Encouragement and TeachingПримерок

Not seeing and yet believing

The essence of faith is believing something you can’t see with your very own eyes. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). But this does not make faith doubtful and “risky”. We can trust God 100% that He will keep His promises. We can be absolutely sure that He will give us “the salvation of our souls”, according to His great mercy.

We don’t need to see something with our physical eyes in order to be sure it exists. For one thing, we can’t see love. We can’t “prove” that our spouse or our parents love us. We hear their words and see their deeds of kindness, but we can’t see their feelings. However, that does not prevent us from trusting them and loving them too.

In a similar way, we can’t see God, but there are lots of “signs” that He is indeed loving and faithful and trustworthy. Therefore, it is possible to love Him and believe in Him and rejoice in His promises, even though we have not seen Him.

Jesus knew that believing in the unseen is not always easy. The apostle Thomas had great difficulty believing that Jesus was really risen from the dead when he had not yet seen Him alive. Jesus did not rebuke him for it, but invited him to touch His wounds and to believe. We can’t do that, since Jesus is not physically present on earth anymore. But this story encourages us, “who have not seen”, to nevertheless believe. Jesus calls us “blessed” if we do!