Sermon: Seeing the Invisible

The Reality of the Unseen
#1766
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 08-Jun-24; 88 minutes 2024-06-08

I recently read an article by a man named Aaron Earls. He is a C. S. Lewis scholar. Many of you probably know who C. S. Lewis is. He was an Anglican apologist in the middle of the 20th century. He died on the same day as JFK (one of those little interesting facts about those two men), so he died in 1963. But Earl's article was about C. S. Lewis as a bridge. And that is exactly the name of the article, "C. S. Lewis as a Bridge."

The article relates how Lewis often used the metaphor of a bridge to illustrate connections between things. Two things are separated from one another and to get from one to the other, you need a bridge, you need some sort of connecting material. And it is a wonderful metaphor to use. C. S. Lewis specifically talked about Christ being a bridge between God and man in many ways, or between a certain doctrine or a spiritual thing and us, so that we can understand it.

Well, Earls, about halfway through, turns the article to recounting how Lewis himself acted as a bridge during his lifetime for Christians. He was an apologist. That is what apologists do. They try to answer the questions that people have and show the truth of Christianity. So he said Lewis must have really liked this metaphor because he in many ways lived this metaphor in his own life. So what he did through 30 or 40 years of writing about Christianity, is that he acted as a bridge for Christians between Christianity and areas of human thought and endeavor that had fallen by the wayside over the centuries.

You have to know a little bit about C. S. Lewis to understand exactly why he could do that. Because he was an expert in classical and medieval literature. He was a scholar of astounding perception and intellect. And he could see, being a modern man, how thought has changed from the time of the Romans, let us say, or the Greeks, and today. It has gone through quite an evolution of various periods of time that have gone from, let us say, the time of Jesus up to now [and] have warped our thinking one way or the other. And he readily admits that back in the day, back in the Roman Empire times, their minds were warped. They were just warped in a different way.

And so what he was doing, maybe subconsciously, maybe later it was consciously, he was trying to help us modern people understand the way the ancients wrote. And of course, in their writing it was their thinking on paper. And so he was trying to bridge modern thought with ancient thought.

For instance, because of his apologetics work, C. S. Lewis helped to bridge philosophical arguments to Christian thought, showing that right philosophy based on truth, thought out properly, is not opposed to biblical thought. The truth is the truth. And if you can come by it through human reason, then it is still truth no matter how you came to view it. And then, if you have a bridge like C. S. Lewis, you can see how a person could from his understanding through human reason, then make the transition to biblical thought and say the Bible is right; Christ is right; the apostle Paul is right, because he had thought out in a similar way but through a worldly means, let us say, or a human means to come to that same conclusion.

So being the scholar that he was, he could say this early church father thought of it this way. And C. S. Lewis would say in his writings, well, he did not get everything right, but he was on the right track. And we can see that if he had just taken this route rather than being blinded by his own superstitions or blinded by the current thought of the day, he may have come to the exactly right conclusion. So that is what C. S. Lewis did in that respect.

And as I mentioned, he was also an expert in historical literature so he was able to make himself a bridge, or his writings a bridge between Christianity and theological works of the past and attempt in his own way to compare and synthesize the two because, as I have mentioned, modern and historical writers have different blind spots and one complements the other or exposes the other's faults. And if you compare them and contrast them, you can come up with very interesting things that reflect on biblical truth.

Now, Earls also called Lewis an imaginative bridge. Because the other part of C. S. Lewis' writing history is that he wrote a lot of fiction as well, particularly the Chronicles of Narnia, his time traveling books with the planets and all that. You do not need to know all that stuff. But he wanted to use his fiction in a similar way. And even some of his nonfiction contains elements like The Screwtape Letters. Many of you may have heard of that. It is letters from a senior demon to his nephew, a functionary under him, trying to give him advice, if you will, about how to deceive human beings and keep them away from God. And of course, if you look at it from the negative that way you can see how something like that could be helpful for our understanding so that we are more aware of Satan's devices.

Anyway, he felt that it was good for him as an apologist to help Christians consider those things that exist beyond what our senses can discern. That is what an imagination does. It takes the reality of the world and then it imagines things that may be like it, but actually do not exist. And he considered this to be an important job for Christians to witness, if you will, or to read about because the Christian faith contains many fundamental elements that are invisible.

Now, we can maybe understand these elements just on sheer faith, let us say, that God says it, I believe it is true. But on the other hand, God did endow us with an imagination that would be able to, just for a lack of a better way to explain it, put clothes on some of these ideas just by using our ability to think something through and imagine how they are, how they work. I mean, we do this all the time. We all say we are going to be members of God's Family in the Kingdom of God. Well, if you actually look in the Bible, there is very little there to tell us what the Kingdom of God is going to be like. Mr. Armstrong wrote a book, The Wonderful World Tomorrow, and it was only a half inch thick, there was not a lot biblically to go on to tell us. We have hints. There are things in the Bible that tell us generally what things are going to be like.

