Javascript lacks some string manipulation functions that might be handy when trying to output a date as two digits.
I was trying to format a date as "YYYY-MM-DD" and discovered that there is no equivalent of right$ in Javascript. So I did it this way:
var day=new Date();
day>9 ? day.toString() : "0"+day;
If it matters, here is the code to render the date, making sure that days before the 10th and months before October include the leading zero character:
var now = new Date();
var month = now.getMonth()+1;
var day = now.getDate();
document.getElementById('date').value=now.getFullYear()+"-"+
(month > 9 ? month : "0" + month) + "-" +
(day > 9 ? day : "0" + day);
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Why the Republicans are doomed
Bobo was an unfortunate child, born to unfortunate parents and given an unfortunate nickname. Because his parent's union was brief, and because they had little to contribute intellectually, he was raised mostly by the community. His body was not exactly deformed, but each feature tended towards the ugly side of normal.
What he lacked in brains, he more than made up for with hard work. Bobo lived with a traveling circus, a throwback to bygone days. He was up early, feeding the animals, cleaning up the grounds, and generally helping out wherever there was manual labor to be done.
He loved the elephants. He envied the handlers and their close relationship with the mostly gentle giants. For 50 years, he tended the elephants, carrying water for them to drink, and making sure that there was adequate straw.
One day, the ringmaster fell ill and died. The troupe that Bobo lived with was a close-knit group, and after a few generations had become somewhat inbred. This of course contributed to the posters that said "Bobo for Ringmaster! Vote Bobo!"
It was the accepted wisdom of the group that Bobo would be anointed as Ringmaster. After all, he had spent most of his life carrying water to the elephant. And of course, the common wisdom prevailed, and Bobo became the Ringmaster.
You can guess what happened next. Bobo had no Ringmaster skills. He couldn't schedule performances, he could not reconcile the differences between performers. He could not even make that snapping noise with his inherited whip. Performances suffered, ticket revenue plummeted, and one by one, the various performers packed up their trailers and went looking for another troupe to join.
The Republican party should not be a meritocracy. Leadership skills are not learned by endurance, but by experience. If you show up to every caucus, every convention, every lit drop, and every fund raiser, all that it proves is that you know how to work. Leading is not the same thing - that's why business is divided into management and labor. Each must bloom where they are planted.
I am a Republican, and I want it known that endorsing a candidate based on their ability to carry water to the elephant (a clever euphemism for supporting the party) is simply a dumb, inbred idea. It is group-think run amok.
In 1994, the Republicans stood Washington on it's ear with the Contract with America. Riding the tide of disappointment with "It's the economy, stupid!" President Clinton, Republicans swept the House and held a majority for the first time in 40 years. They then proceeded to balance the budget, at least for a few years. Then, the Freshman class of the 104th Congress set about turning into Democrats.
Power corrupts. Eventually, the Republican majority lost their vision and their memory of what they had come to Washington to do. And then they lost their seats. We need to take back the House in order to save America from rampant progressivism. But we also need to remember that even the best Republicans don't stay conservative for long after they get a taste for opium (OPM, Other People's Money). Put them in, but then flush them out before they get worthless.
And above all, don't vote for Bobo. A long history of carrying water to the elephant is not a substitute for leadership, integrity, and brains. We don't need strong backs in Congress, we need wise heads. Find one and vote for it, no matter the gender or the race or the party of the body that it is attached to.
If you don't, then the Republican party - and all the rest of America, in fact - is doomed.
What he lacked in brains, he more than made up for with hard work. Bobo lived with a traveling circus, a throwback to bygone days. He was up early, feeding the animals, cleaning up the grounds, and generally helping out wherever there was manual labor to be done.
He loved the elephants. He envied the handlers and their close relationship with the mostly gentle giants. For 50 years, he tended the elephants, carrying water for them to drink, and making sure that there was adequate straw.
One day, the ringmaster fell ill and died. The troupe that Bobo lived with was a close-knit group, and after a few generations had become somewhat inbred. This of course contributed to the posters that said "Bobo for Ringmaster! Vote Bobo!"
It was the accepted wisdom of the group that Bobo would be anointed as Ringmaster. After all, he had spent most of his life carrying water to the elephant. And of course, the common wisdom prevailed, and Bobo became the Ringmaster.
You can guess what happened next. Bobo had no Ringmaster skills. He couldn't schedule performances, he could not reconcile the differences between performers. He could not even make that snapping noise with his inherited whip. Performances suffered, ticket revenue plummeted, and one by one, the various performers packed up their trailers and went looking for another troupe to join.
The Republican party should not be a meritocracy. Leadership skills are not learned by endurance, but by experience. If you show up to every caucus, every convention, every lit drop, and every fund raiser, all that it proves is that you know how to work. Leading is not the same thing - that's why business is divided into management and labor. Each must bloom where they are planted.
I am a Republican, and I want it known that endorsing a candidate based on their ability to carry water to the elephant (a clever euphemism for supporting the party) is simply a dumb, inbred idea. It is group-think run amok.
