Faith Must Rest on Truth

According to the Bible, this is how faith is defined: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1 KJV)." Matthew Henry, in his commentary on this verse, wrote: "Faith and hope go together; and the same things that are the object of our hope are the object of our faith. It is a firm persuasion and expectation that God will perform all that he has promised to us in Christ; and this persuasion is so strong that it gives the soul a kind of possession and present fruition of those things, gives them a subsistence in the soul, by the first-fruits and foretastes of them: so that believers in the exercise of faith are filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory." The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines faith as "firm belief in something for which there is no proof; complete trust."

We need faith for everything, not only religion. We have to believe in things which we have no time to prove, which we have not seen or cannot see. We do not have the ability or the capacity or the time to see and prove all things we are told. Without faith, we cannot trust our friends. We will have to live with fear and suspicions.

Science also demands faith. We are told many things in Science and we believe without proving. We are taught in school that the earth goes round the Sun. Have our teachers seen it? Do they or do we have the skill to take the telescope and look into the sky and do we have the mathematical skill to calculate and prove from our observation that the earth is going round the sun? For most of us, we just accept by faith what our teachers taught.

While faith help us in our weakness and our blindness, it is also open to great abuse, since you have to believe in things you do not see and cannot prove. The same faith that allows me to believe in what my science teacher taught me, also allows me to believe in charlatans and fakes. Which is why faith must always rest in truth. Faith which rest in unprovable hypothesis will lead to superstition and lies. Faith that rest on truth will lead to progress.

The Prodigal Son

I had to prepare some sharing on the parable of Prodigal Son last Sunday. My son saw and he asked, "What does 'prodigal' means?" Oh. I always thought I know, but I realized I could not answer him. So I checked the dictionary and found from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary that it means "squander, recklessly spendthrift, or positively, yielding abundantly".

Then the next thing he remarked was, "I always thought that the title is 'The Prodigal's Son'. But now I know it is 'The Prodigal Son'".

The Prodigal's Son. The Prodigal Son. Who is the prodigal? The son or the father?