Let us just confine it to the Millennium. We know that there is going to be plenty, everybody is going to be following God eventually, stuff like that. We find like in Revelation 20 a few things about the great war of Satan when he is finally released. And so we know a little bit. But then, if we allow ourselves, we can imagine or try to imagine what that time will be like. God has given us that faculty of mind to be able to take words and turn them into images in our own mind. That is all imagination is, being able to focus our thoughts and have a kind of an artistic view of those realities that we have as words.

So, C. S. Lewis (getting back to that) thought that it was important to give people a head start, let us say. So he has in The Chronicles of Narnia a Christ figure named Aslan and what is Aslan but a lion. And he emphasizes in those books Christ's aspects of being a lion, the Lion of Judah. So he felt that those things were important because it especially got children to think about these sorts of things, to give them, let us say, a little head start on what God has in store, what God wants us to do.

Now, if you think about this, this is kind of an interesting way of approaching things because in a rational age, like the one we live in (and you can argue about how rational it actually is), but proving facts, truths in God's Word or elsewhere, is limited to what can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched. And it has been that way at least since the Enlightenment when the scientific method really began to have a great effect on our civilization.

C. S. Lewis felt that helping people imagine the invisible also helped them understand it. That is, it helps them think it through. I mentioned Aslan before and we can see how that might work. If C. S. Lewis had made a character that was a lamb, he could have done the same thing and emphasized the lamb qualities. I am really not as much interested in what C. S. Lewis did on that front, but I am interested in the idea of the high count of invisible elements in Christianity that we through our conversion need to come to understand.

Now, we can use our imagination like C. S. Lewis would prompt us to do to understand some of those things. But that is not the only way to understand them.

So the invisible elements in the Good Book, in the Bible, are not a defect of Christianity. They are a feature. You have to understand that. God purposely made many of His things; as a matter of fact, almost His entire plan is invisible and He did it for a reason. And that reason is what James was talking about, faith particularly. So I would like us to think about invisibility today as it pertains to faith and to works.

We are still carnal, that is, we are made of flesh, we cannot walk through walls, we get old, we get sick, we die. That is the way it is among carnal human beings. As I mentioned earlier, we are confined to sight and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching. But as I mentioned also, God made our minds capable of imagining. That is a feature as well, that He gave us a mind, even as physical, carnal, unconverted people, we can imagine a great deal. We can take thoughts, take words, and we can extrapolate from those words and learn a great deal about the truth of a thing just by using our imagination, just a different element of our thought process. Like I mentioned, it is kind of an artistic element of our thought process.

So when you take what God gave us as human mind, with these various abilities to think things through, and then you combine that with the Holy Spirit, the mind of God, we can understand not that there are invisible things out there, but we can come to understand the reality and the power of the invisible. All those things that are beyond the material that are actual and vital parts of our Christian lives. You have to admit, I mean, even this subject, faith. What is faith? Is not faith immaterial? It is a concept. Love—it can be shown, but the concept itself is immaterial. It is non-physical. It is a spiritual thing. And you could go down the list of Christian virtues and attributes and they are all in one respect or another spiritual in nature, but have physical manifestations that we can do.

That is why I said this sermon is about not just faith but works, because those invisible things have to come out in such things as how we treat our neighbor. And we will get to that a little bit later.

Let us turn to the epistle of I Timothy. What I would like to do as we begin here is go through the five places in the New Testament where the word invisible in Greek is found. You do not need to know the Greek word. It is not that important. It just means unseen. It is the word "see" with the negative on it and it means you cannot see it. It is pretty simple. There is no other way basically to translate the word. But it is used five times in the New Testament. And we are going to go through four here and then we will pick up the fifth one when we go to the next section. But I want to go through the first four pretty quickly.

I Timothy 1:17 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

We find here that God is invisible.

Let us just keep on moving here to Colossians 1, verses 15 through 18. There are two usages of this Greek word here, starting in verse 15.

Colossians 1:15-18 He is the image of the invisible God [That is what we got in I Timothy 1:17], the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible [He created not only visible things like you and me and everything that we see around us, but also invisible things like angels], whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.

Let us not linger here. Let us go to Romans the first chapter. and we will start in verse 18 and go down all the way to verse 23.

Romans 1:18-23 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them [or to them], for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and [divine nature], so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things [that is imagination gone sinful and wild].

What we have here are the first four of those Greek words that mean invisible or unseen. First we saw in I Timothy 1:17, that the Father—God—is invisible. As a spirit being He is well beyond human perception. We cannot use any of our senses, any of our physical senses to see Him or hear Him or anything. He could walk through here right now and we would be totally ignorant of the fact unless He just chose to reveal Himself. He is here in spirit. We say that a lot, we ask God to be here in spirit or Christ to be with us, and He is, but none of our physical senses can perceive Him unless He chooses to make Himself known.

