People are always wanting proof. They want 100%, irrefutable proof of the Gospel message. They want proof that the Bible is true. They want proof that God exists. They want proof of Hell. And they want 100% proof. Ninety nine percent won’t due.
And yet we live life in a less than 100% world. Every day we wake to a world where decisions are made without absolute proof. We sleep in houses believing we are safe, even though people are killed in houses every year. Earthquakes, tornados, violence. We get in our cars believing that the homicidal people are not driving toward us and ready to swerve and kill us. We walk into buildings and trust the architect and engineers and contractors and code enforcement officials to have all done their jobs perfectly, making this building safe.
We live and act every day trusting other people. We even trust ourselves. We trust our memories, that we turned off the coffee pot before we left home, that we dropped the infant at the baby sitters, that the expiration date is after the date we eat the food.
The reality is that we live in a world of possibilities and not certainties. Remember, trust is faith in action. So every time we trust someone or something, we are exercising faith. Trying to make our world 100% leads to OCD and Agoraphobia. We either become so compulsive, trying to control our world, make it 100% safe, or we hide away believing the inside world is somehow safer and more controllable.
Our text tells of one set of Jesus’ contemporaries asking Jesus to make their world 100%. They want proof that what He is saying is true. They of course were asking with ulterior motives. They had already determined to kill Jesus because of the threat He posed to their way of life, to their power base. The numerous signs that Jesus had already done were not enough to convince these religious leaders. People who rely on miracle, on signs of God’s existence, in order to believe, will never have enough. They will always want one more sign.
Signs don’t prove it, make your world 100%. This world will never be 100%. It will always take faith. Even Evolutionists have faith that someday someone will find the ‘missing link’, or even one transition fossil. You would think with the innumerable numbers of transitions that had to have taken place for Evolution to be true, that all you would find in the fossil record would be transitions. They would be tripping over partial this and that. But this is exactly the opposite of what we find. We find the exact same fossils covering the globe.
At what percentage are you willing to trust? We would all like 100%, but that is not life.
The Arnold Journey 