By faith, not by sight

By Erika Schwibs

On the river of God's will, a believer must learn not to strive to row or paddle to something seen along the river bank, unless that striving is God's will and it's being done in His strength, and not human strength. 

When believers do something in His strength, there's a peace and effortless to it, even when accompanied by great trouble and difficulty. The Lord leads believers through the circumstances of situations, and He takes them where He wants them to go in His time, just like a boat on a river fully under His control instead of the control of the people in it. Just wait on Him until then.

Too often, believers think that when God shows them something and gives them insight, it means that He wants them to immediately go out and "make it happen," even if that means using worldly means, when instead He's teaching them and revealing things to them. If He shows a believer a shed on the river bank, then, including many details about it, it doesn't necessarily mean that He expects the believer to row like mad to the riverbank and then construct the shed by whatever means necessary. Nor does it mean that the believer should try to row furiously to the banks whenever something appears that resembles a shed and it's virtually impossible to reach it before the current takes the believer far downstream past it. When thinking that way, it can seem like God presented an opportunity to the believer, but maybe only to tantalize or punish with failure. 

But instead of building the shed or having to reach shore when it's impossible to do so, the Lord might only be revealing things about such a shed because at some time in the future, He will take the believer's boat effortlessly to that spot on shore in order for the believer to pick up just one needed item from that shed. God's ways and thinking aren't ours. They're higher. Believers need to always remember to practice waiting on Him.

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Once the Lord taught me something important from a large construction project that I saw almost daily. I'd see some of the same workers in the same areas of the site day after day, and through that He showed me that, despite the grand size and great intricacy of the project, all a singer worker could do each day was the daily work of one worker, and no more. They all had their very small piece to do out of the larger project, and it was manager of the whole project who actually knew who better than the worker how the pieces fit together.

In the same way, the individual worker couldn't just decide to break from the orders given him to do what seemed good to him, but had to stick with faithfully going along with the overall plan, whether he could see the point to any of it or not. One could imagine that sometimes some workers thought something else should happen, or wanted to be doing something else, but that was like playing God, and much more difficult than just faithfully doing one's one small part in the overall construction project.

And that is the perspective I should have, the Lord showed me, in going about my life on earth. I should remember that I can only do my small part of His plan. And I'll never fully understand it on earth -- neither the whole, or any of the parts, or even my own part. Even the human manager of a construction project, who seemingly knows it all, can never know how the Lord has used that project beforehand or will use it during construction or after. He doesn't know all that came before of that land, or the building materials, or the lives of the people making it, and He doesn't know how the finished project will be included in the Lord's plans, either, in the future. Since we know so little, then, even far less than we think we do, it's best to walk very humbly with our God, leaning on Him and not our own understanding, and walking by faith, not by sight. 

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The Lord and the devil come by. The Lord tries to give away the truth, as Wisdom tries to give herself away in the book of Proverbs. The devil has lies to give away, the price to be paid for them to come later. Even though the truth comes from God Himself, so we can be sure that it will be good and pleasant and pleasurable in the end, a lot of it isn't at all appealing at first sight, so it's not easy for the Lord to give it away. On the other hand, the lies offered by the devil look very attractive, and are practically irresistible to mankind. Even though the lies come from the devil, so that people should know that they'll end up making them terribly miserable eventually, they look so appealing and even sort of wholesome and good when the devil brings them out that it's all too easy to justify accepting them. They're full of flattery and false promises, just what people want to believe, and the devil has done the hard work. It would take a lot of work to counter or question his lies. It's easier just to accept them. "What else is there to do?" 

But rather than accepting and possessing the devil's lies, it would be better to be empty-handed for awhile, for as long as God wills, and to say, "I'm not sure what the truth" is about a situation if only the devil's lies are available while waiting on the Lord to reveal the actual truth, or to labor for the truth if it's our responsibility to do so, even though we find a stronghold in ourselves that doesn't want to accept the truth from the Lord. As it says in 2 Thessalonians 2, those who will be saved receive the love of the truth, and the truth is what God says is the truth, and what it reveals about His heart and our hearts.

As Some Christians Abandon the Ark

By Erika Schwibs

The Christian faith brought powerful spiritual knowledge -- truth about God -- to much of the world, and it's been part of the modern world's social foundation for centuries. 

Yet as the Bible teaches us, Satan and the forces of Hell will try to conquer the world before the second coming of Christ, and entirely banish spiritual knowledge from the earth, if that were possible. Babylon will try to claim control of Heaven for itself. Babylon and the Beast system exalt man and natural knowledge while doing all in its power to suppress the true, life-giving spiritual knowledge that's available in Christ, and they have been growing in power in the modern world where belief in God is often mocked and dismissed as "ignorant superstition." Babylon and the Beast system would shut out the Spirit of God, if they could, and leave man as god of the world. And their efforts, permitted by God to fulfill His partly-hidden plan, have never been more successful, or so it seems. The world around us now very closely resembles in many respects the one that exists in the Last Days described in Revelation.

From our earliest days in the Garden of Eden, human beings have sought after knowledge, and our desire for knowledge quickly became destructive when Eve gave in to the Serpent's wiles. She desired knowledge, but went about it the wrong way, directly disobeying God.