We know that He is anthropomorphic, that is He is human-like because He says that He made us in His image. We are the copy, He is the model, but He is so far superior to us that it is unexplainable. He is infinite in all His abilities. He is immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-perceiving in every way. He is beyond human, beyond physical, beyond material.

And then we saw as we went on to Colossians, that the being known as the Word or the Son, we know Him as our Savior Jesus Christ. It is the same. He is also invisible, but there is a difference because He experienced human life for 33.5 years. He walked this earth. He came to understand human life, its limitations and weaknesses. And He endured all of that to become our Redeemer.

But as soon as He was resurrected, He was again invisible. He went back to His glory, He went back to all the superior abilities and attributes as God. He was no longer human, but He still has the memory and the education of being a human. And that is why He could be a wonderful Mediator between God and man, the bridge between so great a God and so terrible and weak that humanity is. So He was resurrected and ascended.

Actually before He ascended, He was visible. You know, the women came up to Him and saw Him and He talked to them and said, "Hey, don't cling to Me. I haven't yet ascended. Go tell My disciples I'll see them later." And then He ascended and He came back again not long thereafter in a body, but that body could go through walls. He could manifest that body anytime He wanted to. We cannot explain it. They were able to touch His hands where the nails went through, go into His side and see the wound there. But it was a totally different body. I do not know, maybe it was a human body, but He was able to manifest that human physical type of body anytime He wanted to and then walk through a wall or disappear. I cannot explain it! We have to use our imagination to understand what all that entails and probably not be right because we are just so limited.

Again, Jesus Christ, like the Father, is beyond our reckoning. We can get some hints from the Word that is given to us. But we are limited by us, in our own minds.

Then we went to Romans 1 where Paul says that God's "invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and divine nature." So here are more invisible things. All the attributes of God are invisible: His love, His goodness, His holiness, His, as it says, power. All the aspects of who God is, they are all invisible.

But he says, they are clearly seen. We can actually clearly see them. As a matter of fact, before we were converted we could actually clearly see them. Not as they actually are. We could not do that and we still cannot, we still have a problem with that. But despite a spirit's or a spiritual thing's invisibility, we can learn and know things about that spirit or that spirit's attributes. Even spiritually blinded human beings can discern and deduce facts and truths from seeing or studying, not the thing itself, but its effects or what it produces.

So it is not like we can see God in His fullness, but we see the creation and we say, "Wow, the Creator is tremendously powerful. He could make this universe. He could make this solar system, He could make a sun that doesn't seem to want to go out and would scald us on a hot day." He made the mountains and all their beauty. He made all these great things and He made the little things too. All the microscopic things. They say the wonder that we see in magnitude is also the same going the other direction. Call it microtude.

There is so many wondrous things that we cannot see but are actually physical and material, as there are the big things that we can see and say, "Wow, that took an awesome God to make." And all these things work together and He spins the earth and there is a synchronicity in the heavens and on the earth, there is things that go on, the tides, the current, the way the weather cycle is. It all works together to allow life to live on this planet.

We are in the sweet spot, the sweet zone because He put us there and He made everything work. And you think about those people, "Oh, no! Global warming!" Sit down, just wait a few years. We are going to be shivering because God made the earth to renew itself naturally. And if He needs to come into it and intervene for some reason because something has gotten off kilter (usually because we do something as human beings), He can do that too.

So what are the attributes that we can see of God by just looking at what He has created? Love, power, foresight, an incredible kindness, forbearance with us. You know, you could go on. I am just pulling things out of my mind. But you can figure out God, in a way, by just looking at the earth that He prepared for mankind and all the ways that He supplies all of our needs. God's providence is awesome on this earth. I mean, there are some places, you know, you spit out a seed, you get an apple tree that in just a few years is producing many apples. I mean, that is how the midsection of our country was for such a long time before it was over-farmed and all that goodness was used up and we got dust bowls and what have you. But He made the earth to be fertile for us and for thousands of years, for however long His plan was, He was going to give us what we needed.

That is just an example of how His invisible attributes are clearly seen if we study not the attributes themselves, but their effects and what we can see in terms of what is produced. So we can learn a great deal about God by just looking out in nature.

But then Paul gets around to saying, "You know, man messed that up too. Even though all those invisible attributes are right there to be seen by anybody, they messed that up. They ignored the Creator. He says "they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts." See, that is the problem with human thinking and imagination. It is always going off to things that are not good, finds things that are not good to be more exciting, or more titillating, or hey, if I think this way I can get that guy's things or take over his land, or take his wife, or be in control over the company or whatever. And we totally go away from God's goodness that we could actually see in the creation.

And so we become futile in our thoughts and God says that He just, at that point, turns us over to a debased mind because we are ruining ourselves and you will have to pick us up in the second resurrection when things are better.

