Faith is Substance III

The Hebrew language has no future tense. Merely past and present tenses and those constitute the realm in which faith operates. Faith is acknowledging what is. I was forgiven in Christ and every moment I am forgiven in Christ by His precious blood which He shed for me. Forgiveness is not something that belongs to the future. It has happened and that is substance. To take it a step further I can say that like Jesus I am tempted in every possible way, but in every moment found without sin because His Spirit of goodness lives in me and God delights in everything that proceeds from Him. William Law so eloquently wrote: “For God can delight in nothing but His own will, and His own Spirit, because all goodness is included in it, and can be nowhere else.” And His will and His Spirit are found in every man who is born again from above.

It is by that same faith I acknowledge that the serpent’s head is already crushed in me. The bruiser of the serpent lives in me. The devil has thus nothing in me and, moreover, finds nothing in me! One of the enemy’s favorite tactics is to divert our attention to the future and hence convince us about something that might perhaps take place depending on some obscure conditions we have to fulfill. But God speaks only in past and present tense. The word plainly informs that we are blessed with every blessing in the heavenly realm. Faith as substance does not relate to the future and cannot relate to the future, because the future isn’t here yet.

Substance is something that already has taken place and which is here and now. Faith as substance leans solely on “the Goodness of God breaking forth into a Desire to communicate Good, which was the Cause and the Beginning of the Creation. Hence it follows, that to all Eternity, God can have no Thought, or Intent towards the Creature, but to communicate Good; because he made the Creature for this sole End, to receive Good” (William Law). Like the sun can nothing but shine and give its blessings of light to every creature God can nothing but bless His creation.

David’s blessing as recounted in Romans 4 reads: “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” It reads in Hebrew: “O the happiness of him whose transgression ‘is’ forgiven, Whose sin is covered. O the happiness of a man, To whom Jehovah imputeth not iniquity, And in whose spirit there is no deceit.” (Psalm 32:1-2 Young’s Literal Translation.) (No future tense used here) In our translation we read: “Blessed is the man against whom the Lord WILL not count his sin.” “Will” is, however, future tense! But there is no substance in the future tense! If you put your confidence in the future Jesus says: “According to your faith let it be unto you.” There is no substance in such a belief and what you have will be taken from you as it never existed. But those who rely on what is, they have, and more will be given unto them.

Another of the devil’s subtle ways is to accuse us of being have-nots and in every such instance prove His charges by alluding to appearances viz. what we see, feel and experience. But faith doesn’t operate in the land of appearances. It requires no faith to be in the wilderness. Faith moves, lives and has its being in the Promised Land where everything is because God says it is and because He has promised it is so and because every promise is fulfilled and effected in Jesus Christ.

Substance states that heaven already is among us. In Jesus we were before the foundation of the earth included in the triune fellowship. From God’s perspective that has forever and ever been a settled fact, but what already is was manifested and effected through the cross, and consequently it was His great delight to reveal His Son to me and ultimately in me so that His life could be efficacious in me as me. Without receiving His life I walk in death, but His life in me is my guarantee that I walk as He walks.

Our Father’s name also demonstrates the principle of faith, because it is a faith name; ‘I am that I am’ shouts that everything that is in God himself is boundless, incapable of any increase or diminution, without beginning, and without end. The ascended Jesus says in the book of Revelation: “I will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” You are given the same name as God, that is, ‘I am’, but since it is a faith name it is received through faith and it is known in faith. It is known in the similitude of how Abraham knew Sara when they conceived the child of promise.