Prince Caspian: Confidence without evidence
1 Peter 1:8-9
The children are confronted with a choice. They don’t know which way to go to get across the gorge and meet Prince Caspian. Earlier in the story, Lucy sees Aslan, and points him out to the others. He is guiding them a specific but hidden route straight across the gorge. They do not see him. Most of them don’t believe Lucy saw Aslan. They think she is just indulging in wishful thinking.
They decide on a route based on the dwarf’s knowledge of the land, while Lucy’s suggestion that they follow Aslan across the gorge is argued down. Edmund is the only one who supports Lucy, and he gives in to the others too. Lucy is left with the difficult option of joining the others or being dismissed as a kid.
(Show Clip, Susan and Lucy by the fire, "Why couldn’t I see Aslan?")
So they take a longer route and see enemy soldiers. Then they backtrack. Lucy’s suggestion to go Aslan’s way reveals a way across the gorge that is both easier and beautiful.
The Pevense Children are in the middle of a question of sight versus belief. Will they trust Aslan even though one of them can see him and the others cannot?
For the most part, at first, they do not.
The result of faith will always be persecution. There is no way around it. Jesus warned us of it, Peter addresses it in his letter, and experience will prove it. The more we express faith, the more some will find it ridiculous. Why is this?
Remember Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
(Hebrews 11:1 TNIV)
The definition of faith is belief in what cannot be demonstrated or proven. In other words, confidence without evidence. Especially in our age, reared on the scientific method, experimentation, demonstration, and technological advancement, "proof" has been canonized. It is a prerequisite for belief. It has become the religion of my generation.
That is not to say that younger generations than myself are not open to the exploration of spiritual things. They are. But my generation and the generations before mine have become calcified in their trust of science. The younger generations are open minded enough to see that Science has limitations and cannot live up to its claims and promises. However, the habits of our culture still tend to dictate responses to faith, and distrust of anything that cannot at least be adequately explained remains the rule.
Lewis was well aware of this problem and he has the Pevense Children living up to the industrialized attitudes of the post War era.
Even in Christian circles we have this problem. There are those who want a more rational religion and those who want a more mystical religion. Those who tend toward reason gravitate to understanding theology. This is good because the greatest minds in Western history were dedicated to understanding God. Those who are more mystical gravitate to experience. This is good because it leads us in the direction of personal encounters with God.
We could think of the two sides of the Christian coin as being understanding and doing. If we follow one path it is the same as a person who understands how to take two very flammable elements: Hydrogen and Oxygen, and create a compound to put out fires: water. The other person gets in a tub every day and takes a bath, keeping good hygiene. It is important to note that one need not cancel out the other. I want my chemists to have good hygiene, and I don’t want people who bath to think their responsibility ends there. Both have their place, and both are legitimate, helpful approaches to water.
Spiritual experience, is by definition, unprovable. We cannot demonstrate to another the validity and genuineness of our encounter with God. His Spirit has communed with ours and that is His personal gift to us.
Even rational spirituality cannot be proven. It is akin to philosophy which tries to account for the vast spectrum of human experience and thought. It, unfortunately, is inadequate to deal with the mind of God. His thoughts are not like our thoughts. His thoughts are above our thoughts, so our paltry reason will always be unable to cope with Him.
I can rationalize my way to God, but I cannot prove His existence
I can have a personal experience with God but I cannot prove its validity to another person.
We come back to faith
Confidence without evidence
Thus, Peter deals with faith in two waves. The first wave is the outside affect that faith will have on people, persecution. Because the Christian faith was not:
• popular
• traditional
• provable
• conformist
the early Christians and Christians today continue to be persecuted.
On the other side, though, is the internal affect that faith has.
an inexpressible and glorious joy.
Lucy saw Aslan, but the others did not. She could no more prove to them that her eyes had perceived light bending around a lion than she could fly. They did not see Him. Thus by the other children, even though they knew Aslan she was persecuted. She was:
• doubted
• belittled
• ridiculed
• dismissed
• patronized
And the children did what all people do who will not believe what they cannot see or prove. They opposed her, ignored her, and did what they wanted to do in spite of her counsel.
Thus Lucy was left with the dilemma of her own emotional response:
• The great joy of seeing Aslan, which she felt the first time she saw him and, later, when she saw him again.
• The pain of being put down by her brothers and her sister, and the unbelieving dwarf.
Her belief was the product of the child like faith that Jesus encourages us to exercise. Susan was older, and "wiser," and did not indulge in that belief.
Lucy’s wise counsel to Susan is important. Perhaps she did not see Aslan because she did not really want to.