But he does go on to say here in Romans 1 that among the worst things that they do is that they make new gods. Even though they could see the wonders of the Great God of all the universe there, their imagination, their futile thoughts almost always take them down the road to worshipping creatures or the creation, not the Creator Himself. I mean, how dumb is it to worship a created thing rather than the greater thing, the greater Person who created it. That should tell you something about the debased mind that God allows them to keep on using. And that in itself is a lesson. Not for today though.

So if we look at this idea of invisibility and all the things that are invisible that God has revealed to us, God's answer to our questions about His invisibility is, it is not a problem. He does not think invisibility is a problem at all. And He wants us to learn that it should not be a problem for us. But we have a problem and that is we are human. That has always been the problem. We are human, we are easily deceived, we take our own advice, and it usually ends up bad. You know, the product of our thinking is usually not good. But God says invisibility, the things that are unseen, are not a problem.

In fact, as I mentioned before, it is a feature, it has everything to do with our faith and building strong faith because it is really not easy to believe and trust in a being or in something one cannot see.

My dad asked years ago, I think it was back in the late 80s and it was brought into the Church of the Great God after it was founded (it was his signature sermon), "Do You See God?" Very similar to this particular one. He was trying to persuade us to observe God's work in our lives, to open our eyes and see in faith what God was doing. To see His hand in our conversion, to see Him doing things, showing His concern for our welfare, every step of the way, with the Kingdom and being a child of God in all its glory at the end. And by seeing those fruits, seeing the miracles, seeing decisions at a crossroads that God gives us inspiration to choose wisely the right way to go. To see the advantages that God gives us over the people of this world.

All of these are products of His loving dealings with us. If we can recognize those things, my dad said, our faith will be galvanized, it will be strengthened, it can weather what is going on out in this world. And so no matter what comes up, we could trust Him more and we can grow in that trust and follow His lead more often. That is what he meant with that sermon, "Do You See God?"

So I am asking a similar question today. Do we see the invisible? Have we been trained to see the invisible? Have we taken the time to see the invisible?

Let us go to the fifth place where this word, this Greek word translated invisible is mentioned. And we will go to the faith chapter, Hebrews 11. We will read verses 24 through 28. You know, this is the chapter where the author of Hebrews goes through many of the heroes of faith and says, "By faith," he did this, and "By faith," he did that, and "By faith," he did what God wanted him to do. Here we are at Moses.

Hebrews 11:24-28 By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the firstborn should touch them. By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land, whereas the Egyptians, attempting to do so, were drowned.

What we see here with the inclusion of the word invisible there in verse 27, is that Moses is a case study on this subject. We can look at the life of Moses, particularly some, we will them scenes, in his life, where he showed that he saw the invisible. "He endured as seeing Him who is invisible." Right there we have an attribute that can be strengthened by being able to see the invisible: endurance. One can persevere.

Now, we know that later on when he had taken the Israelites out of Egypt to Sinai, that Moses saw God. Remember the elders came up the mountain and they had a meal with him and there was a visible presence of God. Incredible! I have always thought that that was one of the most incredible scenes in the entire Exodus story. How would that have affected all those elders? It did not seem to do much. It makes me wonder about seeing God in our human form and not being overly impressed. I would have thought that those elders would have been on fire for God having seen Him there at that meal. But it obviously did not work that way because they all died in the wilderness, could not enter the Promised Land. Something to think about there.

Anyway, later on after the Golden Calf incident, he saw the backside of God's glory. God said, "Hey, you can't see Me in My full glory, but I'll pass by you. I'll hold My hand over your eyes so you can't see and die. But as I go past, I'll take My hand away and you can see My backside as I go away from you." Incredible things that God did for Moses. It is beyond us.

But when Moses was going head-to-head with Pharaoh, because that is what the invisible mentioned here is linked with, that he was going up against Pharaoh, he had not had that those particular experiences up to this point when he was in Egypt trying to get Pharaoh to let the people go. He had seen the burning bush and he had heard God speaking from the bush, but he had not seen God. Now you could say that the hearing part of it was maybe sufficient as proof of God's existence, of his reality. And I think it is, but we have got to remember, this is pretty early in the story. So Moses was taking baby steps, if you will, in what God wanted him to do.

Now, we know at the burning bush, Moses was saying, "Aah, not me, not me! I don't want to do this." And God showed him all the things, the miracles that He could do in trying to prove to Moses that he could do this. God would supply him with what he needed to convince Pharaoh to let the people go. "Not me. No, I don't want to, I don't want to do that." "Oh, well, ok. I'll bring your brother. Your brother can go with you. He could speak for you." "OK." You know, God had to get a little bit upset with him. God's wrath was going to come down on Moses and it was like, "OK! OK!"

But you could see from that characterization at the burning bush that Moses was not a huge man of faith at this point. He had enough faith to start the process, but he was not the paragon of faith that he became. Like I said, early days.

