How Shall the Just Live?

"Now the just shall live by faith..." Hebrews 10:38a

Let me start by making one thing very clear: WE are the just, both in regards to being ones who are just (Micah 6:8) and ones who are justified (Romans 5:9). This verse is our reality, NOT a command: "shall live," i.e., we have no choice in the matter; if we want to truly live, than living must be done by faith. Anything else other than faith will (as Oswald Chambers puts it) "work the death sentence" in you. There is no other way to go about it.
So then the real question is, "HOW do you live by faith?" Please. As good Christians of the late 20th, early 21st centuries, fed on sound doctrine whilst we sit upon plush pews, we should know what "living by faith" means. This theme is always shouted from pulpits: "But I tell you, BRUDDERS (stress the 'br' part), you must live by FAITHUH! (and put some power in the 'uh')" Dear me, "Living by Faith" is a hymn for goodness sake! We should know this subject backwards and forwards.

Ask yourself, though: WHAT does "living by faith" mean? Better yet, ask yourself a more fundamental question: what IS faith? Is it believing, though you don't see or know what is going to happen? Is it a kind of "spiritual grit," an endurance of sorts? Is it the attitude of, "Things look grim and you don't know what's going to happen, but just buckle down and go for broke"? No, not even close. That is hope disguised as faith, and faith and hope are two VERY different things (more on that later) Truly, if we want to know what faith IS (and subsequently, know how to live by it), we must look to the expert and His best selling book:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Here is the answer, in all its anticlimactic beauty. It is yet another over done passage in the Bible that gets memorized and preached until it becomes another horse beaten to death and then beaten some more for good measure. We THINK we know what that verse means. Look at it again...what in the world is that saying?

"The substance of things hoped for..." Here is the difference between faith and hope: faith gives hope substance, i.e., the things we only hoped for are realized with faith.
Let me give an example: suppose we are in a country at war with a vast enemy. They are stronger than us and are winning. If I were to say, "I hope we win," I speaking as a man who cannot know or see, i.e., I don't know if we will win because I can see neither victory nor the mechanisms by which victory will come about. Hope, in a sense, is empty: it has NO SUBSTANCE. Faith is what "substances" it, makes it REAL. Faith is the realization of the hoped for. A man in our supposed war who has hope would say, "I hope we will win." The man who has faith says, "I KNOW we will win," because the hoped for (i.e., victory) is now made REAL. If I may use an example from The Matrix: hope says, "I hope you're right," while faith says, "I do not believe it is a matter of hope. I believe it is a matter of time." Hope is not knowing because we cannot see; Faith is knowing inspite of our being unable to see.

"The evidence of things not seen..." Evidence is what convinces, what brings about conviction. Again, we have a separation between hope and faith. Hope does not convince or convict; a jury would be useless if their verdicts in the end said, "We hope this is correct." Jurys cannot hope in order to make a decision; they must know. But how can they know what to decide? Jurys do not see the crimes; crimes are unseen things to them. They need evidence to convince them.
Faith is the evidence that convinces us of "things not seen," i.e., God, Who He is (the source of love, joy, peace, beauty, wisdom, courage, justice, and just about every virtue known or unknown), the Trinity, the creation of the world, Jesus Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection, the objective reality of redemption, etc. These are all unseen things; they are only made real to us and we are only convinced of them by faith, i.e., the realization and conviction of the unseen.

If that is what faith is, then where does it come from? "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." (Romans 10:17) This is the power of Hebrews 4:12, and the mystery of coming in contact with God. The Word is the conduit in our lives of the living reality of God; by it we have the way to contact with Truth, Reality, Source, Primacy, i.e., GOD. The mystery comes in that you cannot believe God unless you have faith, but you cannot have faith unless God touches you. This is the mystery, this is the paradox.

I'll let Oswald Chambers weigh in: "Common sense is not faith, and faith is not common sense; they stand in the relation of the natural and the spiritual; of impulse and inspiration. Nothing Jesus Christ ever said is common sense, it is revelation sense, and it reaches the shores where common sense fails."
This is the conundrum of being unable to "prove" unseen things to another human being. We cannot; faith proves it to us, not others. Faith is an experience, an inspiration, a revelation, "a touch of madness," contact with Reality, communion with God. Perhaps faith is the greatest proof in the reality of God because only by God could faith exist.

How shall the just live? By faith. What is faith? The realization and conviction of the unseen, i.e., KNOWING that these things ARE and that they MATTER (see Hebrews 11:6). And where does faith come from, i.e., how do we KNOW? By communion with God.
So how then shall we live? The just shall live by communion with God and nothing else.

Wow.