Mistaking Presumption for Faith

There is no personal duty more positive or more unqualified than the duty of faith. “Have faith in God” is a command as explicit, and of as universal application, as “Thou shalt not steal.” Nor is there any danger of too great a reliance on faith. “The just shall live by his faith;” and no child of God has come to the standard of his full duty and of his full privileges as a child of God, until he can say in all sincerity and heartiness, “That life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.”

It is both right and safe to have faith in God, for his guidance and help in our every emergency of life, and also in our more ordinary experiences of daily living; in our toilings and in our trials, in our Prayer

business and in our recreations, in our health and in our sickness; and for our - loved ones as well as for ourselves. We cannot trust God too implicitly. We ought to trust him absolutely and in perfect restfulness.

But while there is no danger of too much faith in God, there is a danger of wrong substitutes for faith. Faith is a well-grounded trust in a trustworthy person; faith in God isa restful trust in the loving and wise and all-powerful God as our Father in heaven, whose word to us is not to be doubted, and whose watchful care of us will never fail.

Faith goes beyond sight, and in its truest exercise it begins where knowledge ends. Faith does not decide for itself what it must have, but it leaves with God the decision of the desired supply, even while it makes known its desire to God. To claim unqualifiedly beyond the limits of knowledge, or to refuse God’s proffered help in one line because of a preference for Presumption not Fattb

God’s help in another line, is not faith, but presumption; and presumption is very often mistaken for faith.

He who is our Example, as well as our Saviour, gave in his personal experiences illustration and emphasis to this truth that presumption is not faith, and that true faith does not presume. When Jesus struggled with the prince of this world in Gethsemane, he would not choose for himself whether or not he should have relief in his physical needs, but his submissive cry was, again and again, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” An unqualified choice on his part, in that hour, would have been presumption; but he had faith, and did not presume.

When, yet earlier, Jesus was on the pinnacle of the temple at Jerusalem, there were two ways of descent from that lofty height: one was by the human agency of winding stairs; the other was over the parapet, through the empty air, borne up by God-sent angel arms. It was the arch-Prayer

enemy of mankind who then and there whispered that faith in God would be shown by rejecting the human agency of the temple stairs, and trusting to the sustaining power of the angels. The very Bible text which would justify this exercise of faith was pointed out by the tempter:

“He shall give his angels charge concerning thee:

And on their hands they shall bear thee up,

Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone.” But Jesus said that to refuse the help of the available stairs would be presumption, and not faith, and that it would be in violation of the command, “Thou shalt not tempt [or improperly put to the test] the Lord thy God” — by multiplying dangers unnecessarily, in order to have an added supply against those dangers. Thus in the example of our Lord, as in all the precepts of the Bible record, the truth stands out that presumption is not faith, and that true faith does not presume.

In many ways the danger of confounding faith with presumption shows itself in 72

Presumption not Faith

the experiences of poorly instructed or seriously mistaken Christian disciples. To claim the right to expect from God health, or wealth, or honor, or more influence, or more friends, or more appreciation from one’s fellows, even though the thing prayed for be desired that it may be used for God’s glory and for the welfare of his creatures, is presumption, and not true faith. Sickness may .be a means of greater good than health; poverty, a richer gift than wealth; obscurity, an advantage over prominence; loneliness, a better training than social privileges. God knows as to this. A child of God may properly ask for what seems to him to be preferable in such a matter, but if he does not leave the decision with God, instead of assuming that the best thing, for him or for others, is certain to be just that which the petitioner designates in his prayer, he is presumptuous,: To take the matter of health or sickness as an illustration. It is evident that some in

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of the richest blessings which God gives to his loved ones are during and by means of sickness; and the delay of healing is often the sign of God’s loving providence, and not a token of Satan’s control. There are promises of God which can have their fulfilment only in the hours of sickness. “The Lord will support him upon the couch of languishing:

Thou makest all his bed in his sickness.”’ How can these be made good if a couch of languishing and a bed of sickness be no place for a child of God in his life-struggle? What presumption it would be to claim that God must lift us instantly from the couch of languishing, and that he ought not to continue us on a bed of sickness!

See how it was in the course of the father of the peculiar people of God under the old dispensation. So long as Jacob stood in ruddy health, he was a scheming supplanter. It was not until he was touched by the finger of God so that he became a cripple for life that he stood erect Presumption not Faith

as Israel,a prince of God. Jacob never walked straight until he limped.

