More Than We Can See

Psalm 16 reminds us that God's purposes and His pleasures are eternal:
9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; My flesh also will rest in hope.

10 For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
11 You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

As Annie Herring related in a song from a number of years ago, we are earthbound - the apostle Paul said that we groan while we are in this body.   We live in a world that is governed by our senses, and we are sometimes held in bondage by our limited human emotions and understanding.   But God wants to take us into His realm, life without limits, where we walk by faith and not by sight, where we can experience His presence daily, to understand truth according to His Spirit and to live in a state of dependence on Him.

2nd Corinthians 4 reminds us that we walk by faith and not by sight, and that God calls us to see beyond the finite things of earth and experience the infinite realm of the supernatural:
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.
17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,
18 while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

For movie buffs, Wednesday could have been a rather notable day...a picture made the rounds on social media that June 27, 2012 was the date that Marty McFly and Professor Brown travelled to into the future in the 2nd installment of "Back to the Future" - in episode one, they travelled in the reconstituted DeLorean from 1985 to 1955. So, in episode 2, they went to...2012, right? Wrong. Watch the clip on YouTube - it was 2015. Somebody with too much time on his or her hands photoshopped a picture to indicate the incorrect date.   This incident illustrates how things are not always the way they appear.

Bulgarian archeologists announced two years ago they had found the bones of John the Baptist.  Tom
Higham, an Oxford University scientist and an atheist who, according to the CNN Belief Blog, doesn't believe in "any kind of religion or God or anything like that," was asked to test six small bone fragments found on an island named Sveti Ivan - St. John.

The bones turned out to be from a man who lived in the Middle East at the same time as Jesus.   Higham said that they had a date right in the middle of the first century.  Now, this is not proof that the bones belonged to John the Baptist, since there's no DNA database of early Christian saints, but it does present compelling evidence.   But, they could be the bones of John.

But, our faith is not predicated on whether or not these are the remains of John the Baptist.  Our faith is based on the authenticity of the word of God, His inspired, infallible, written testimony which reported the activities of John and his relationship to Jesus.   I think of Dr. Gary Habermas, who shared on this program and in a recent conference.  He discussed and displayed a replica of the Shroud of Turin, which is believed by some, not necessarily him, to be the burial cloths of Jesus.  But our belief in the resurrection is not based on whether or not Jesus was buried in the Shroud, it's based on the fact that He was buried and the tomb is empty.

Jesus cautioned about living only according to what we can see.   There is a vast unseen realm that is actually more real than what we experience here on earth.   It's the realm of the Creator, rather than just the creation.  He calls us to look beyond our senses and to embrace the Holy Spirit and gain a sense of His presence and His work in our lives.   As Jesus said to Thomas in John 20:29, "...because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."