Truth -- knowledge of what's true -- is most valuable to us, but the human heart is, at best, ambivalent about it. Few people would put up with outright lies in the weather forecast, but beyond that, the truth is often not welcomed despite being, in many cases, even more vital in importance than the weather. Spiritual truth is most important of all kinds of truth, yet it without doubt the most distorted by man over our history. While long gone is the flood of water that God brought on the earth in response to man's wickedness, humanity itself has flooded the earth since then with lies, and the modern world, which has "improved" upon just about everything, has only "improved" in dishonesty.

Yet, God spared godly Noah and his family aboard the ark that He led Noah to build patiently over many years, and He also offers to lead any and all in building a spiritual ark to save us from man's lies. To do so, we must receive a love of the truth (2 Thessalonians 2:10). Love of the truth isn't loving what we want to hear or our own opinions. Faith in Christ, the Son of God, reveals to us that there is both natural knowledge and spiritual knowledge, and that these two work together when we yield ourselves fully to God and give spiritual knowledge its foremost place.

Even in the natural sense, though, such a world carries in it many of the seeds of its own destruction. For the health of a society, some deep commitment to truth is necessary -- a commitment which comes from the spiritual and impels people to value God and truth and to act with integrity. Yet with the unprecedented technology of this age, where knowledge has increased and people run to and fro, such great control can be given over to a worldwide soulless system itself that human society necessarily self-destructs with its machine-like workings. The Satanic spirit will be fully in control of natural society at that point, although only because, for a time, the Lord will permit it.

I think of some jobs I've worked where, for many of the workers, appearing to do a good job was the same to them as doing it. And they often seemed untroubled by receiving credit for the good they didn't actually do and the quality and safety standards they didn't meet. While this attitude has always been a part of human society, of course, I believe it's progressed to unprecedented levels in recent decades because never before have the societies of the world thrown off the fear of God and the love of God as we have. The result is so many people convinced that they're "good people," no matter what they do, and simply refusing to feel guilty when they should. I just recently happened to look up the lyrics for a song about "karma." Not surprisingly, it's all about how another person besides the song narrator is a terrible person. Godless self righteousness is no improvement on Christianity, but is its natural successor. Godless society runs on feeding into people's natural narcissism. It's flattery that spreads a net for people's feet, but a godless society of primed for self-worship just doesn't have the spiritual wisdom -- especially the spiritual humility -- to recognize that.

And having come from a family torn apart by ordinary human ungodliness, a family that psychology would call pretty "dysfunctional," I have to think that too much spiritual degeneracy and feigned integrity simply leads to such great social degeneracy that societies simply can't operate any longer.

While largely Christian nations mostly haven't been actual theocracies, they've been strengthened with spiritual power and shaped supernaturally by faith and truth. Great spiritual light was permitted to come in.

Now this light is being increasingly shut out. 

When Babylon gets so established in the world, even natural philosophy has to be replaced by society with something more to people's liking, like modern psychology. Natural philosophy, although far from perfect as it gives short shrift to spiritual truth, still asks too many difficult questions and isn't fawning enough over the individual. It's not egocentric enough for today's modern, prosperous societies where the overall point is to have one's way, with little if any thought to God. 

One of my high school teachers once paraphrased a famous saying by Socrates as follows: "I'm the wisest man in Athens because I know that I know nothing."

While being sorely deficient in knowledge of God, this statement still shows far more natural awareness and wisdom than is found in today's self-worshipping, godless culture. 

The republican form of government commonly called democracy is too threatening to Babylon. Babylon claims to be the defender of democracy, while, ironically, desiring to lord over people made ignorant by its lies. 

A false Kingdom of Heaven is apparent in Babylon. It can't be run by laws, but must be founded on people -- "good people," "superior" people. People who believe themselves to be righteous like the Jesus of their imaginations. They reject the real Jesus, the foundation of Heaven, for the foundation of themselves. While psychology, like philosophy, is filled with human error, it speaks a half-truth about what drives humanity, and so, this godless society: "self-serving bias". 

Babylon -- the false Kingdom of Heaven -- also demands that people take every thought captive to itself (2 Corinthians 10:5). It seeks to remove all things that offend against what it  wrongly takes to be righteousness (Matthew 13:41). And it requires that people's every word be judged (Matthew 12:36).

And much of the church here, too, is taken up with "coexistence" with the Babylon world. It's either merely going along with it entirely, or else half-heartedly fighting the darkness by natural means, rather than by spiritual. Zeal -- passion for God -- is sorely lacking much of the time in modern, prosperous societies where worldliness has also been greatly "improved". It's as though much of the church has exchanged God's actual Word for another Bible. A Bible that an unrepentant Laodicean church would have authorized -- the Kidding Yourself Study Bible. Rather than "love not the world," it says instead to love the world, as it is God's creation. This "Kidding Yourself" Bible teaches people "what God really meant." It vocally disowns the Prosperity Gospel, yet that's what it is at heart. It is disdainful of the Study Bible of the Philadelphia Church -- the "Whatever It Takes, Lord" Study Bible.

Going by what's revealed about the End Times in the book of Revelation and at other places in the Bible, it wouldn't be a surprise to see the institutional church in prosperous countries go completely the way of Babylon and never turn back. 

In that case, however, individual believers can and must stay faithful to Christ, as also described in Revelation. In Christ, and Christ alone, is Heaven found. And though the lies of Babylon are flooding the earth with more and more confusion, there is still the Christian's duty to Christ to point people to Heaven. And it's wise for every Christian to be found to be doing so if still here when Christ returns.