When again God would prepare for himself a spiritual father of the outside nations, he fitted Paul for his new work by giving him a stake in the flesh, — “a messenger of Satan” it was, but a messenger which was now set at God’s work, by the will of God, — in order that the infirm apostle might do a better work than a well man could do. And when Paul besought the Lord thrice that he might be of sound body again, he was told explicitly that it was in just such a state as that in which he then found himself that God’s power could be best displayed. And from that day until the present, some of the best work in the Lord’s cause has been done by the sick, and God has been honored and glorified rather by those who were in combat with disease, than by those in the possession of bounding health — free from all physical conflict, and from the benefits which successful conflict brings.

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It is true that disease is a consequence of sin, that sickness is in the world because sin-is in the world, but it is not true that sickness or bodily infirmity is always a specific result of sinning. Our Lord rebuked that notion among his earlier disciples, as he would also rebuke it among misguided Christians to-day. “Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?” was their question to him on one occasion. “Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents [as a cause of this infirmity]: but [this man became blind] that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

The works of God, in his sustaining grace and in his transforming power, are very often shown in the lives of the blind and the deaf and the. bed-ridden, and the patient wrestlers with disease, as those works of God could be shown in no other way; even as, also, the “poor as to the world” are often chosen of God “to be rich in faith,” to the honor of God, and to Presumption not Faitb

the confounding of those who trust in their earthly riches. For men and women in buxom health to claim that they are blessed of God above their sick fellows, mainly because of their fulness of health, is no less presumptuous than it would be for a company of Christian millionaires to parade themselves with labels of their aggregate bank credits, and with the boastful legend, “See whom the Lord loves.” In the struggle with disease, as in the struggle with poverty, God’s appointed means are to be used with all wisdom and diligence, and are to be used in faith. To refuse to employ available human means in an hour of human need, and to ask God’s help while neglecting them, is in itself presumption. The prompting to refuse these God-provided aids is a temptation of Satan. To yield to such a temptation is more than a culpable weakness; it is an immorality. When the Lord would miraculously heal King Hezekiah of his sickness, in response to his importunate prayer, he directed that 77

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human means should be employed for his recovery from the disease. A poultice of figs — which to this day even in our country is often used in such a case in preference to bread and milk, or flaxseed — was applied to the malignant boil, and God’s promise was given that in three days — not instantly, but in three days — the fig-poulticed patient should be able to go out to church, When, again, Paul found that he must continue to battle sickness, although he would have liked to have health, he obtained as a traveling companion a beloved physician; and it is even possible that it was on this physician’s suggestion that Paul wrote that famous prescription for the stomach’s sake and the often infirmities of young Timothy.

When James counseled the calling in of the elders of the church to pray over a sick person, he added the caution that they should not neglect the use of oil, which was the commonest medicine in all the East then as now. “Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of Presumption not Faith

the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick, and the Lord shall raise ’ him up;” that is, the Lord shall raise him up in response to the prayer of faith in connection with the use of oil.

The word here rendered “anointing” is aleipsantes, oiling, or smearing, the skin, as is done after bathing; it is not chrzo, the word which designates the sacramental anointing. To smear, or anoint, the body with olive oil, cool or warm, is the commonest native treatment for bodily disorders in Syria and Egypt. Prominence is given to this treatment in the “Memoirs Relative to Egypt, during the Campaigns of Bonaparte,” in a paper “On the Use of Oil in the Plague,” by Citizen Desgenettes, chief physician to the army in the East.

In all sickness, as well as in all times of health, faith in God is more to be relied on than any human agency; but faith never decides for God in a matter which is clearly beyond human knowledge; nor will faith ever tempt God by refusing to Prayer

employ gratefully the means of help which —

God has already placed within its reach.

It may be best for us, or for our loved ones, to continue in sickness; if so, let us learn, in whatsoever state we are, by the will of God, therein to be content. It may be that God will grant our faith-filled prayer for restored health, to ourselves or to those dear to us; if so, let us use faithfully the means which tend to restoration; for James, who knew as much about the right use of faith and its wrong use as any of the Bible writers, declares explicitly that “faith without works is dead;” and a dead faith is only another name for presumption. To mistake presumption for faith is a sad mistake.

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