Bible Bedrock
“It is by grace you have been saved, through faith.” – Ephesians 2:8
At the time of conversion we have become so convinced of our lost condition, through the impact of the outer law, that we are willing to take a revolutionary faith-action. We become aware through the written word—the one material link in the process—of the offer of forgiveness, a removal of all that guilt which propels us to a destiny in hell. And much more, we hear of acceptance by a loving, uncondemning Father who offers the gift of eternal life, purchased by the historic event of His Son’s public death on our behalf. And that death, we discover, resulted in a further event which is “beyond human history,” His bodily resurrection—attested to by numerous of HIs disciples; and His unconditional offer to be our Savior requires only that we believe and receive Him as alive from the dead! But that receiving means transferring our faith to the reality of a Person whom we can neither feel, see, nor touch, and who in His resurrection is an absurdity to material-world thinking. This is why it becomes a crisis moment. It is the absurdity of faith! Now is the first time we affirm that we are believing in One who was not only crucified—a fact verifiable in history—but who is living, risen from the dead—foolishness to the world, and impossible of material verification! That is why it is the greatest moment in our human history.
How does that faith become fact? By an inner spirit-knowing. None on earth can say how we know…or is we really do know! But we know that we know. Into us has come an inner awareness, what Paul calls “the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit,” that we are a child of God. And nothing can shake us.
Our inner eyes have been opened, as Jesus told Nicodemus they would be, to “see the kingdom of God” And if it is only those born of the Spirit who can see that kingdom, it can be no visible, earthly realm. It is the glorious kingdom of reality, for reality is spirit as God is Spirit, and we simply “know” that we are now members of the eternal reality—that realm where Father, Son and Spirit dwell, and we with Them, and where God has all resources, all wisdom, all power, and we with HIm. Men now know that this outer universe is only energy or spirit slowed down to visible forms. So we have come home, and are now eternal participators in the resources behind the universe. Never again do we mistake or confuse the trivialities of the “bits and pieces” of material things as being the real and reliable, or irreplaceable. We look, as Paul did, “not at the things which are seen, but the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” –Yes I Am
