Examples of Faith

When we get to Luke 10:22, Jesus clarifies the relationship that He has with the Father by explaining simply that the Son and the Father are intimate in regards to knowledge of each other. He also tells us that it is His exclusive franchise regarding any knowledge about the Father and will be revealed by him in His own time frame.

Chapter 10:23 tells us that when Jesus was alone with the disciples, He told them that they were fortunate to have seen and witnessed the miracles of God. Many powerful and influential people through history have wanted to see exactly what those disciples have seen.

In order to give an example of this, I searched for factual accounts of the famous and powerful people who have searched for God their whole life.. I came across accounts of people like Houdini, Hitler and Stalin. Their stories were interesting but in my research I came across the names of the famous people in the past and present who, because they weren’t able to see what the apostles had seen, just couldn’t or can’t bring themselves to believe.

In fact, one of the greatest mysteries is the fact that the apostles didn’t believe that Jesus was who He said He was, until He appeared after the Resurrection. As I have stated before, I realized who Jesus was and is through the example of the faith of the apostles and how that faith was exhibited in their martyrdom and death. Without the refusal to deny who Christ was and is, while under extreme duress, pain and eventual cruel death, all of the apostles were secure in giving their earthly lives so as to attain an eternal life in Jesus. If even one of them faltered in the course of their martyrdom, they would have been removed from peril, cleaned up and paraded around the empire, telling everyone about the “Jesus hoax” and we can be sure that those accounts would be secured through the ages and delivered to us on a regular schedule throughout history. Because that did not happen, God gives us an excellent example of how to anchor our faith to something solid and comprehensible, to coincide with our simple faith in His word.