In 1994, the Republicans stood Washington on it's ear with the Contract with America. Riding the tide of disappointment with "It's the economy, stupid!" President Clinton, Republicans swept the House and held a majority for the first time in 40 years. They then proceeded to balance the budget, at least for a few years. Then, the Freshman class of the 104th Congress set about turning into Democrats.
Power corrupts. Eventually, the Republican majority lost their vision and their memory of what they had come to Washington to do. And then they lost their seats. We need to take back the House in order to save America from rampant progressivism. But we also need to remember that even the best Republicans don't stay conservative for long after they get a taste for opium (OPM, Other People's Money). Put them in, but then flush them out before they get worthless.
And above all, don't vote for Bobo. A long history of carrying water to the elephant is not a substitute for leadership, integrity, and brains. We don't need strong backs in Congress, we need wise heads. Find one and vote for it, no matter the gender or the race or the party of the body that it is attached to.
If you don't, then the Republican party - and all the rest of America, in fact - is doomed.
Monday, February 1, 2010
How about this for a new law...
I just read about a wealthy man who stopped making payments on his house. He is upside-down in his mortgage, so he simply stopped making payments and is living cost-free in the house until the bank forecloses. That's a minimum of 6 months, probably more like two years because of the foreclosure backlog.
Meanwhile, the US Taxpayer is bailing out his bank.
That means a wealthy man who can afford the monthly payments is taking money out of our pockets to pay for a very nice house. Somehow seems wrong, doesn't it?
When the bank loans me money, their first collateral is my good name. They know I will pay the payments in a timely manner because I have a good credit score and I have some integrity. I don't just bail on a loan and let other people pay my debts. The secondary collateral is the house, because if they were wrong about my good name, there is still something of value that they can take and redeem to protect their other investors, and the taxpayer who is the ultimate fail-safe for the bankers.
I'd like to propose a new law that makes it a federal crime for a person or corporation to stop making payments on a taxpayer-insured loan when the borrower can clearly afford to make the payments. Since the risk has been spread to all tax payers, robbing from all tax payers by failing to make an affordable payment is tantamount to theft by swindle, and should be punishable as such.
"Taxpayer insured loans" include anything handled by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or insured by AIG, or made through any other bank that received TARP funds, or any other loan that ultimately will hurt the taxpayers if there is a default.
For punishment, I would suggest 25 years in prison (adjusted for the remaining term on the loan), and confiscation of all unencumbered personal property. Sell the personal property at auction to help settle the mortgage debt. Since the debtor will be in prison for the foreseeable future, they won't need that big-screen TV anyhow.
For corporations defaulting on such debts (and they do it with distressing regularity), the government should dismantle and disband that corporation and jail it's board of directors and every executive above the level where the decision to screw the taxpayers was made. Put some teeth in the law; too long the rich and the powerful have stolen from the masses using the law and the government as a stooge. Oh, that hurts the other employees and the investors? Yes. The investors took an educated risk when they loaned money to the company. The employees will be sold along with the division that they worked for.
Think what this threat will do to corporate culture. Suddenly the middle manager who proposes screwing the bank or the taxpayer is a pariah, rather than a hero. Integrity will increase. There will be a personal motivation for every employee and every stockholder to encourage corporate ethics. How is this a bad thing?
Perhaps I am too harsh on people who default on their loans when they can make the payments. After all, it's not their fault that the housing market plummeted, right? No, it is not. But it's not my fault that my son had an emergency appendectomy last year... but I still had to cough up the three thousand dollars that my insurance did not cover. It's not my fault that Haiti had an earthquake, but my tax dollars and my personal charity are going there. It's not my fault that Katrina hit New Orleans, but I got to help pay for that mess, too.
Being responsible and grown up means that you get to pay for things that were not your fault. That's how we are; we spread the risk. I don't mind paying to help after natural disasters. I don't mind paying for the guy who cannot get a job. What I have a problem with is paying for the mortgage of the person who has the financial resources to pay, and who promised to pay, but then changed his mind while he could still afford the payments.
My hope in asking for this law is that it will never need to be enforced; that the threat of consequences will deter people and corporations from demanding that all of us taxpayers foot the bill for their greed and foolishness. I may be a little naive here; perhaps there are people who are willing to risk it all to screw the rest of us. For those people, perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should be involved.
Who is with me on this?
Meanwhile, the US Taxpayer is bailing out his bank.
That means a wealthy man who can afford the monthly payments is taking money out of our pockets to pay for a very nice house. Somehow seems wrong, doesn't it?
When the bank loans me money, their first collateral is my good name. They know I will pay the payments in a timely manner because I have a good credit score and I have some integrity. I don't just bail on a loan and let other people pay my debts. The secondary collateral is the house, because if they were wrong about my good name, there is still something of value that they can take and redeem to protect their other investors, and the taxpayer who is the ultimate fail-safe for the bankers.
