Coping with Uncertainty: Seeing with Eyes of Faith

We are living in uncertain times, and this can foster anxiety, fear, and despair. Throughout this pandemic, many of our plans for the foreseeable future have been put on hold, revised, or cancelled. Plans for vacations or weddings, for instance, have been changed in the blink of an eye. Businesses and schools have closed, reopened, and closed again. Surgeries have been postponed. It turns out that all kinds of worldly plans for the future are simply not reliable. It turns out that we can’t see into the future to observe the next hour, let alone the next days or weeks. But the book of Hebrews wants to show us that faith gives us another kind of sight – another kind of insight into the days to come—that is entirely reliable and trustworthy.

Hebrews 11 teaches that when we use our “eyes of faith”, we look into future events and places that are in fact certain and unchanging. As Hebrews 11:1 teaches us, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (emphasis added).” Faith is based upon the assurances that God has made to us in His Word about the future—things that are real, substantial, and reliable. Abraham is an example of someone who had “eyes of faith”. Hebrews 11:8 explains that, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.” Abraham left his home, his kindred, his wider family, and all that he had ever known. And he went to a place of which he knew nothing. How could Abraham and Sarah cope with such uncertainty? Amazingly, it was because they were looking beyond their next stop on the journey to something far greater – something they could only see with eyes of faith. Verses 9-10 explain, “By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land…For [and here’s why he did it] he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”

Did you catch that? Abraham headed into deep uncertainty believing that beyond his immediate destination in the physical realm, there was an eternal homeland prepared for him. Beyond any city that might be built in Canaan, the Lord had prepared a greater city: Zion above. Abraham wasn’t alone in seeking an eternal homeland. Verse 13 references others like Abel, Enoch, Noah and points out they “all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on earth.” These heroes of the faith were “seeking a homeland” (verse 14) and desired “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (verse 16). Best of all, “God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.’ (verse 16)

So how do we navigate our ever-changing earthly circumstances with “eyes of faith”? According to Hebrews 11, part of the answer is to seek God’s homeland above. This is what Gods wants—hearts burning with a passion for future things, on fire for kingdom realities that are out of this world. As we use our eyes of faith and look through the spectacles of the Word of God, our grip on earthly preoccupations like vacations, career advancement, real estate, etc. loosens. If we allow them, the uncertainties associated with Covid-19 can obliterate our preoccupation with earthly things. We have been woken up from our spiritual slumber. And once heaven has our attention, earth’s pleasures begin to pale in comparison.

Today, in the midst of your earthly uncertainties, fix your eyes on the city to come—the New Jerusalem. As you seek this homeland above, a fresh peace, hope and joy will fill your soul. In his classic hymn, “It is Well with My Soul”, Horatio Spafford opens our “eyes of faith” with these lyrics: “And Lord, haste the day when the faith shall be sight. The clouds be rolled back as a scroll; The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend, A song in the night, oh my soul.”