Mark 8:11-13
People
are always wanting proof. They want 100%, irrefutable proof of the Gospel message.
They want proof that the Bible is true. They want proof that God exists. They
want proof of Hell. And they want 100% proof. Ninety nine percent won’t due.
And
yet we live life in a less than 100% world. Every day we wake to a world where
decisions are made without absolute proof. We sleep in houses believing we are
safe, even though people are killed in houses every year. Earthquakes,
tornados, violence. We get in our cars believing that the homicidal people are
not driving toward us and ready to swerve and kill us. We walk into buildings
and trust the architect and engineers and contractors and code enforcement
officials to have all done their jobs perfectly, making this building safe.
We
live and act every day trusting other people. We even trust ourselves. We trust
our memories, that we turned off the coffee pot before we left home, that we
dropped the infant at the baby sitters, that the expiration date is after the
date we eat the food.
The
reality is that we live in a world of possibilities and not certainties.
Remember, trust is faith in action. So every time we trust someone or
something, we are exercising faith. Trying to make our world 100% leads to OCD
and Agoraphobia. We either become so compulsive, trying to control our world,
make it 100% safe, or we hide away believing the inside world is somehow safer
and more controllable.
Our
text tells of one set of Jesus’ contemporaries asking Jesus to make their world
100%. They want proof that what He is saying is true. They of course were
asking with ulterior motives. They had already determined to kill Jesus because
of the threat He posed to their way of life, to their power base. The numerous
signs that Jesus had already done were not enough to convince these religious
leaders. People who rely on miracle, on signs of God’s existence, in order to
believe, will never have enough. They will always want one more sign.
Signs
don’t prove it, make your world 100%. This world will never be 100%. It will
always take faith. Even Evolutionists have faith that someday someone will find
the ‘missing link’, or even one transition fossil. You would think with the
innumerable numbers of transitions that had to have taken place for Evolution
to be true, that all you would find in the fossil record would be transitions. They
would be tripping over partial this and that. But this is exactly the opposite
of what we find. We find the exact same fossils covering the globe.
At
what percentage are you willing to trust? We would all like 100%, but that is
not life.