I'd like to propose a new law that makes it a federal crime for a person or corporation to stop making payments on a taxpayer-insured loan when the borrower can clearly afford to make the payments. Since the risk has been spread to all tax payers, robbing from all tax payers by failing to make an affordable payment is tantamount to theft by swindle, and should be punishable as such.
"Taxpayer insured loans" include anything handled by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or insured by AIG, or made through any other bank that received TARP funds, or any other loan that ultimately will hurt the taxpayers if there is a default.
For punishment, I would suggest 25 years in prison (adjusted for the remaining term on the loan), and confiscation of all unencumbered personal property. Sell the personal property at auction to help settle the mortgage debt. Since the debtor will be in prison for the foreseeable future, they won't need that big-screen TV anyhow.
For corporations defaulting on such debts (and they do it with distressing regularity), the government should dismantle and disband that corporation and jail it's board of directors and every executive above the level where the decision to screw the taxpayers was made. Put some teeth in the law; too long the rich and the powerful have stolen from the masses using the law and the government as a stooge. Oh, that hurts the other employees and the investors? Yes. The investors took an educated risk when they loaned money to the company. The employees will be sold along with the division that they worked for.
Think what this threat will do to corporate culture. Suddenly the middle manager who proposes screwing the bank or the taxpayer is a pariah, rather than a hero. Integrity will increase. There will be a personal motivation for every employee and every stockholder to encourage corporate ethics. How is this a bad thing?
Perhaps I am too harsh on people who default on their loans when they can make the payments. After all, it's not their fault that the housing market plummeted, right? No, it is not. But it's not my fault that my son had an emergency appendectomy last year... but I still had to cough up the three thousand dollars that my insurance did not cover. It's not my fault that Haiti had an earthquake, but my tax dollars and my personal charity are going there. It's not my fault that Katrina hit New Orleans, but I got to help pay for that mess, too.
Being responsible and grown up means that you get to pay for things that were not your fault. That's how we are; we spread the risk. I don't mind paying to help after natural disasters. I don't mind paying for the guy who cannot get a job. What I have a problem with is paying for the mortgage of the person who has the financial resources to pay, and who promised to pay, but then changed his mind while he could still afford the payments.
My hope in asking for this law is that it will never need to be enforced; that the threat of consequences will deter people and corporations from demanding that all of us taxpayers foot the bill for their greed and foolishness. I may be a little naive here; perhaps there are people who are willing to risk it all to screw the rest of us. For those people, perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should be involved.
Who is with me on this?
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The secret of prosperity
I've run out of text from the book that I once tried to write; it's time to move on to do some real blogging (not the copy-and-paste variety).
Recently I have been perusing a 2007 edition of a 400-year-old translation of a 13th century copy of a 2000-year-old document, and in doing so, I stumbled across the secret of wealth. It is something that anyone can do, but few want to.
Everyone wants money, and everyone who has it wants more of it. Most of us feel that we don't have enough money, so we fall victim to this scam and that program. We send money in response to various advertisements that promise to reveal the secret of wealth. And we do so with the suspicion that the secret might start out "First, take out an ad that starts with How to get rich..." No, that's not the secret.
But in these ancient writings, I have found the awful secret. The secret to prosperity is something that we've been conditioned to avoid. I know people who shun the very appearance of this secret thing that can, in fact, make you rich.
One of the reasons that the United States of America is in serious trouble today is because so many people make it their life's mission to avoid doing the one thing that could make them wealthy. The government for years has rewarded millions of people for not doing this one thing that could make them wealthy.
It started in the 1930s, when a few farmers were paid cash bonuses for not doing this secret thing. In the 1960s this program was expanded to include people in the cities, and has since increased to the point where the government spent $577,000,000,000 dollars just in 2009 to keep people from taking advantage of the one thing that could make them truly wealthy.
$577 billion dollars was about 4% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product for 2009. That means that out of every dollar's worth of goods that you produced, four cents went into a program that helps people to avoid wealth! How incredibly stupid is that?
You've read far enough. It's time to reveal the age-old secret to wealth that people have been trying to avoid. I'm not asking you to send me money, I'm going to tell you the secret for free. Be advised, however, that the secret to wealth is a four-letter word. This is not for the faint of heart - but for the few who have studied and perfected it's techniques, the rewards have been stunning.
Bill Gates does it. Warren Buffet does it. The CEO of IBM got there by doing it. And you can do it too - if you are willing to put aside your very natural aversion to it. Most people who do it freely admit that they will only do it as long as they absolutely have to, and they look forward to the day when they won't have to do it any more. We pity the poor fools who become addicted to it, and vow never to become one of them. It really is that bad.
Ready?
Here it is.
The secret to prosperity is . . .
Work.
That's right; I said it. Right out loud (as I was typing). I'm not ashamed of it. I enjoy it. And I look forward to doing it for as long as I can.
In the New Living Translation, Proverbs 13:4 says "Lazy people want much but get little, but those who work hard will prosper"
There you have it - from God's word to your eyes - the secret to prosperity is work. There are no shortcuts. Now, close the browser and go do some of it. That's what I'm about to do.