How to nurture faith in our unseen God
Remind yourself of the many unseen, difficult-to-define truths you accept, pretty much without question:
• Justice
• Love
• Nobility
• Beauty
• Courage
• Grace
These ideas are not fictions. They are characteristics that make people worth knowing. They are not persons in themselves, but they cannot be true without people. When some are confronted with our difficulty in not seeing God, these ideas are not doubted for a moment. Yet, like God,
• their effects can be seen
• we know when they are present
• we know when they are absent
• we think we know what they are, but our knowledge tends to be based on our limited reading and experience, others see them differently
The fact that we cannot see them does not make us doubt their truth, simply to understand them as intangible, spiritual qualities. We recognize them by their effects. In the same way, God is not someone who can be touched or seen but must be understood as a spirit. We can tell where He has been.
Remind yourself you are in good company
We may seem unpopular as believers in Jesus, but our faith is the most pervasive faith in the world. It has survived for centuries, from the time of Abraham till today. People from every walk of life are believers in Jesus giving it a substance that goes beyond any era, culture, age, ethnicity, socio-economic bracket or nationality.
Josh McDowell began his widespread fame as a Christian speaker and thinker with his book Evidence that Demands a Verdict. In it he argued that legal evidence, not scientific evidence was the key to faith. As part of that argument he used the evidence of the similarities in the experience of people as diverse as:
• athletes and drug dealers
• senators and Nazis
• computer experts and criminals
• beauty queens and billionaires
• farmers, philosophers and skeptics
• Asians, Native Americans, South Americans, Africans, and Europeans
• Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Satanists
And he documents the experiences of some who have suffered for their belief. In short, there is no single "kind" of person who maintains faith in God. As a God Follower, you are in the company of those who have practiced the harshest crimes and those who have lived in luxury, the most down trodden and the brightest.
In the series: Great Books of the Western World, the most influential writings of Western Civilization have been gathered into a 54 volume set. I find it interesting that about 1/10 of the books are distinctively Christian. In fact, Volume 18 is Augustine and Volumes 19 and 20 are Thomas Aquinas. In other words, the most influential thinking for nearly 1000 years began and ended with Christianity, and nothing in the intervening time even compared. A fair revision would probably put the Koran in between, but Christian thinking still overwhelms.
If you have faith in the Invisible God, you are not a weirdo, you are part of a global and timeless community who emphatically affirm the intelligence, practicality and transformational power of your faith. Their affirmation shapes the very assumptions of our culture and permeates every walk of life. Stand up straight, and believe with dignity.
Indulge in the company of people who have faith
In Ernest Hemmingway’s Green Hills of Africa, He hunts for Sable. He shoots a large chestnut colored cow, and then sees an immense black bull, which he shoots but badly. He finds the cow, but he and his team of trackers and porters search all day for the bull. The language he uses, I believe is no accident.
By the middle of the day, some of the men were sitting under trees or searching half heartedly. They began to doubt that the bull sable existed. Perhaps it was really only a big cow, and they had already found it. Their smaller cow had gotten away instead. No, there was no bull. Hemmingway admits that it was very hard to keep looking against the force of so much unbelief. It was hard to have faith that the bull even existed. He began to doubt the bull’s existence.
Then he envisioned the situation, the bull breaking from the trees. His own excited bad shot. The size of the horns, the bull breaking through the grass and running. No, he had shot the bull. His tracker also remembered with him. The bull was there, they just had to keep looking.
The others caught the faith briefly, but eventually they gave up again. It made the faith, even of the leaders hard to maintain.
This is a real dynamic. Think about the way love works. If a man does not tell his wife that he loves her on a regular basis, she begins to doubt it. Talking about it reinforces the truth. It strengthens belief.
This is not just a story about Sables and big game hunters. It is about faith and the dynamic of unbelief. In the story, the Dwarf did not believe in Aslan at all. Peter did not see him and did not believe that Lucy saw him either. Susan believed Lucy but would not express her belief. Edmund believed, expressed his belief, but gave in to the older people present.
In the end, unbelief won the day. The believers were influenced by the unbelievers.
Some ask why they should attend church. This is one reason. You spend most of your time around people who have no faith or whose faith is negotiable. In the end, they will influence you. You must insert yourself into a situation where others have faith and will talk about it. This is true fellowship, not talking about the weather. That is not fellowship, it is casual conversation.
Fellowship is intentionally talking about the things of God in order to encourage each other in the face of all the unbelief we are confronted with every day. We are building up each other’s faith, reinforcing it so that we can carry on for the days to come. We should and must surround ourselves with unbelievers, but we cannot neglect the company of the faithful. And when we are in that company, we must discuss the faith, or we rob ourselves of the vitality of our own faith.
When David was surrounded by critics, the Bible says He encouraged himself in the LORD. This is a skill we must all learn, to exercise the mental discipline to reinforce our own faith and to get help to do it when we need it. It is easy to slip. But the essence of faith is confidence in the absence of evidence. We may see and enjoy the effects of the God who cannot be seen, but our inability to see and touch him will undermine our belief.
If we let it.
Don’t let it.
Doubt will bring you down
Peter says faith is the source of inexpressible joy
Remember, and believe
