What does faith look like?

The disciples were going through a bad time. The fishermen among them, especially, knew exactly how bad this storm was, and what the odds were that they would make it through safely. It is difficult to believe they were overselling the severity of the storm; the tax collector and the zealot might have gone their whole lives without encountering a storm-tossed sea, but according to Luke 5:5 the fishermen were accustomed to working through the dark night on this very sea, and must have operated with little warning about coming storms, considering they apparently noticed no signs of this one.

So they are doing the best that they can in the circumstances. And they know Jesus can do something, otherwise they wouldn't bother calling for Him. It is unclear, of course, what exactly they expected Him to do, maybe it was as simple as bailing water out of the boat. Regardless, when Jesus was done calming the storm, He turned to them and asked them about the state of their faith. It seems that their actions, marked by fear while trying to solve the situation on their own power, were not particularly full of faith. But they did call on Jesus to help them, right? Isn't that enough?

Consider the example of David. What sort of faith does he display in this psalm? There is no fear, only trust. David proclaims that he can face any situation, no matter how dire, as long as God is with him. Not only that, but while enemy forces gather around him, he is content to sit and enjoy the blessing God has laid out before him. There is no room for staring anxiously over the roast to make sure the enemies aren't drawing closer. There is no place for putting aside a full cup until the problem of being surrounded is resolved.

The disciples had their eyes on the storm and the sea. And Jesus worked to draw their eyes back to Him, though the act of doing so fills them with fear of His awesome power. In this psalm, however, David has his eyes on the blessings and power of God, and is able to enjoy a feast and anointing. Where we fix our eyes matters. Let us fix them on Him.

"Because of your hardness of heart" is an interesting answer to the written law handed down by Moses. I have generally heard this presented as part of a larger, progressive view of the Law. Basically, the view presented to me has been that the commands of God have always been more loving toward people than the surrounding culture, and that God had to start His people on little stuff like only hurting people back as much as they've hurt you before He could get them to the point where He was like "just turn the other cheek, guys, this is where we've always been going with this." Which may well be accurate, in general, though I suspect the truth is somewhat more complicated than that; but the point here is that I don't entirely buy the claim that that is what Jesus is saying here. That is, Jesus may not have meant that Moses allowed limited divorce because it was a step in the direction of no divorce, but that divorce was allowed because sin was already breaking the perfect plan of God for marriage.

So, look, this topic comes up a lot partly because of the people I know and partly because of some family background, and I've had need to step back and analyze what the Bible has to say about marriage and divorce and the answer I've come to over the years is that divorce is bad fundamentally because it breaks up what is supposed to be a representation of the relationship between God and His people, but not every divorce happens in a context where that image was still intact.

Remember that every human being is an image-bearer of God. Marriage, while carrying a lot of imagery itself about Christ and the church (and, in another passage, God the Father and God the Son), is still fundamentally a covenant between two human beings, and what they do with that covenant shows their understanding of what every aspect of that means. For our purposes right now, let's focus on one part: how you treat your spouse, the person to whom you have sworn undying devotion and who represents the role of God in your life more than anyone else outside of the church itself, is a glimpse into how you view God. If Christ could say with confidence that our view of Him is contained in how we treat strangers, how much more is our view of Him revealed in how we treat our covenantal partner in a relationship specifically designed to be an image of God's relationship with us?

I submit that when one cheats on a spouse, or abuses a spouse in any way, that person has attacked God Himself and has actively broken the covenant they had with their spouse. Now, the Christian ideal is always grace, always hope that the person can and will change, but this is still an ideal. And this is where we get back to Christ's words about the legal standing of divorce in scripture: because we, as fallen creatures, are hard of heart, there needs to be an out. When the covenant is broken, especially in a situation where their very value as a person is being threatened, there needs to be a way for the offended party to walk away, because the offender often will not change, not in any real way, as long as they know their spouse is stuck with them.

"But," some will offer, "what about the sanctity of marriage?" And this is a good question. Hear me carefully here: the sanctity of marriage is important, and it does not always look how we expect it to look. The sanctity of marriage is important enough that we should never break it without overwhelming reason; the sanctity of marriage is also important enough that we cannot demand that it be corrupted by forcing people to remain in a broken image where they live with a spouse who has already broken their vows. That is, sometimes, we must protect the sanctity of marriage not by staying married, but by showing that a corrupted form of marriage is not good enough for the term. That marriage is so sacred that the image of it must be protected both from unmerited divorces and from unrighteous marriages. Sometimes, when an individual breaks their covenant with a spouse, we have to remind them of the value of a covenant by allowing them to suffer the just results of breaking it, even if this means a divorce.

Oh, the myriad ways we've attempted to define a lukewarm Christian. It has become apparent that, in the modern western churches, we can apply the label to basically anyone who does not exhibit a passion for Christ in the way we expect or demand. But what did our Lord actually say of the lukewarm?​

In Revelation, where we get the term, God explains what it is about the church of Laodicea that causes Him to call them lukewarm: a belief in self-reliance and their own resources that blinds them to their deeper spiritual poverty. Wealth appeared to be doing a good enough job of meeting their physical needs, so they lost sight of the fact that their reliance was actually on God and that the greatest wealth is not physical.