Recently I have been perusing a 2007 edition of a 400-year-old translation of a 13th century copy of a 2000-year-old document, and in doing so, I stumbled across the secret of wealth. It is something that anyone can do, but few want to.
Everyone wants money, and everyone who has it wants more of it. Most of us feel that we don't have enough money, so we fall victim to this scam and that program. We send money in response to various advertisements that promise to reveal the secret of wealth. And we do so with the suspicion that the secret might start out "First, take out an ad that starts with How to get rich..." No, that's not the secret.
But in these ancient writings, I have found the awful secret. The secret to prosperity is something that we've been conditioned to avoid. I know people who shun the very appearance of this secret thing that can, in fact, make you rich.
One of the reasons that the United States of America is in serious trouble today is because so many people make it their life's mission to avoid doing the one thing that could make them wealthy. The government for years has rewarded millions of people for not doing this one thing that could make them wealthy.
It started in the 1930s, when a few farmers were paid cash bonuses for not doing this secret thing. In the 1960s this program was expanded to include people in the cities, and has since increased to the point where the government spent $577,000,000,000 dollars just in 2009 to keep people from taking advantage of the one thing that could make them truly wealthy.
$577 billion dollars was about 4% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product for 2009. That means that out of every dollar's worth of goods that you produced, four cents went into a program that helps people to avoid wealth! How incredibly stupid is that?
You've read far enough. It's time to reveal the age-old secret to wealth that people have been trying to avoid. I'm not asking you to send me money, I'm going to tell you the secret for free. Be advised, however, that the secret to wealth is a four-letter word. This is not for the faint of heart - but for the few who have studied and perfected it's techniques, the rewards have been stunning.
Bill Gates does it. Warren Buffet does it. The CEO of IBM got there by doing it. And you can do it too - if you are willing to put aside your very natural aversion to it. Most people who do it freely admit that they will only do it as long as they absolutely have to, and they look forward to the day when they won't have to do it any more. We pity the poor fools who become addicted to it, and vow never to become one of them. It really is that bad.
Ready?
Here it is.
The secret to prosperity is . . .
Work.
That's right; I said it. Right out loud (as I was typing). I'm not ashamed of it. I enjoy it. And I look forward to doing it for as long as I can.
In the New Living Translation, Proverbs 13:4 says "Lazy people want much but get little, but those who work hard will prosper"
There you have it - from God's word to your eyes - the secret to prosperity is work. There are no shortcuts. Now, close the browser and go do some of it. That's what I'm about to do.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The book, chapter 4
Why we believe
Belief and faith go hand in hand; they are both translated from the same Greek word. Which English word is used to translate πίστις is largely a matter of context. Even though the same Greek word is used, in English ‘Faith’ is something that we have; ‘Believe’ is something that we do.
So why do we do it?
Predicting the future
God has created our brains to perform calculations at a rate that defies measurement. One of the things that the brain is good at is predictive reasoning. This is what makes driving possible – if you could not predict the motion of the other cars at an intersection, there would be far more crunched fenders.
Early in life, we learn to associate “hot” and “pain” by experiencing the two in close proximity. Some people learned to connect these two ideas by having their hands slapped as they reached for the hot stove. Others learned by actually touching the stove.
Similarly, we learn to associate grief with loss, pleasure with sugar, and certain unruly behaviors with severe tongue-lashings. In time, we develop the ability to predict the outcome of an action without having to experience it directly. I remember a childhood friend describing sliding down a razor blade into a pool of lemon juice – even though I am positive that he never had such an experience. Yet both of us made the expected noises and I know I shudder still at the thought. I cannot honestly imagine the pain that might ensue, but I can draw from other painful experiences in my life and extrapolate what it might be like.
The forcefulness of the predictive image is directly related to the seriousness of the consequences. When I was about ten years old, my Dad took the family in our four-wheel-drive pickup truck up a just-barely road to see a marble quarry in Colorado. As my four year old brother raced on ahead to see this wonderful site, a lady grabbed him by the arm and halted his progress. She looked at my parents and explained, “There is a drop-off there with no guard rail, and a patch of ice right before it.”
When we got to the edge of the quarry, there was indeed about a 50-foot drop straight down to a solid stone floor. And there was a frozen puddle about ten feet across just at the rim of the quarry. To this day, I still shudder at what could have happened there that morning. In my mind’s eye, I can still see my brother’s green sweater and the white marble with red streaks through it, the black ice, and the long drop to the stone below. Even though no accident befell us, the predictive ability of the brain clearly saw a dire consequence and imprinted these images where they will not be forgotten.
When things do not work out as our brains predict, we look for another explanation so that we can refine the process of predicting the immediate future. For example, experience teaches us that the cost of the things we buy will continue to go up in relatively small increments. When we see a price drop, we need to know why. Sales and negotiated discounts are familiar explanations, so they are included in the model of reality that the brain uses to predict the future. There are some products that defy the trend, like consumer electronics. So we add a clause to the mental rule, saying that prices go up, except for sales, model year closeouts, and computers.
