On Faith (ii): God is Mine

Last time I reflected on Faith, I expressed that I believed it to be "Seeing God", and that it is something that can be acquired gradually,

that God works on us all the time so that we may see Him,

and that there are many aspects of God... we get to know & understand Him bit by bit, lesson by lesson.

It hit me today that many Christians reduce Faith to be an announcemet of "Jesus Christ, Son of God, is my Savior".

No offence to anybody, but I think that is hardly enough.

Aside from the important point that any Faith must be detailed in emotions, thoughts & experiences (& not just a verbal testimony),

and aside from the fact that this reduces Christian Faith to a superficial binary Faith like the one present in many other so-called religions that are  about nothing more than loyalty to a name... aside from all that, I see this Statement to be the crowning statement of a whole body of Faith that should also be acquired.

In my opinion, one of the main components of that body is the lesson of "God's taking my side", followed by the lesson "God will make everything alright" .

The first lesson is a lesson that sounds to the modern ear like a naive egoistic statement, which is debatable, but I don't think that makes the lesson any less valuable,

it surely won't make it any less pronounced in the Scriptures!

We see this sentiment of "God is taking my side" for example written all over the psalms, as well as in most of God's promises throughout the Old Testament, not to mention that it is evident in the OT's historical accounts.

I personally believe God is actually on our side, and by 'our' I mean all people,

but for the people of the Old Testament, with their understanding of their ruthless world, they can't possibly be expected to imagine themselves reconciled with all nations (neither could all nations imagine themselves reconciled, I think!)

In those settings, God wanted them to be perfectly sure that He's not on the enemy's side,

neither is He neutral, he wanted them to trust Him & rely on Him, and know that He is THEIRS.

I believe God has done so much to root this belief in the people of the OT, and with just reason.

This belief makes God personal, and therefore intimate and close,

which is the only way He'll have it, I believe,

and the only healthy base to build our more advanced knowledge of God upon.

I cannot stress this point too much, that I believe this Faith to be by far the most important lesson to learn from the OT.

To believe that God, in even our most primitive understanding of Him, when His strength was expressed in storms and His wisdom expressed in riddles... we saw him expresses His love in bias!

If He'll ever have to take a side, it'll be mine.

I think this idea has offended many people across the ages, and lead to a lot of explaining away of Scripture.

But the beauty of this belief is that once it's dwelled upon, absorbed & experienced, it must lead to the second -and more important- belief: "everything's going to turn out perfect!"

That one is harder to hold on to these days, and I suspect it's because we don't really believe in the first concept to begin with.

If God is always & constantly on our side (rather than on the other side, or on no side at all) then things will always turn out in our favor.

They're always going to turn out perfect

He will make sure they do.

And that is what I believe the Old Testament Faith was all about.