Believing More Than We See

In the late nineteenth century, few people had access to the great sequoia groves in the United States, and many didn’t believe the reports of the massive trees. In 1892, however, four lumberjacks ventured into the Big Stump Forest in California and spent thirteen days felling the grand tree named Mark Twain. Twain was 1,341 years old, three hundred feet tall, and fifty feet in circumference. One observer described Twain as a tree “of magnificent proportions, one of the most perfect trees in the grove.” They shipped part of this remarkable beauty, now destroyed, to the American Museum of Natural History, where everyone could see a sequoia.

The reality, though, is that we can’t prove every truth with our eyes alone. Hebrews describes faith as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith isn’t irrational or a fit of fancy, because the whole story is grounded in a person—Jesus—who has entered human history. Faith includes human senses and reason, but it’s not limited to them. Faith requires more. “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command,” Hebrews says, “so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (v. 3).

It’s often difficult to trust what we can’t touch or see or completely comprehend. But our faith in Christ, made possible by the Spirit, helps us to believe more than we can see.