Membership

I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:8  NASB

Faith – When I was a child my family attended a local Protestant church.  At age twelve, I was enrolled in a membership class where twelve-year-olds learned the doctrines of the church and, upon graduation, joined the congregation and received a red, hardcover New Testament.  From that point on, we were counted among the faithful.  Baptism was in the mix somewhere.  I just don’t remember now.  But the goal was to become a part of the believing assembly.  Faith was membership, plain and simple.  Reading Yeshua’s inquiry in that context was disturbing.  I’d done everything required to be a member.  In fact, everyone I knew was a member somewhere.  Why would “Jesus” ask such an odd question?  Of course he would find “faith” on earth.  Just look at all the people who went to church on Sunday.

Over the course of the next twenty years my naïve view of faith and membership changed.  From Campus Crusade’s Four Spiritual Laws to Pentecostal revival, I learned that faith meant giving your life over to Jesus, studying the Bible, praying, and tithing.  It took another twenty years to encounter the Hebraic idea of faith, an idea that probably comes closer to Yeshua’s question than anything in the Greco-Roman Christian world.  Consider these definitions:

“. . . faith is the human reaction to God’s primary action.”^[1]

“Faith in the OT expresses the being and life of the people of God in a vital divine relationship that spans the whole of this form of life and involves a certainty that releases new energies.”^[2]

“Faith means:  If you ever once merit that the Hidden One appears to you, be faithful to Him all the days of your life.  Faith means:  To guard forever the echo which once burst upon the deep recesses of our soul.”[3]

In the Hebraic world, faith is the residue of encounter.  Faith is the inability to ignore the day God touched you.  Faith is the God-infection that gave you spiritual distemper all the rest of your life.  No matter how intentionally you try to escape the reality of that confrontation, it just won’t go away.  Faith is remembering.

When I was a child, I thought faith was about having the right beliefs, the beliefs printed in the “Statement of Faith” you signed when you joined the church.  I didn’t think faith was transformation initiated by God and remembered for the rest of your life.  How things change!

Topical Index: faith, remember, transformation, Luke 18:8

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 849). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

^[2] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 852). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

[3] Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 64.