Now consider the match up. Moses goes down into Egypt. He goes to the capital city and it is Moses, (from a physical point of view), the representative of a slave people versus Pharaoh, who was probably the most powerful man in the world at the time. His word was law. He could say, "Guards, take this man out. Cut off his head! Throw him in the Nile! Let him feed the alligators." This was the fear that Moses was facing in these (well, I kind of made it up like a competition) but they were meeting together and there was a war of words and at some point, "OK, you can go into the wilderness," and then he would harden his heart and Moses would have to come back and try to re-convince him.

And we find out later that God was turning the heart of Pharaoh one way or the other. He was making a point, making a story, if you will, for us to read, to understand about how God works and how God wants to free us, and that He will free us; and all the other things that we can understand from the freeing of Israel from Egypt.

But Moses had to face him personally. Every time he went to court with God's message, that, "Let My people go," Pharaoh would say, "No, I'm not going to let your people go." And Moses would say, "Okay, God told me to tell you that there is going to be a plague and it's going to be a plague of this or that." And you know, he had to do these things in the face of a human competition where he was facing someone much more powerful than him. I will just put it that way.

So would carnal, selfish, proud Pharaoh give in to Moses and his invisible God? We have to think of that too because Pharaoh did not believe that the God of Moses was real. He probably did not believe his own gods were real. It was probably just a farce that the Egyptian hierarchy used to control the people. I do not know. That is the way I have always thought. They knew their gods were nothing. And of course, Moses had a few miracles to show that there was a God behind him. I mean, Pharaoh thought of them pretty much as parlor tricks because he sent out Jannes and Jambres, his own magicians, and they were able to do the same thing.

What proof did Moses have to convince Pharaoh? Physical man, a man who did not want to see the reality of God, did not want to see the invisible God. Now, what does it say? It says there in Hebrews 11:27 that Moses endured as seeing Him who is invisible. He did not necessarily overcome Pharaoh. He just out-endured Pharaoh, if you will. But that endurance, that perseverance and persistence was enough to get him through the 10 plagues because he saw that God was real and that He was going to do what He said.

First off, He was going to bring Israel out of Egypt. He was going to free His people. And so with that idea in mind, he kept it up, even though he felt all the time that he was overmatched. He went on the power of God, a God, the God who is invisible. He could see Him in his mind's eye, if you will. Pharaoh could not. And it was being able to see the invisible—the invisible God—that allowed him to endure.

Now, this is very important to us because what does Jesus Christ say in the Olivet Prophecy? "He who endures to the end will be saved." So like Moses, we may be outmatched in this world. We are very outmatched in this world, but we can endure and actually prevail over much more powerful people and institutions and cultural changes and all those things, simply by seeing the God who is invisible, and knowing that He is far stronger than any of those things and that He will do what He says He is going to do. No matter what we see happening in the world, if we see Him first, if we see Him as a priority, then we can endure those things and persist and be there at the end.

So Moses before Pharaoh did not falter. He kept at it, he persevered, he kept going to Pharaoh's court and saying, "Let My people go," because actually he knew he had the upper hand. Not because of himself, but because of the invisible God that stood behind him every step of the way. He knew God was real even though He was unseen. He knew God's power. This God was able to burn a bush and the bush would remain unburned. How does that happen? That is beyond nature. It is supernatural. He believed in a supernatural God.

He also knew, and this may be interesting to think about. I mentioned the encounter there between Moses and God when he said, "I can't speak well," and God got upset at him. He felt the wrath of God in those few seconds. And so he knew that God's wrath was greater than the wrath of Pharaoh because he has experienced it just in a small way. So what that meant, we have another way to phrase that fear of God's wrath, and that is the fear of God. He had a high respect, a reverence for what God could do and what God could do to Him as his Master.

So keeping the reality of the invisible God in the front of his mind, he was able to remain faithful and on task and complete the work of God that had been assigned to him. He was able to push through every wall that was put in front of him because he saw the God who was behind him, cheering him on, helping him every step of the way. Like I said, he did not falter. And even when Pharaoh chased him with the Egyptian army all the way to the Red Sea, what did Moses do? Moses saw God. He tried to explain to the Israelites, "Stand still" and watch God work. But God just had to give him a word, "Moses, go forward," and he went. That was Moses seeing the invisible.

Let us stay here in Hebrews 11 but go back a few verses to verse 13. We will read 13 through 16 and we will look at Abraham starting in verse 13. Actually, it is about all of them, but it kind of is in the middle of Abraham's story.

Hebrews 11:13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, . . .

Notice, they saw promises afar off. Have you ever seen a promise afar off? Well, you do not see them with your eyes, not necessarily. You may see the words on the page, but you do not see promises afar off. They are invisible. They are words, they are spirit out there, life-giving spirit to those who can perceive it. Did Jesus not say that His words are spirit and they are life? That is what we are talking about here.

Hebrews 11:13-14 They were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.

