Trust While You Can

“While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light. These things spake Jesus, and departed, and did hide himself from them.” (Joh 12:36 AV)

The context here is salvation.  The challenge from Jesus to the multitude is the light by which they may come to Him will not last forever.  They have a limited opportunity in which to accept by faith that He is their Messiah and has come to save them from their sins.  If they continue to back up on light, a heart of hardness and unbelief will become unreachable.  To further emphasize His point, the light of which He speaks is His earthly ministry.  While they have the presence of the Messiah, they must take advantage of Him and trust Him.  Otherwise, when He ascends, there may not remain another opportunity.  This principle of moving up on light is a common one.  One of the most vivid to me is when the children of Israel were asked to trust the LORD and they rejected Him by believing the ten bad spies instead of the two good ones.  This cost them a generation and forty years of wandering in the wilderness.  God gives opportunity to trust Him.  But this opportunity is not necessarily open-ended.  There may very well be time limitations on His offer of faith.

One of my sons was not all that adventurous when it came to amusement park rides.  In particular, the roller coaster.  His two brothers, however, loved the thrill.  Our little family would go from one park to another and it would always be the same.  When it came to the roller coasters, two would board while the other would get a cotton candy with his mother.  We would go to Sea Breeze while living in the Rochester, NY area.  Only a couple of roller coasters there.  Not a chance.  Then there was Fantasy Island near Niagara Falls.  Nope.  Ain’t gonna happen.  Then we moved to the Chicago area and there is a Six Flags there.  His birthday was coming up so we bribed him.  We told him that if he would ride the ride with his brothers, we would get him a Game Cube for his birthday.  His two brothers, knowing how much that game system would benefit them, were relentless.  We must have walked by that roller coaster several times.  The other two rode it a couple of times just to prove their brother would not die.  Ride after ride, just as many people who got on, got off.  It was time to place a little faith in parents and siblings and take the plunge.  As we were nearing the roller coaster one last time, we made it clear there were no more chances.  If he didn’t ride it this time, no Game Cube.  His brother dragged him to the line.  It was rather entertaining to watch his two brothers convince him everything was going to be alright while they stood in line for about twenty minutes.  That had to be the longest twenty minutes of his entire life.  I couldn’t believe his brothers could come up with twenty minutes of conversation and argument to get him on that coaster.  But they did.  On he went and he survived.  When there was an opportunity to trust, he decided to do just that.  I think that was the turning point in his life.  He learned to trust God with his fears and apprehensions.  Today, he is a foreign missionary in a place that is not easy to be in.

God gives us countless opportunities to trust Him.  Each time is something a little bit more.  The level of trust He offered at our spiritual birth is nothing compared to what we might face much later in life.  These opportunities, however difficult, might just be time-sensitive.  The Jewish nation only had three years to place their faith in the Messiah they saw.  After three years, there was faith by word only.  There was an opportunity that would not come again for thousands of years.  If we do not learn to trust the LORD when it is easy, it will be much harder to do so down the road.  They saw Him by faith.  When He ascended, now they could not trust Him by sight.  Faith became harder and not easier.  The first time Israel was given the opportunity to enter Canaan, it was from the south.  A direct route into the promised land with adversaries in a measured confrontation.  The second time, they had to enter by way of a parted Jordan River and circumcision.  The second time was a much bigger step of faith.  It would behoove us to take the easiest steps while we have them and trust the LORD each step of the way.  Maybe then our leap won’t be so great.