CHILDREN IN WHOM IS NO FAITH

"Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Faith has nothing to do with a nice feeling you have about a seemingly good idea you dreamed up on your own, or heard from someone else, who seemed like a really sincere person. It also has nothing to do with what you think you used to know about the word of God, but you eventually let slip away from you. You might have some sort of belief, but not necessarily have the faith of God

Deuteronomy 32:18-20
Of the Rock that birthed you, you are unmindful, and you have forgotten God that formed you.And when the LORD saw it, he abhorred them, because of the provoking of his sons, and of his daughters. And he said, I will hide my face from them; I will see what their end shall be: for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith.

The very first use of a word translated as faith in the Old Testament is here presented to us in what is called the Via Negativa, which is a Latin term, meaning “The Negative Way”. It is the use of a negative statement as a teaching device to demonstrate a positive truth by showing the difference through dramatic contrast. A positive statement would simply tell us the benefits of having, exercising, and maintaining faith in our lives, but the negative statement used in this passage shows us the dark side of what happens to those who neglect or abandon faith. It is equally important to recognize the consequences of doubt and unbelief, which then makes the pursuit, not only of faith, but of sound faith, a thing to be desired. In the Garden of Eden, there was no active faith being required of Adam and Eve to believe God for what they had never experienced before, but rather simply to maintain a passive trust, in lieu of faith, concerning what was forbidden to them. Adam and Eve were already abiding in the full benefit of God’s blessings, never having experienced less, and therefore had no “knowledge of good and evil”. In the scriptures leading into our subject, Israel has experienced God’s miraculous blessings in the Wilderness for forty years, while transitioning into a completely new generation, also not being required to exercise personal faith for any of their blessings. So God now calls Israel by the endearment Jeshurun, meaning “one expected to go straight on”: as continuing in the reality of that blessedness, fully recognizing the source; only they become a disappointment, and forget the true source of their blessings. It is not enough for us to espouse some nebulous and personally contrived beliefs, but our faith must be “rooted and grounded” in the specific promises of a definitive source, which is to say (Romans 10:17), “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God”, or we really have nothing more than presumption. Jeshurun, or Israel, is still at this point under the original blessing of Jehovah God, but have redirected what ought to be an abiding faith, into the worship of other completely false and strange gods. Are you giving credit for any of your own blessings to the wrong source?

15But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: you are waxen fat, you have grown thick, you are covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation. 16They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominations they provoked him to anger. 17They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not.

There are two problems being set forth and addressed here. They have not only forsaken the God who created them, but also the Rock of their salvation. We are all created and initially blessed by God, “who makes the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust”, but God has also chosen Israel for his redemption. They are being blessed apart from the other nations, no longer under the curse of the law. Romans tells us, concerning all men, In the day of their visitation, when they knew God, the Creator, they did not glorify Him as God, but rather became vain in their imaginations, worshipping false gods, fashioned after created things.

In the wilderness they left behind the Egyptian gods, but no sooner do they enter Canaan, the Promised Land, than they begin to adopt and worship those new gods.

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