The promises have to do with the homeland. The homeland cannot be seen because they are still in the promise form. They are prophecy, they are something that has been told to us, but they have not been revealed in their fullness yet.

Hebrews 11:15 And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out [which was a physical country that they could see], they would have had an opportunity to return.

It is very easy for people to go back to something that they feel is concrete, that they could at least wrap their arms around and understand. But these people, the faithful people of Hebrews 11, were able to see those things in the future, only given to them as promises at the moment, as more real than the country that they had come out of.

Hebrews 11:15-16 they would have had an opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is a heavenly country [and there is another invisibility word,; heavenly means spiritual]. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

New Jerusalem comes out of heaven. It is not visible to our eyes, but it has been promised. And we see in Revelation 21 that it will come to pass.

Let us think about Abraham though, about his life, because Abraham and Moses had a point of convergence in this area of meeting Pharaoh. Abraham met Pharaoh one time and he messed it up. He failed. Then Abraham went to Abimelech's court, had the same problem and failed. You do not hear that about Abraham too much. He is the father of the faithful, is he not? But in those two instances, he failed. Interesting to put these two men and their experiences side by side.

Now, Abraham did not do very well against Pharaoh or Abimelech because at the time he lacked faith in the unseen God. Twice he faltered against the great men of his day. He lied about Sarah, both times, when he should have trusted God to protect them, even in the midst of their enemies, powerful enemies. But God gave him a pass, if you will, God backed him up both times, made sure Sarah was safe, made sure Abraham was safe. He even blessed them with gifts from these men because God had overarching goals that He needed to fulfill. He needed Abraham to live. He needed Sarah to live because Isaac was not yet born. And so they could not be killed or Sarah taken by Pharaoh. That just would not work.

So God backed him up even though he was weak in faith. And poor Abraham, he gets this story of a double failure put in God's Word for the rest of us to understand. So they stand as a kind of black mark on Abraham's record. But they are a great teaching vehicle to help us to understand some very necessary things about faith and about seeing the invisible.

We could go to Genesis 22 but we will not. You know the story. That is where he successfully sacrificed Isaac. That was an even bigger trial than the two that he had there in Egypt and in Philistia. Because this was his beloved son. God was saying, "You've got to give him up to Me. Go and sacrifice him three days out. Off you go." Well, he came through this one with flying colors. He probably had these two instances against Pharaoh and against Abimelech in his mind as he did this. "God is testing me. How am I going to react this time? Am I going to trust Him, trust His word?" And I imagine that three day walk enabled him to think all of this through.

But when they got to Mount Moriah, he trusted God implicitly to protect his son or to resurrect his son, whichever one God chose was fine with him. He would rather not have to kill his son and then him being be resurrected. But he knew one or the other would have to happen. God would have to stop him from going through with the sacrifice, the physical killing of Isaac. Or if He wanted him to go through with that, then He would resurrect him. That was the only way it could turn out.

Why? Because he was able to figure out an invisible attribute of God. And that is one that we all know: God cannot lie. He always tells the truth and He had given Abraham several promises, particularly the one where He gave the Abrahamic Covenant and all that got started, that his son was going to be the father of many kings, many peoples, and if Isaac died, that could not happen. Isaac was not married yet. Isaac did not have any kids yet. And so he had to make an accounting. He had to think this through. "The invisible God has told me that Isaac is a necessary part of the promises that He has made. And so He's not going to kill Isaac. I'm going to trust God that He is going to work all this out. I'm going to follow it through. I'm going to do what God told me." And he did, because he finally saw the invisible. He saw God. In this case, the invisible thing was God's promises based on God's always truthful nature.

So like Moses did before Pharaoh, Abraham went forward because he was convicted of the reality of God despite not being able to see Him. All this was based on invisible promises and the invisible God who made them. He could trust Him because he had faith.

We are going to move into a little bit different area here. Let us go to II Corinthians 4. Now, I have got to explain something here because we cannot read the whole account. But I want you to hear the summary here about chapter 3. We are going to be reading chapter 4. But chapter 3 is important as a lead-up to this because Paul, in chapter 3, had just explained a major difference in the Old and the New Covenants. He used the metaphor of writing and he pares that metaphor down to two phrases, the letter and the spirit.

The letter was the Old Covenant. The spirit was the New Covenant. And he says the Old Covenant was written on stones, that is, on physical material. You could see it. I mean, they were real stones that had the Hebrew letters making those words etched on them. The Old Covenant then, written on stones, was far different from the New Covenant, because the New Covenant is written on the heart by the spirit. Both the place that is written and the writer of the New Covenant are invisible because we know that the heart that he is talking about here is not the physical heart. It is that essence, it is that knowing and believing that makes us, you know, whatever it is. A lot of people like to call it the soul or whatever, but it is something inside us. It is something immaterial, the spirit in man (I do not know) combined with the Spirit of God.

