Hebrews 11:3: By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.

Faith requires us first to trust God, and, in return, He will give us understanding of His ways. However, we can’t know or understand God through man’s knowledge. There is only one Way to understand the Father and this is accomplished through a relationship with Jesus, His only-begotten Son. If you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus and know that He is, indeed, the Son of the living God, then you can rest in the assurance that you have been born again.

In today’s devotion, you will discover that if a person tries to understand God through knowledge, they will eventually fall prey to the spirit of offense and walk away in spiritual darkness. There is only one way to know the Father or understand His ways and that is through faith in Jesus. After you place trust or confidence in Christ as your Savior, the Father will begin the process of revealing His ways to you.

The Scribes and Pharisees constantly persecuted Jesus and rejected His truth because they didn’t understand Him. To come to faith doesn’t mean that you understand God; it means that in spite of sometimes not understanding Him, you choose to trust Him. The Scribes and Pharisees sought understanding apart from faith in Jesus, and this caused them to stumble at His teachings. It wasn’t because Jesus was speaking to them in a foreign language. They stumbled because they didn’t believe He was the Son of God because, if they had believed He was the Christ, they would have understood and received His teachings.

In John 6, we read where Jesus was teaching some Jews about Him being THE BREAD from heaven. He told them that their fathers had eaten of the bread that God through Moses gave them, and they (their fathers) were dead. He went on to tell them that if they would eat His flesh and drink His blood, they would never die. When He told them to eat His flesh and drink His blood, they MISUNDERSTOOD Him and began to walk away. Remember, I said earlier that if we don’t walk by faith, eventually we will take on the spirit of offense; this is the very thing that occurred with them. Between you and me, they were probably more offended that He had said they would never die than they were over Him commanding them to partake of His body—simply because they refused to believe that Jesus was the Christ.

Let’s address the problem of unbelief. God is spirit, and we are carnally (fleshly) minded. Humans believe in what they can see, and God is invisible. The just are to walk by faith and not by sight in order to have eternal life. It is the same as someone from a foreign country coming to your homeland and trying to communicate to you in their native language. You wouldn’t understand their words. So how do we come to understand the Word of God? Faith is our interpreter. The writer of Hebrews wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: By faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

If you truly desire to know the invisible God as your heavenly Father, you must first be fully willing to trust in Jesus as the Son of God. As you begin to implement this principle in your walk, the Holy Spirit will enlighten your understanding to be able to comprehend the hidden wisdom of God and to know His ways. By this, we will know that we have eternal life.  —submitted by Asa Dockery, US