Head-in-the-Sand "Faith."
By John Gavazzoni

Enduring testing is indisputably inherent to a Christian's life. It belongs to that existential mix of being IN the world, but not OF the world. Peter summed up our testing as "....the trial of your faith....." Trials test us. God has set it up for it to be unavoidable that we must, as those seated with Christ in the heavenlies, also deal with what is adversarial to that reality in this present evil world. In my theology, I distinguish between the two as the difference between heavenly Reality and existential actuality. Great is the mystery that God has chosen to subject heavenly Reality to affliction by temporal contrariety, hostility, enmity, and alienation. In a word, as children of God, we are, by God's design, exposed to all that is alien to our true being in union with Christ. That description explains the essence of our testing trial. Jesus drank that cup to its dregs FOR us, that is, on our behalf, but NOT INSTEAD of us.

On the cross, bearing the whole of humanity within Himself, He endured the test of the full force of alienated humanity's venom against Him. Thus, the battle having been won seminally in Him, we can be assured that we will finally come out of "the fiery trial" purged of all the dross, of all that does not belong to true faith, to the faith OF Christ, which is ours in Him, and which He lives out in us. There is a counterfeit form of faith. It is fleshly, of this world, hopeful (yet unconsciously psychologically deeply insecure) that man can find his way by his own ingenuity.

It is, of course, native to the trial, that it must be faced. Of late, I've become very conscious of a trend among fellow believers to substitute presumption for faith, and to seek to support that counterfeit with scripture, and it involves a refusal to face the fact that we are, today, under a viciously seductive attack by the present authorities of darkness. I say "present authorities" because though that presence has always been a part of living in this world, we are in a season in which the enemy of our souls is employing his biggest guns, as he has, cyclically, down through history. This presumption masquerading as faith does not want to hear anything that, to them, smacks of gloom and doom. It's a head-in-the-sand "faith."

Please understand that by my reference in the above paragraph to "his," and "he," I'm not speaking of the religiously invented non-corporal being that is usually understood to be the devil/Satan, but the collective "he" which is the collective man of the mentality Paul described as the man of a carnal mind: "The carnal mind is enmity against God." As I've often pointed out, it's enmity that makes an enemy an enemy. The constitution of the adversary is enmity, and as the comic strip character, Pogo, observed (if not originally), "we have met the enemy, and he is us."

Positive thinking has replaced faith. While faith is positive in its thinking, positive thinking, per se, is not faith. Look, Jesus very explicitly laid out a warning to his disciples, that there was coming in THEIR generation, as had never before been seen, an onslaught on Jerusalem and its temple of horrifically vicious proportions. He was predicting the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by an army of Rome under the general, Titus. The disciples obviously passed on that warning to the believing community in Jerusalem, which they took so seriously, that is, soberly and vigilantly, as Peter admonished in his first epistle, that as the storm clouds began to appear, according to the extra-biblical historic records passed down to us, the whole church, packed up and left Judea to take refuge in the city of Pele.

Not much time elapsed between when all seemed normal....men were "eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage"....and then the holocaust came upon the city. As I've pointed out in a previous article, psychologists understand that human behavior is strongly influenced by what they call, the normalcy bias: the presumption that things will continue on as they have with no serious interruption, certainly not to any degree that would amount to a disruption so immense that what had been considered normative to daily life would have to be completely abandoned in the foreseeable future. Of course, the opposite extreme is to be so fearful of what might happen, that one is disabled to function in the immediate present. Both extremes, and all in between, are part of carnal-mind thinking, and each of us is uniquely vulnerable to either/or according to our mental and emotional temperaments.

Consider, beside the warning of Jesus recorded by Matthew and Luke in their gospels, that in the Book of Acts (The Acts of the Apostles), prophets foretold things that we, today, might evaluate as discouraging and unedifying, such as Agabus, warning that a great famine was going to spread through all the world (specifically the Roman world). "He spoke by the Spirit" the record tells us, and it would be right to assume that the other prophets in company with him on that occasion discerned that he had, and were in agreement. The church there in Antioch where the prophecy was given took the prediction seriously, and gathered funds as different ones could afford, and sent Paul and Barnabas to the brethren in Jerusalem with that aid. Presumably they expected that Judea would be hit harder by the famine than most other places. [They certainly did not, by the way, petition Caesar and the Roman Senate to "do something" about the impending situation. If you infer a note of sarcasm in that, you're right.]

Again, in Acts, we have that same prophet, Agabus, warning Paul that "chains awaited him" should he proceed in his plans to go to Rome. Paul did not rebuke Agabus, and tell him to quit that doom and gloom stuff. He accepted the warning which helped him prepare for what he would face. Prophecy of impending difficulty is meant to POSITIVELY prepare the mind and heart, not to negatively discourage as many seem to think today. In that vein, I'm not claiming to be prophesying by what I'm about to posit. But I do feel a boldness from the Lord to warn believers that there is a high probability of an economic crash coming upon our nation, and on the world generally, of such proportions, that it will be comparable to that famine recorded in Acts. I won't pull any punches, I personally expect that scenario to play out in the very near future.

If so, God may, as He did back then, prepare some of us whom God has granted the wisdom to see what's coming, and prospered us accordingly, so that we'll be able to care for our own families and help others who are not like-aware, and/or do not have the resources necessary for such preparation.