Eventually, we develop a highly refined sense of how the immediate future should look. Little surprises us, because we have vast experience and a million corrective clauses to adjust a thousand situational rules. You might even say that we have faith that the near future will look pretty much like our predictions. And, for the most part, we are right.
So believing is, in part, based on those sets of rules that we have constructed from years of experience. Are those rules set in stone?
No, they are always fluid, because we are always finding new ways to tweak the rules that we use to predict the future. So when something does not quite fit the pattern we have imagined, it is no big deal. We revise the rule and keep moving on. If something is dramatically different than our predictions, that causes a little pain, because we have to totally re-examine the rules and all the little corrective sub-rules that explain things.
Superstition and magic are things that humans have invented because someone built a bad set of predictive rules, and those rules were seriously violated. If you break a mirror and there follows a string of ‘bad luck’, it is sometimes easier to add a rule to your predictive model that says “If you break a mirror, you get seven year’s bad luck” than to consider that breaking a mirror is nothing more than breaking a mirror. And of course, having heard the old superstition repeated often enough, some of us start cataloging all the bad stuff that follows a broken mirror as proof of the theorem. It becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.
Superstition is reinforced by inaccurate score-keeping. By being selective about what we define as ‘bad luck,’ we choose to reinforce the superstition rather than weaken it. Mental discipline can use this tendency to move in the opposite direction. By an act of will, we can choose to define broken mirrors and black cat path-crossings as simply ignorant beliefs of the superstitious. Having done so, we can choose to see how much good luck follows a broken mirror, and further weaken the grip that the superstitions have on our predictive reasoning.
It is this mental discipline that is all too often lacking in today’s busy world. “If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. If you really make them think, they will hate you.” That quote is variously attributed to Paul Gaugin, Mark Twain, Don Marquis, Arthur Costa, Plato, and Aristotle. Whoever said it, it seems self-evident to me.
We love to think that we are thinking; it is the sort of bad score-keeping that allows us to believe that we are smarter than the average picnic basket. However, Paul reminded “…every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think…” (Romans 12:3). In context, Paul was speaking of getting puffed up about how much faith we have, rather than how much intelligence, but the same principle should apply.
Thinking can be hard work. It requires setting aside preconceived notions and telling that prediction engine to chill out and prepare to accept new information. This sort of thinking requires some uninterrupted time. When I am driving, my brain is furiously anticipating all the stupid moves that the other idiots on the road could make. I just know that half of the oncoming drivers are yakking on their cell phones, and another thirty percent are otherwise distracted. My mental energies are directed at keeping an escape route open. Sometimes, I am so wrapped up in how the other drivers could do something stupid that I do something stupid myself. This of course, reinforces the belief that all drivers – myself included - are just disasters waiting for the right opportunity. So I do not find that driving is a good time to ponder the deep philosophical issues of the day. I am too busy surviving to think clearly; I let the predictive engine run wide open.
Time to think
In our interrupt-driven world, there is rarely a time when we can focus on one thought for any length of time. Our attention spans have become shorter as our access to information has expanded exponentially. News sources feed us carefully filtered facts designed to lead us to some conclusion. Talk radio hands us our opinions fully formed and mocks the contrarian opinions of the many callers. Every Web site is a sub-set of information designed to convince us of something.
If you notice, there seems to be a defining theme for each time period. The late 90’s we were taught to fear the anarchy that would result from the Y2K computer crisis. No sooner was that fear safely past than September 11th, 2001 issued in a crisis so that we could fear terrorists. Not long after the Department of Homeland Security had been established, we had to go to war because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After the American people wearied of hearing about the war, suddenly the price of oil doubled, raising prices at the pump dramatically. As I write this, the unthinking masses are being herded into pressuring Congress to open up costal waters and the Alaskan reserve so that we can drill for oil in those areas.
Sometimes, I stop to catch my breath. It is exhausting being stampeded from one opinion to another; I need to get some time alone to think.
Consider what this means. Shut out the world for a while, quiet the voice inside your head that bounces from topic to topic like a sugared-up toddler in a toy store. Slow your breathing, relax your muscles, and focus on one thought for a minute. Taking time to think is a lot like praying.
Jesus talked about entering our ‘closet’ of prayer in Matthew 6:6: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret…” This closet is an inner sanctuary where we can be alone with God. In our world, this may not be a physical location so much as a behavioral practice.
Communion with God is a good place to examine our preconceived notions. Ask Him if the future really has to be as we anticipate it. Discuss current events with your heavenly Father and seek His opinions on the things that we are being fed. But above all, be aware of that predictive engine running in your brain and challenge its rule set. Because those rules often take the place of thinking; we simply make assumptions about the future and wait for them to be validated.
Inhibitor to faith?
This amazing predictive ability of the brain is what prevents us from enjoying faith to the fullest. Because we have often seen similar situations and circumstances, we are convinced that the outcomes must follow the pattern that our predictions forecast. In a sense, we have faith that things will continue as they have… and so they do.