But the important part here is they are metaphysical, they are invisible, invisible parts of us. And so God writes with His invisible Spirit onto our invisible heart. The New Covenant is all about invisibility. Whereas the letter, the Old Covenant, is all about material things, the life of humanity without God. Even though they had God, that is, Old Testament Israel, they had His truth, they did not have Him in the way that we do under the New Covenant. All those promises and everything were physical to them. All the things that they had to do were physical, except for those few that God called by His Spirit and showed them the invisible things.

And then he talks about, early on in chapter 3, that the materialistic letter in the end only brought death. But the immaterial Spirit, the invisible Spirit gives life. That is in verse 6. So he ends the chapter by saying that we are being transformed into God's spiritual image, unto glory by that Spirit. He is telling us that everything that is happening under the New Covenant is spiritual. Our part, especially right now, is spiritual. So we could even say that what is happening to us is the transforming of us from the visible to the invisible. God is laying the groundwork for the actual invisibility by giving us all of these invisible attributes through the Spirit so that we are prepared when that change comes.

Now, this great pronouncement that he makes at the end of chapter 3 needs a little further explanation because it explains why Paul dealt with the Corinthians as he had and simultaneously focuses on one of their main problems. And that is, what do we know about the Corinthians? They were still carnal, they were thinking through things through with humanistic thoughts and trying to do human physical things. You can go to I Corinthians 3:1-3 and see that that is exactly what he said about them. "I'm having trouble teaching you things because you're still carnal." Which means that why there was the problem between Paul and the Corinthians is because they were not getting the spiritual, they were not getting the invisible parts. They were all still carnal to turn everything that he said into something materialistic. It was not getting through.

And as a side note here, he is basically telling us in I Corinthians 4 that a minister's service toward the congregation is primarily spiritual in nature, using his own example of how he was having to work with the Corinthians. It is through speech, there is nothing physical about speech. It is all words. It is through prayer, it is through the giving of advice, it is through exhortation. All of those are spiritual things that a minister has to do to get people to speak the same thing and to be unified and move forward toward the Kingdom.

II Corinthians 4:1-10 Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart. [He was always trying to get the Corinthians to understand that he had certain authority and they should not be knocking his authority, but his authority is spiritual.] But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the God of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus' sake. For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. [Notice all those spiritual things that it is the minister's job to get across to the people.] But we have this treasure in earthen vessels [God has given all these wonderful invisible, spiritual things to humans who are clay, animated clay, if you will.], that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. [He gets all the glory for being able to transform us from human to divine.] We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

He is saying it is our job as ministers of Christ, and also the membership as well, to go through this life bearing Christ's burden, if you will, and living the life of Christ out in whatever situation we are in. We always have to be like Him. He is particularly talking about his own life and how he has to work to bring the gospel to the people. But it is as an example for all of us.

II Corinthians 4:11-18 For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus' sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you. [So he is saying, the minister gives his life for you to be able to live in the Kingdom of God.] But since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, "I believed and therefore I spoke," we also believe and therefore speak, knowing that he who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus, and will present us with you. [The ministry looks forward to that knowing that they also are included in that number.] For all things are for your sakes, that grace, having spread through the many, may cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God. [Now, where does he go with all this?] Therefore we do not lose heart. [We do not lose heart as ministers. We do not lose heart as members of the church.] Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

He is telling them through this whole thing that our focus has to be on these invisible things, and whatever happens to us in this world throughout our lives is God working in us to bring us to the resurrection from the dead and into His Family. We have to believe that, we have to have faith in that, knowing that these invisible things, these spiritual things that we are learning, are God's way of making us like Him. We have to trust the process, as they say these days.

So we do not lose heart because Christ is at work through His Spirit, though we cannot see it. He is renewing the inward man on a daily basis. He is renewing that converted heart daily and our trials and experiences are working to bring us to glory. In other words, we cannot see all the things that are happening behind the scenes. We cannot even see what is happening within us to help us to understand and to grow in character and produce fruit that pleases God. Those unseen things, Christ, His Spirit, even the spiritual growth that is happening in us, are all eternal. We cannot see them, we cannot feel them; smell, taste, touch, we cannot, but they are happening. They are happening because God is faithful and He is working with us, in us, by His Spirit.

I do not want to be a a Debbie Downer here, but the other side is also invisible. That is, the Devil, his demons, the bad habits, bad human nature, all of those things are also invisible. Let us just go to Colossians 3 here for a minute to get the gist here.

Colossians 3:1-5 If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above [that is, on the invisible, heavenly things], not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you will appear with Him in glory [because He has been working with you to learn and to know and to grasp all those invisible things of the Spirit. So what do we do?] Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Colossians 3:9-10 Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him.

So all of those things that we are supposed to mortify, kill off, are invisible things but bad evil things that we are supposed to get rid of. This is a spiritual battle between the invisible things that are good and right and godly and the invisible things that are satanic and evil and will eventually end in death.

Let us go to Ephesians 6.

