Specialists in the area of breaking the human will have
concluded that everyone has a breaking point. You can’t hold out indefinitely.
Eventually, the pain becomes too much, the privation too intense, and something
snaps. You relent. You give in. You tell the interrogator what he wants to
know, and some besides just to make it stop. This is by no means a new
revelation. It’s been common knowledge among those whose profession is to hurt
others in varied and ever-crueler ways for a very long time. This is why the
fortitude, perseverance, tenacity, and grit of the Christians baffled the
Communists so. They were supposed to relent, they were supposed to break, they
were supposed to give up the ghost and tell their torturers what they wanted to
hear, yet they didn’t.
For many, it was a long road to martyrdom, nothing so swift
as a guillotine or a bullet to the back of the head because they had
information their persecutors needed in order to ferret out their brothers and
sisters in Christ and stamp out this obstinate resistance to the system. It’s
how they viewed believers, not because they were overtly political or partisan,
but because their hope in Christ eliminated the need to be dependent on the
current power structure, and that, in turn, weakened their control over them.
What those who doled out merciless pain didn’t understand is
that those they were persecuting had hope and faith in the God they served.
Those were the unquantifiable factors that allowed common men to endure
uncommon hardships, all the while deepening their bond of love and devotion
with the God they served. They understood that whatever hardship they had to
endure was temporary. The pain, the tears, the cold, the hunger, the
dehumanization rituals that were a favorite of the old regime couldn’t last
forever.
Sometime in the 1950s, an experiment was conducted by a
professor at Johns Hopkins that attempted to quantify the power of hope. The
professor’s name was Curt Richter, and he used rats for his experiment. He took
a group of rats, put them in water, and timed how long it took them to drown. I
know, cruel, perhaps needlessly so, but bear with me.
Then he took another group of rats, put them in water, and
just as they were about to drown, pulled them out. He allowed them to rest,
then put them back in the water, and to his surprise, the rats that had been
saved, having returned to the water, swam for far longer than those who had
never known the hope of being plucked from the water and jubilation of being
saved.
Believers endure and persevere because they have faith and
hope in the God who saved them. They know what it is to be on the brink of
death, drowning in sin, and to be plucked from the depths by His loving hand. We
go on when others give up, and we endure when others surrender because we know our
hope is not misplaced and our faith is not without substance. Our prior
experience of having been given life through the sacrifice of Christ on the
cross solidifies our hope and faith that God is able, He will make a way, and
He can do the impossible.
No matter how violent the storm or how strong the waves
buffeting us, our attitude must always be one of trust and full assurance in
the God we serve. God is in control. It is a sentiment that has been echoed by
every true servant throughout the ages whenever faced with circumstances deemed
impossible by others.
We can’t get around the reality that faith involves putting
yourself at risk by acting on what you have confidence in. When Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego stood before an enraged Nebuchadnezzar, they had
confidence that their God was able to preserve them, keep them, and save them.
Whether He would or not was another matter entirely, but they’d made their
peace that whether God saved them or they succumbed to the flames, He was still
God, and they would remain faithful.
The only assurance they had was that God was God, and He
would continue to remain God even after the events that would transpire,
whether He chose to keep them from becoming human torches or supernaturally spare
their lives. Their faith in God’s omnipotence was unwavering even though they
stood before a king and his assembled acolytes, with the flames of a raging
furnace within view.
It’s one thing to be threatened with some future, potential punishment;
it’s another to watch the fire and know that the man threatening to cast you in
it has both the power, authority, and inclination to do so. It wasn’t hypothetical;
it was actual, factual, and real. They did not doubt Nebuchadnezzar’s resolve;
they trusted in the power of the God they served.
You can’t quantify faith and hope. You can’t bottle them up
and sell them, and acquiring them requires a lifelong commitment to obeying the
will and Word of God in all things. Faith and hope begin as infants, and with
diligent nurture and attention, they grow to maturation, just like a child
would.
When we begin the journey, we have faith in the little things
because our faith is small. It is alive, a substantive thing, and we can feel
it in our hearts, but the more we exercise it, stretch it, feed it, and lean on
it, the more it grows. As your faith grows, you learn to walk in it with ever
greater boldness, looking back on the road you traveled and seeing the
countless times it kept you surefooted and upright.
By the time Job’s trial came his faith in God had fully
matured. He’d served God, worshiped Him, and fellowshipped with Him for many
years before Satan asked to sift him, and we know this because, by the time of
his testing, he already had ten fully grown children living on their own. Satan
was as befuddled as the torturers of the old regime as to why this man’s faith
held strong, and he did not waiver because even though the demons believe and
tremble, they cannot possess salvific faith.
It’s easy to conflate belief and faith, but they are not the
same. Faith involves reliance and trust. Faith endures in the face of trial and
doubt. Belief, on the other hand, is something we take to be true. You may
believe you can walk on water, but Peter had the faith to step from the shore and
walk toward Jesus upon the waves. That’s what faith does. It keeps you pressing
onward even when your sense of self-preservation and all available physical evidence
is screaming that you should turn around. Faith takes us from the realm of the impossible
to that of all things being possible with God.
Jude 20-21, “But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.”
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
Posted on 10 November 2024 | 12:29 pm
Page processed in 0.019 seconds.