Verse of the day · October 18
What does it mean to walk by faith and not by sight?
Halfway across a desert, a man chasing a fortune has no assurance he will last the journey.
Read one of these every day in the THNK GOD app →
(For we walk by faith, not by sight:)
2 Corinthians 5:7
The line about walking by faith sits inside a longer argument, and the argument is about dying. Paul was telling a church why he and the men with him did not lose heart, when they had every reason to: they were hemmed in on every side, at a loss, hunted, knocked down, handed over to death again and again on Jesus' account. He begins with the body, and he calls it a tent. Not a fixed house — a tent: something put up for a short purpose and taken down easily when the camp moves on. Behind the word is the old tent of meeting that Israel carried through the wilderness. It came apart whenever the camp moved. So the body is somewhere to camp on a journey, not the place the journey ends. The nails will be drawn and the cords loosed, and the body will go back to dust. What Paul sets against it is "a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" — and nothing takes that one down.
Meanwhile, he says, while "we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord." He does not mean God's presence is withdrawn. His presence fills everywhere, and a believer often has a sense of him, and is never totally and finally deprived of that presence. What he is away from is God in his glory, and the full enjoyment of that. Believers are pilgrims here, staying a while, with God among them by his Spirit. Inside the tent these pilgrims groan under a weight: the body is a heavy burden and the troubles of a life are a heavy load. The groan is not for a way out of the body. It is for a better body. And in the middle of that he says it. "For we walk by faith, not by sight." And then: "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord."
To walk, in the Bible, often just means to live — how a man conducts himself, what he acts on, day after day. The word has a journey inside it: life is a road, and the Christian walking it is travelling to another country. The country is his own, too. A soul made for glory is away from its own country the whole time it is in the body. So to walk by faith is to live in confident expectation of what is coming, and to let the unseen things weigh on a man as if he could see them. Not one decision, either, but a continued course of believing, kept up. And what he is walking toward is not his own achievement: God made him for that glory, and whatever God begins he finishes, and is never frustrated of his end. Faith is the soul's eye, and its hand, and its foot: the eye that looks to Christ for righteousness and pardon and life, the hand that takes him, the foot that walks to him and keeps walking in him.
What faith is set against here is sight. Not the sense of nearness a believer already has, but the seeing itself: the full sight, face to face, that is still to come, when faith is turned into vision. We cannot see his face while we live, and God is not in our physical view now. For the present, faith stands in the place of direct vision. And the list of what is out of view is longer than it looks. God is unseen, and a man of faith lives and thinks and acts as though he saw him. Christ is unseen now by the bodily eye, and he acts as though Christ's eye were on him. The Spirit is unseen. Heaven is unseen, and he lives as though its glories were in front of him. If all of it were visible to the naked eye, the way it is to the eye of faith, nobody would doubt that it was right to live with it in mind. What governs a man is not his sight of a thing but his faith in it.
The sight withheld is the full one. There is something of sight in faith already — a glimpse of what is unseen and eternal — though only the way a thing looks through clouded glass. What stands in for sight now is testimony. God has given his word for these things, and his word cannot be doubted; and to make it more convincing still he gives the earnest of his Spirit, a foretaste of the glory. An earnest is part of the payment and secures the rest of the payment, a sure proof that what was promised is coming. And taking God at his word is not an unreasonable way to be sure of a thing. There are many ways of being convinced that a thing is real besides seeing it, and acting on reason, or on judgment, or on strong confidence may be every bit as rational as acting on sight.
The people of this world are moved by the things that are seen. They live for money, for standing, for show, for praise, for whatever this world can put in front of them, as though there were nothing else. And yet every man alive is moved by something he has not seen. They hope for things still in the future. They reach after a happiness they have never laid eyes on. They work for honour and money that are years off. They go without, and labour, and cross oceans and deserts, and breathe air thick with disease, to get hold of what they have never seen. So a man who walks by faith is not the only one walking toward something he cannot see. Everybody is.
The difference is not in the walking. It is in what each of them has been promised. The money and the standing have no guarantor: nobody who could actually hand them over has promised them to anybody, and nobody has given a man his word that his life will last long enough to collect. He may be cut off in a moment with all his plans unfinished; or miss it outright; or get the thing at last and find it is a disappointment, nothing like the pleasure he had expected of it. The other man has been promised — which is exactly what the money and the standing never were. He has three things: the promise of life; the assurance that a sudden death cannot rob him of it; and the assurance that once he has it, he will not sicken of it, or tire of it, or watch it decay, but will find it answers everything the soul expected of it, and lasts. If men will cross a desert for what they have never seen, there is nothing strange in bearing the same labour for something unseen that cannot decay.
The tent still comes down. What a man has in view at the end of the journey is not merely heaven but the Lord himself; without him, heaven would be no home and no rest for a soul whose desires never come to an end. So the man crossing a desert for a fortune and the man Paul is describing are doing the same thing: walking toward a country neither of them will see before he arrives in it. Either of them may be cut off in a moment. Only one of them was walking by faith, and if he is taken he is not carried away from what he was walking toward; he is carried into it. And what he is leaning on is not the strength of his own walking. It is a promise God made to Christ from everlasting: that all his own people, everyone who comes to believe in him, should be with him. That is what waits at the end of the road: "an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," and "to be present with the Lord."
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, B. W. Johnson and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made