Thinking that all things will continue as they have is not an inhibitor to faith so much as an unintended application of faith. It rarely enters our awareness that expecting things to continue is a form of faith. After all, it takes so little faith to believe that nothing miraculous will happen today.
The opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is faith applied backwards – doubt is faith that something will NOT happen, rather than faith that it will happen. For example, if I want it to rain, and pray for it to rain, and look out at the sunny sky and think to myself, “It’s not going to rain today”, then I have just put faith in failure. I have canceled out the effects of my earlier prayer by applying an equal amount of the substance of faith, but I applied it in the opposite direction. So doubt is a form of faith.
Fear is also a form of faith – a specialized subset of faith as a whole. Fear is faith in bad things happening. It has side effects like adrenalin fatigue, panic, or just a low level of constant stress. Fear is faith in personal harm, but it is a form of faith. Perfect love casts out fear because when we feel loved and protected, we are no longer thinking about being harmed.
So what can inhibit faith? Only a failure to think at all. If you can turn off your brain and park your body, you will have no faith. Other than that, if you are thinking, you can use your faith to change the world around you. For good or ill, whether we intend to do so or not, we do change the world around us with our faith. It is the way that we have been created.
Belief and faith go hand in hand; they are both translated from the same Greek word. Which English word is used to translate πίστις is largely a matter of context. Even though the same Greek word is used, in English ‘Faith’ is something that we have; ‘Believe’ is something that we do.
So why do we do it?
Predicting the future
God has created our brains to perform calculations at a rate that defies measurement. One of the things that the brain is good at is predictive reasoning. This is what makes driving possible – if you could not predict the motion of the other cars at an intersection, there would be far more crunched fenders.
Early in life, we learn to associate “hot” and “pain” by experiencing the two in close proximity. Some people learned to connect these two ideas by having their hands slapped as they reached for the hot stove. Others learned by actually touching the stove.
Similarly, we learn to associate grief with loss, pleasure with sugar, and certain unruly behaviors with severe tongue-lashings. In time, we develop the ability to predict the outcome of an action without having to experience it directly. I remember a childhood friend describing sliding down a razor blade into a pool of lemon juice – even though I am positive that he never had such an experience. Yet both of us made the expected noises and I know I shudder still at the thought. I cannot honestly imagine the pain that might ensue, but I can draw from other painful experiences in my life and extrapolate what it might be like.
The forcefulness of the predictive image is directly related to the seriousness of the consequences. When I was about ten years old, my Dad took the family in our four-wheel-drive pickup truck up a just-barely road to see a marble quarry in Colorado. As my four year old brother raced on ahead to see this wonderful site, a lady grabbed him by the arm and halted his progress. She looked at my parents and explained, “There is a drop-off there with no guard rail, and a patch of ice right before it.”
When we got to the edge of the quarry, there was indeed about a 50-foot drop straight down to a solid stone floor. And there was a frozen puddle about ten feet across just at the rim of the quarry. To this day, I still shudder at what could have happened there that morning. In my mind’s eye, I can still see my brother’s green sweater and the white marble with red streaks through it, the black ice, and the long drop to the stone below. Even though no accident befell us, the predictive ability of the brain clearly saw a dire consequence and imprinted these images where they will not be forgotten.
When things do not work out as our brains predict, we look for another explanation so that we can refine the process of predicting the immediate future. For example, experience teaches us that the cost of the things we buy will continue to go up in relatively small increments. When we see a price drop, we need to know why. Sales and negotiated discounts are familiar explanations, so they are included in the model of reality that the brain uses to predict the future. There are some products that defy the trend, like consumer electronics. So we add a clause to the mental rule, saying that prices go up, except for sales, model year closeouts, and computers.
Eventually, we develop a highly refined sense of how the immediate future should look. Little surprises us, because we have vast experience and a million corrective clauses to adjust a thousand situational rules. You might even say that we have faith that the near future will look pretty much like our predictions. And, for the most part, we are right.
So believing is, in part, based on those sets of rules that we have constructed from years of experience. Are those rules set in stone?
No, they are always fluid, because we are always finding new ways to tweak the rules that we use to predict the future. So when something does not quite fit the pattern we have imagined, it is no big deal. We revise the rule and keep moving on. If something is dramatically different than our predictions, that causes a little pain, because we have to totally re-examine the rules and all the little corrective sub-rules that explain things.
Superstition and magic are things that humans have invented because someone built a bad set of predictive rules, and those rules were seriously violated. If you break a mirror and there follows a string of ‘bad luck’, it is sometimes easier to add a rule to your predictive model that says “If you break a mirror, you get seven year’s bad luck” than to consider that breaking a mirror is nothing more than breaking a mirror. And of course, having heard the old superstition repeated often enough, some of us start cataloging all the bad stuff that follows a broken mirror as proof of the theorem. It becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.
