“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Pet. 1:16)
The characters of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and David are not myths…because no human literary genius could invent them.
The biblical lives of faith are so unconventional compared to worldly horizontal, temporal, here-and-now thinking…that their life storylines lay far outside of humanistic imaginative invention.
It takes a divine worldview…outside of time and conventional thinking…to create the life-scripts of the people of faith in the Bible.
We do not need ancient archaeological evidence to corroborate their existence or their storylines, although this certainly helps in the field of biblical apologetics.
The uniqueness and originality of God-composed life-script adventures of faith…validate the existence and reality of the biblical people of faith.
The unbelieving skeptic must explain the uniquely singular origin of the cross of Christ…God displacing our ways with His higher ways…uniformly and consistently embedded within these biblical storylines…starting in the book of Genesis and proceeding throughout the entire Bible.
This has been said repeatedly throughout this book.
Mankind needed the initiation of a journey of faith…starting with Abraham roughly around 2,100 B.C., and we need biblical-quality journeys of faith today.
Abraham did not suggest to God that he needed a change of scenery and that a move to Canaan would be beneficial. Abraham probably would have been happy to stay right where he was in the city of Haran.
God’s higher plans…the way of the cross…displaced what Abraham might otherwise have wanted to do according to conventional norms…with a brilliantly imaginative and totally unconventional life-story for the benefit of mankind and the fulfillment of an incredible joint-venture journey of faith with God.
But it was not easy.
Joseph could never have dreamed up the cascade of events that led to him becoming governor of Egypt during a famine crisis, resulting in his family coming to reside in Egypt.
The future nation of Israel needed a secure place to grow in numbers…and then a strong positive motivation to leave Egypt when the right time came.
But Joseph’s adventure of faith was not easy.
The growing nation of Israel in Egypt needed a deliverer. At the time of the calling of Moses at the burning bush, Moses probably would have been happy to live-out the rest of his life as a shepherd in Midian.
Moses certainly did not suggest or volunteer for the mission to deliver his people from Egypt…at the time of the burning bush.
Moses at that point in his life did not want to go to Egypt and to take-on the daunting task of confronting Pharaoh for the release of the Israelites.
But looking back in hindsight, after the miraculous delivery of the people and the parting of the Red Sea, and after forty years in the wilderness in preparation for the conquering of the promised Land…I think that Moses would be glad beyond measure that God displaced his plans with God’s higher plans.
After the up-and-down period of the judges, Israel needed the combination of both a godly king and a military leader to bring stability to the nation of Israel and to solidify its borders.
The challenging pathway of preparation and apprenticeship to becoming the king of Israel…for David…was beyond his creative imagination…beyond his ability to contrive and orchestrate…and outside of what he would have chosen for himself according to worldly conventional normalcy (Ps. 23:4).
Yet we see in the account of the life of David and read in his beautifully inspired psalms…the story of a man who would not exchange his difficult yet purpose-filled life for anything else…not for all the world.
What makes a journey of faith hard is also what makes it great.
No one would want all of the challenges and hardships of a genuine journey of faith as recorded in the Bible.
This is one feature that authenticates the divine origin of the biblical narrative stories of faith.
The cross of Christ is difficult…it comes with a cost.
Yet we honor the great men and women of faith in the Bible for their personal sacrifices for a higher good…for following their God-composed life-scripts to meet a specific need…against the grain of worldly conventional thinking and normalcy.
This is the Christian life in the risk-filled zone of a God-composed journey of faith.
The Cross in the Christian Life 