The Vision of Faith

Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on...to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me (Phil. 3: 13 & 12).

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The journey of Exodus, the journey that Israel walked, is an image of the journey that every person makes when he or she sets out to follow the Lord.  Israel is, as it were, humanity personified, and so what happened to Israel is what happens to everyone who sets out on the journey of faith....

[The Israelites'] religious insight was really a product of religious hindsight: they reflected on their experience and they interpreted it in a new way.  Today, on the other hand, we do not usually look back on what has happened and see the hand of God in it.

When that hindsight becomes foresight -- when it becomes a hope and expectation that God will do in the future what He did in the past-- we call that the vision of faith.  It is precisely this vision that is essential for authentic worship.  (Richard Rohr in The Great Themes of Scripture, pp. 19-20).

We all tend to hold onto resentment and bitterness over the past.  Someone once said, "Sooner or later, we must all give up the hope of a better yesterday."  I love that idea, because I think it well expresses the reason we ingrain the past into our brains.  We rehearse what was done to us in the hope that by going over and over the past, we somehow can change it.  But all we do is make it more real; we become the past by making it our only reality.

That is why the Exodus journey, and the journeys of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc. are one of "the great themes" of Scripture.  The only way we can "change" the past is by walking out of it toward the future, toward that for which Christ Jesus has taken hold of us.  Of course, the past does not really change; what does change is the hold it has on us.  We are prisoners of our experience until we are set free by a call to the future, to a new "Promised Land," where the past becomes a distant memory.

In the book Hinds Feet on High Places, Hannah Hunard writes an allegory of "Much Afraid," whose future is determined by her relatives: "Fear," "Anxiety," "Worry," etc.  She is held captive and almost paralyzed by her "people."  But the Shepherd calls her forth from "her father's people" to the hills; he leads her by cords of love to a new land, where he captures her heart and makes her forget her relatives.  Once her heart has been renewed by love and she no longer belongs to her "father's people," but to her Lover, she is sent back to her people--no longer as "Much Afraid," but with a new name.  Her people no longer recognize her; she is not the person who went away after the Shepherd.  Now she returns in freedom and power to call them out of their dismal past also and to show them the glory that lies ahead.

This is the journey we must all take -- the journey to an unknown place, the journey out of our "dismal past."  There is only one Guide for that journey; no one else can go with us on the way.  Only Jesus Christ is the Way.  He is the One Who calls us forth and Who invites us to walk with Him.  Once we agree, we will know His Presence in a way we have never before known it. 

So many people are afraid to go with Him.  We prefer to hold onto what we are familiar with, even if it is painful, rather than let go of the past and walk into an unknown future.  But only "letting go" of Egypt will bring us to the Promised Land.