Superstition is reinforced by inaccurate score-keeping. By being selective about what we define as ‘bad luck,’ we choose to reinforce the superstition rather than weaken it. Mental discipline can use this tendency to move in the opposite direction. By an act of will, we can choose to define broken mirrors and black cat path-crossings as simply ignorant beliefs of the superstitious. Having done so, we can choose to see how much good luck follows a broken mirror, and further weaken the grip that the superstitions have on our predictive reasoning.
It is this mental discipline that is all too often lacking in today’s busy world. “If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. If you really make them think, they will hate you.” That quote is variously attributed to Paul Gaugin, Mark Twain, Don Marquis, Arthur Costa, Plato, and Aristotle. Whoever said it, it seems self-evident to me.
We love to think that we are thinking; it is the sort of bad score-keeping that allows us to believe that we are smarter than the average picnic basket. However, Paul reminded “…every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think…” (Romans 12:3). In context, Paul was speaking of getting puffed up about how much faith we have, rather than how much intelligence, but the same principle should apply.
Thinking can be hard work. It requires setting aside preconceived notions and telling that prediction engine to chill out and prepare to accept new information. This sort of thinking requires some uninterrupted time. When I am driving, my brain is furiously anticipating all the stupid moves that the other idiots on the road could make. I just know that half of the oncoming drivers are yakking on their cell phones, and another thirty percent are otherwise distracted. My mental energies are directed at keeping an escape route open. Sometimes, I am so wrapped up in how the other drivers could do something stupid that I do something stupid myself. This of course, reinforces the belief that all drivers – myself included - are just disasters waiting for the right opportunity. So I do not find that driving is a good time to ponder the deep philosophical issues of the day. I am too busy surviving to think clearly; I let the predictive engine run wide open.
Time to think
In our interrupt-driven world, there is rarely a time when we can focus on one thought for any length of time. Our attention spans have become shorter as our access to information has expanded exponentially. News sources feed us carefully filtered facts designed to lead us to some conclusion. Talk radio hands us our opinions fully formed and mocks the contrarian opinions of the many callers. Every Web site is a sub-set of information designed to convince us of something.
If you notice, there seems to be a defining theme for each time period. The late 90’s we were taught to fear the anarchy that would result from the Y2K computer crisis. No sooner was that fear safely past than September 11th, 2001 issued in a crisis so that we could fear terrorists. Not long after the Department of Homeland Security had been established, we had to go to war because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After the American people wearied of hearing about the war, suddenly the price of oil doubled, raising prices at the pump dramatically. As I write this, the unthinking masses are being herded into pressuring Congress to open up costal waters and the Alaskan reserve so that we can drill for oil in those areas.
Sometimes, I stop to catch my breath. It is exhausting being stampeded from one opinion to another; I need to get some time alone to think.
Consider what this means. Shut out the world for a while, quiet the voice inside your head that bounces from topic to topic like a sugared-up toddler in a toy store. Slow your breathing, relax your muscles, and focus on one thought for a minute. Taking time to think is a lot like praying.
Jesus talked about entering our ‘closet’ of prayer in Matthew 6:6: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret…” This closet is an inner sanctuary where we can be alone with God. In our world, this may not be a physical location so much as a behavioral practice.
Communion with God is a good place to examine our preconceived notions. Ask Him if the future really has to be as we anticipate it. Discuss current events with your heavenly Father and seek His opinions on the things that we are being fed. But above all, be aware of that predictive engine running in your brain and challenge its rule set. Because those rules often take the place of thinking; we simply make assumptions about the future and wait for them to be validated.
Inhibitor to faith?
This amazing predictive ability of the brain is what prevents us from enjoying faith to the fullest. Because we have often seen similar situations and circumstances, we are convinced that the outcomes must follow the pattern that our predictions forecast. In a sense, we have faith that things will continue as they have… and so they do.
Thinking that all things will continue as they have is not an inhibitor to faith so much as an unintended application of faith. It rarely enters our awareness that expecting things to continue is a form of faith. After all, it takes so little faith to believe that nothing miraculous will happen today.
The opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is faith applied backwards – doubt is faith that something will NOT happen, rather than faith that it will happen. For example, if I want it to rain, and pray for it to rain, and look out at the sunny sky and think to myself, “It’s not going to rain today”, then I have just put faith in failure. I have canceled out the effects of my earlier prayer by applying an equal amount of the substance of faith, but I applied it in the opposite direction. So doubt is a form of faith.
Fear is also a form of faith – a specialized subset of faith as a whole. Fear is faith in bad things happening. It has side effects like adrenalin fatigue, panic, or just a low level of constant stress. Fear is faith in personal harm, but it is a form of faith. Perfect love casts out fear because when we feel loved and protected, we are no longer thinking about being harmed.
So what can inhibit faith? Only a failure to think at all. If you can turn off your brain and park your body, you will have no faith. Other than that, if you are thinking, you can use your faith to change the world around you. For good or ill, whether we intend to do so or not, we do change the world around us with our faith. It is the way that we have been created.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The book - chapter 3
Chapter 3. The power of words
In the preface, I mentioned that spoken words control our faith. There is a relationship between faith and words; in this chapter, I want to show you the power of the spoken word.