Ephesians 6:10-13 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood [our battle is not against human beings, it is not against armies], but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. [our battles are spiritual invisible battles, so he says] Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Finally, let us go back to II Corinthians chapter 10.

II Corinthians 10:1-6 [where Paul writes] Now I, Paul, myself am pleading with you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—who in presence am lowly among you, but being absent am bold towards you. But I beg you that when I am present I may not be bold with the confidence by which I intend to be bold against some, who think of us as if we walked according to the flesh. For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal [are not fleshly] but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.

What have we seen here in these three passages? Our enemies are invisible, whether it is Satan the Devil, whether it is his demons, whether it is our own human nature with all of its ingrained evils and the bad habits, all of those things are immaterial, they are all invisible. We cannot prevail against them with swords and spears or clubs or whatever weapon we might want to use of a physical nature. I mean, even Satan the Devil is called the prince of the power of the air. Can you see the air? Only when there is smog. But the air is an invisible thing. He is in control in this world of the things that he can transmit through the air. Kind of interesting.

He broadcasts invisible attitudes of pride and other ungodly desires and urges that cannot be driven off with arrows or axes or cavalry charges. He has hordes of demons, also invisible, to do his bidding, to incite us to fear or lust or envy or pride or rebellion. We cannot punch him in the nose, we cannot see them. So we have to fight spiritually. Our Christian fight, our war, our conflict is entirely spiritual. Even our weaponry that we use is spiritual.

He says, yes, we have to live in our flesh until we die in Christ, God willing. But our calling in this lifetime constrains us to fight spiritually, with mighty weapons of spirit provided by God for our use through that Spirit. Our fight takes place in our minds and our hearts, that is, in our decision-making faculties, in our desires to take right action, in our convictions, to keep going, to endure like Moses did, to persist and to finish the race, to reach the goal toward which we have been aimed by God.

The weapons God supplies us through His Spirit will prevail, will allow you to overcome invisible things, invisible powers, invisible strongholds of sin that we have built in ourselves over many years of rebellion against God—our pride and our stubbornness and our wayward thoughts. And we can grow strong enough with these weapons to keep our internal evils at bay despite their propensity to keep coming back at us. Do you not find yourself fighting the same battles a lot? Well, with the weapons that God gives us, we can finally overcome them. Did Abraham not do that? He had to fight the same battle three times. And finally he won on the third time and showed God that he was with Him all the way.

Let us conclude then in I John, but first let us go to John 1, verse 18 just to pick up this one verse very quickly. I want to leave you with something without a whole lot of explanation. Just something to think about as you go.

John 1:18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

He has revealed Him to all of us.

Now, let us go to I John 4 and we are going to read verses 12 through 16. The same man, the apostle John, writes,

I John 4:12-16 No one has seen God at any time. [but notice his next words] If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

This sermon has highlighted how faith works and grows as we come to see the invisible and follow God's will. Faith, as Hebrews 11 says, is the evidence of things not seen. Right? That is exactly what it says there. What Paul is saying is faith demonstrates the existence of reality that cannot be perceived through objective sense perception. That is a kind of scholarly way to put it. We can also see it as the conviction that there is a significant real world beyond what our senses can perceive. It also has a link to godly living.

Jesus Christ came to reveal the Father. That is what we saw in John 1:18. Not just that He existed, but also as He lives and acts. So He is our exemplar, our model, and throughout His life, which we see in the Gospels, Jesus reveals Him as a God of loving concern whose every action is for our good. He wants us to be in the Kingdom with Him.

But here in I John 4, the apostle connects God's invisibility with loving one another. "No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us." Now, if we strip all the Johannine wording that sometimes gets very confusing, his thought is that we come to know and to see God best when we love one another. That is the link there. We come to know and see God best when we love one another.

We know His Spirit is in us. It has been given to us. So we know God from that point of view, that He is working with us. But only when we begin to actually demonstrate the love of God toward one another do we finally get it. We get what God is. What God is like and what God does. When we think, talk, and act like God in the spirit of the second great commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," we see Him ever-more clearly because that love defines Him, which he says in verse 16, that "God is love."

And so the mutual relationship—He in us, us in Him—deepens and strengthens because we are now acting, thinking, talking like Him. We are coming to be like one another. It is like a marriage. When you first get married, you are very different people. (I will use my marriage as an example.) Beth and I will be celebrating 35 years this July. We have become a lot like each other over the years. We cannot help it. We know each other very well because we do so many things together and we do so many things alike. It is the same way with us and God. Over the years, when we act like God, we become more like God, we come to know Him better, and knowing Him better is the Bible's way of telling us that we see Him, the invisible.

So do you want more faith? See the invisible God. And how do you come to see and know the invisible God more deeply? Love one another, because that is what God does. He loves us. So love one another. And as Jesus says in John 13:

John 13:35 "By this all will know that you are My disciples [My followers], if you have love for one another."

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