“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (Jn. 8:36)
Sometimes a journey of faith following God has a life-script that includes the sacrifice…the giving up…of a fundamental component of worldly conventional normalcy…something we otherwise expect to be a normative part of our lives…that becomes an integral part of the cost of taking up our cross to follow Jesus.
Pieces and parts of worldly conventional normalcy, however, are not intrinsically bad in themselves.
“Occupy till I come” (Lk. 19:13) is commendable and admirable in terms of the everyday tasks involved in running well the household manor estates in the temporary absence of the owner away on other business…in this parable. The many admonitions to right and correct living in the New Testament letters to the early churches spells out what it means to “occupy till I come.”
But journeys of faith following God are designed to transcend above worldly conventional normalcy in the most positive way imaginable…necessitating parts of worldly conventional normalcy to fall away in the process.
Certainly, if we are one of the rare few called by God to be a medical missionary doctor in the deepest remote regions of the Amazon rainforest, as a practical matter we will have to leave our Mercedes-Benz or BMW automobile behind…there being no paved roads in the rainforest.
The classic biblical verse “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) is a spiritual truth of such depth that it falls far outside of humanistic contemplation and understanding. It describes the unique gap that only God can create using life events and circumstances…the gap between what we normally can and cannot do according to our human abilities…that produces a beneficial dependence upon God…far outside of our worldly conventional control and sovereign capacity over the normal activities within “occupy till I come.”
Abraham…the “father of faith”…waiting for the birth of the son of promise Isaac…is a perfect example of not “seeing” for a period of time the fulfillment of the promise through faith in the trustworthiness of the word of God…”the evidence of things not seen” created by the gap in time between God’s initial promise to Abraham and the actual event of the birth of Isaac…years later.
This is the first biblical example of a detailed, God-scripted and divinely created scenario for biblically defined faith to actualize.
“Faith…is the evidence of things not seen” that creates a gap in time between God’s promises large and small…and their fulfillment in the future…is the inverse opposite of the reality of Adam and Eve impulsively jumping at the chance to gain a knowledge of good and evil by hastily eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden…a decision they made independently of God…against His initial commandment…and without His further instructive council and input.
From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity
The Cross in the Christian Life 