The insistence on self-reliance, the desire to provide for ourselves rather than rely on God, can take forms outside of wealth. The disciples struggled with questions of status, for instance:

Immediately after this, Jesus takes a child in His arms and tells them that those who receive a child in His name receives the Father, and I have generally heard this passage used to focus entirely on that point. But Jesus is primarily dealing with the disciples, and their desire for station, and their desire for control. They must become servants to be great in the Kingdom of God. There is authority in being a parent, but the job of taking on a child is primarily one in which you serve. Children rely on adults for everything, from food to shelter to basic knowledge of how the world works, and there is a certain degree to which these things must be provided in a way that it will be fruitfully received. I cannot force my kids to learn in a way they can't learn, no matter how much authority I have in their lives or how much I'd rather teach that way. To receive a child is to receive someone helpless, in need of constant service, and to perform a thankless task that will continue for many years into the future. Picking up a child was a vivid illustration of what He was just telling them: they cannot hope to gain standing before the throne of God by taking absolute control of their world and those around them.

This desire for control, for self-reliance, to be the source of our own resources rather than subject to the will and work of God, is a form of arrogant ambition. When we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of this desire, we lose sight of our need for Christ and the glory of His work in our lives. And the result is devastating, "for where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing" (James 3:16, NASB). But we must be more like David who, despite wealth and strength and military power, still saw God as the source of all His provision and protection and saw mankind's relation to God as one of a helpless subject enveloped in an amazing grace.

David asks for blessings, for material wealth and prosperity and safety, but he never loses sight of the source of these things. In losing sight of God's provision, and thinking ourselves capable of meeting our own needs, we become like those James condemns in chapter 4 as asking with wrong motives and seeking to fill our own desires. Let us strive ever more to, like David, respond to God's provision with thankful hearts and a recognition of our own inability to do what He has done for us. May we never grow so focused on our own provision that we become lukewarm, but let it ever be said of us:

Jesus knew what awaited Him in Jerusalem. Luke tells us that "he set his face to go to Jerusalem," knowing full well what would happen there (Luke 9:51b, ESV). We know that He knew, not only because we trust in His divine foresight, but because He told His disciples what was coming.

In Mark 8, cited above, Jesus asks the disciples who everyone else says that He is, then asks who they believe He is, then celebrate's Peter's recognition that He is the Christ. Then He begins to explain what lies ahead, and Peter stands against it, and Jesus condemns that response and resumes teaching. Now, I don't actually believe that Jesus was changing the topic when He began explaining His upcoming death. What I mean by that is that, while it is widely recognized that this was all one conversation, I've heard very few attempts to connect Jesus' coming death with His questions about everyone's perception of His identity.

I submit that this is what Jesus was talking about the whole time. His questions highlighted the expectations of the people around Jesus, and how He was subverting them. He wasn't living up to what people expected of John the Baptist, but He was kinda close. He spoke like a prophet but seemed to have authority beyond theirs. He met some of the expectations of the returning Elijah, but even that didn't quite stack up. He slipped into a number of categories of what the world was expecting, but He didn't quite fit in any of them, and so people didn't know what to do with Him.

The answer, of course, was that He was the awaited Messiah, but there was a reason that didn't make the list of outside interpretations: the Messiah they were expecting really had very little in common with the Jesus that walked among them. And this is where the next part of the conversation goes. Peter, having confessed that Jesus is the Christ, is suddenly being confronted with the realization that even his own ideas of what that means are being subverted. He was close enough to see the Christ in Jesus, but not yet close enough to realize what that meant for his notions of a Christ. Jesus sets about removing false notions and replacing them with truth, Peter pushes back, and Jesus makes a very firm rebuke that forces him to listen. He then continues subverting expectations, talking about laying down one's life, taking up crosses, standing beside the Christ not in worldly victory but in suffering.

And we can enter into that suffering without shame, looking forward in joy. James notes above that our trials should be treated as occasions for joy, not because of what they are, but because of who we will be on the other side of them. Jesus, who set his face "as flint," as described in Isaiah 50:7, can also claim the surrounding lines that He would not be disgraced or ashamed; even when tortured, put on public display, stripped, hung on a cross as a reproach both from the Romans and from His religious environment (after all, any hung from a tree were accursed), Jesus could come through without disgrace because He knew what awaited on the other side.

Jesus knew what death awaited Him, and He knew what victory He would claim over it. And as such, He could go forth, confident in the knowledge that no trial or disgrace He faced on this earth would surpass the riches in glory He would receive after it. And we, who have died with Christ and share in His sufferings and His victory, can look forward with the same joy and confidence that He had, regardless of what shame the world tries to lay on us, because we too shall some day be on the other side of death.