What You See Isn’t
for we walk by faith, not by sight 2 Corinthians 5:7
By Sight – OK, so we walk by faith. What does that really mean? Does it mean that you have to pump up your God-feelings until you suddenly “see” it right? Does it mean that you “just believe?” How can I walk by faith when I still have to go to work, pay the bills, discipline the children and do the dishes?
Before we can answer these questions, Paul gives us a contrast that sets the stage. If we don’t know what the opposite looks like, then we will never know when we are really walking by faith. For Paul, the opposite is dia eidous, Greek for “through external appearance.” Perhaps the first thing we need to do is look at the preposition dia. It implies the motion of traveling through or passing through some place. If I went from my bedroom to my kitchen, I would have to pass through the hallway. The Greeks used this kind of spatial thinking to describe the passage of time. So, they thought of the journey through a day like traveling from Athens to Jerusalem (there are some real philosophical problems here, but we aren’t going to deal with them). If you travel through a day like you travel from one city to another, what will you see? Well, from a Greek perspective, you will see all the appearances that the world offers during that day. You see the weather, the traffic, the interactions of people, the markets, the menus, the world in motion. You’ll see the agendas, the actions, the attitudes and the attributes of the world’s motion picture before your eyes. Paul reminds you that what you see isn’t what you get. To walk by sight is to act as though the appearances of the world on your journey through the day is all that there is to life. It is to accept the surface as reality – and to make decisions according to that surface reality.
That’s pretty clear. We can agree that life is more than what appears along the journey. But now we have a problem. I don’t know about you, but my eyes can’t really see anything but the appearances. I don’t have spiritual rods and cones in my eye balls that can instantly perceive the deeper reality of God’s world. God’s purposes are generally invisible to me. That’s why Paul contrasts them with dia eidous. I can’t see them. They don’t appear through any ordinary sensory mechanism.
Does that mean that walking by faith is walking with my eyes closed? Is faith a blind leap? Not at all! I might not be able to see the deeper reality of God, but He can. Walking by faith is trusting His sight – and making decisions based on what He says is reality, not on what appears to me.
How can I do that? Simple. I follow what God says, not what I see. That means I must know what God says about the appearances in my daily journey. I must know what He says about the agendas, actions, attitudes and attributes of this world. It’s not a matter of taking a guess based on the general platitude of “love.” I have to know exactly what God says since I can’t see anything except the appearances, and some of those seem quite acceptable.
At the end of the day, faith is hearing (shema), not seeing. I have to become an audio man in a visual world.
Topical Index: Faith