Creative words
At the end of Chapter 1, I called your attention to the way that God created the heavens and the earth – He spoke them into existence. Many theological explanations exist for the concept of “Logos”, or the Word. But rather than go all mystical here, I would like to stick with the literal. The things that are written in the Word of God are often written in metaphors because they are true on multiple levels – the literal and the metaphorical. Focus with me on the literal for a few pages, and then you can go back to the deeper meanings.
While I am on the subject, I have noticed a definite human tendency to go all mystical and metaphorical on many matters. There is a book in print called “The Secret,” and a movie by that name. The basic premise of the book is that that there is some mystical power in the universe that brings us what we think about, so by changing our thoughts, we can change our lives. The “Law of Attraction” describes how this occurs. And it must be true, because so many people have said it was true.
Logically, there is a problem with this. When something is true, it is true regardless of popular opinion. Well, not everything. By definition, the current President’s popularity is true or not depending on popular opinion… but I digress. For most things, truth is not dependent on mass opinion, and the book “The Secret” is built on the premise that if so many people (some of them even famous people) believe it, it must be true. I would rather cite scripture and admit that if the Bible is wrong, then I am wrong, too. My personal bias is to accept the Bible as the word of God.
Interestingly, the concepts in “The Secret” do have some basis in scripture, as I am attempting to bring out in this book. It is not true because a lot of people think it is true, it is true because that’s how God put the universe together.
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). King David waxed poetic and described it in Psalm 33:6 as “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” In short, all that God made, He made by speaking it into existence. Then He turned around and made man in His own image, named him Adam, and put him to work.
Examples of words at work
Throughout scripture, there are descriptions of the power of the spoken word. In Numbers 20:8, God told Moses to speak to a rock. “Take the rod, and gather thou the assembly together, thou, and Aaron thy brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water, and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock: so thou shalt give the congregation and their beasts drink.”
Side note: “Ye” is plural. The translators of the King James Bible spoke a version of the English language that is 400 years older than what we speak today; we have since abandoned the idea of singular and plural forms of “you”. So literally, God told Moses that both Aaron and Moses were to speak to the rock. They didn’t; they spoke to the congregation and hit the rock with Moses’ rod, just like they had in Exodus 17:6. In Exodus, they were told to strike the rock; this time they were supposed to speak to it. This failing later cost Moses his ticket into the promised land (Deuteronomy 32:49-52). When God says “speak”, we better open our mouths and say something, and when He says whack the rock with a stick… that is when we should get all physical with the rock.
Jesus illustrated the point about faith and speaking when He told the disciples that “…If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20). He said something very similar in Luke 17:6: “And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.”
Transplanting trees and moving mountains are given as examples of what the voice can do, when faith is present in mustard-seed quantities. Mark 4:31 tells us that the mustard seed is the smallest seed of all, so I assume that the amount of faith required for these feats is also small.
But faith quantities are not the point here; the point is that Jesus said “say unto this” mountain or tree. Speaking is the tool that our faith uses to accomplish the work.
Verbal utterances are given great weight in the scriptures; consider the following list of verses about talking:
Proverbs 18:21 - Death and life are in the power of the tongue
Proverbs 15:4 – A wholesome tongue is a tree of life
James 3:5 - Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things
Romans 10:10 - …with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
Clearly, the tongue is used in reference to speaking, rather than licking things here. James goes on to describe the tongue in more detail.
James 3:8 - But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. (9)Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. (10) Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
Clearly, the strength is there – what is lacking is direction. Our tongues should be wagging for good, not for evil.
Words cannot be recalled
There have been some times in my life when I wished I could go back and un-say something that I had said; often because it was hurtful or untrue. I have found to my great regret that words cannot be unsaid. Sometimes, you can smother them with more words, confessions, apologies, and so on… but that is not the same as un-saying them.
Isaac ran into this problem when he blessed the wrong offspring.
Genesis 27:36, 37
And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me? (37) And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son?
When Esau complained that his brother had been blessed, Jacob lamented that the words he had said could not be recalled; the blessing was given, the words spoken, and the children of Jacob are still stereotyped as wealthy… they are still blessed with corn and wine. Not only were the words “no deposit – no return”, but they were “no expiration date”… The blessings continue indefinitely.
Even God Himself cannot un-say words. In Isaiah 55:11, God says “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” In Isaiah 45:23, He says “…the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return…”
Because words are so durable and so powerful, we ought to watch them carefully!
In the preface, I mentioned that spoken words control our faith. There is a relationship between faith and words; in this chapter, I want to show you the power of the spoken word.
Creative words
At the end of Chapter 1, I called your attention to the way that God created the heavens and the earth – He spoke them into existence. Many theological explanations exist for the concept of “Logos”, or the Word. But rather than go all mystical here, I would like to stick with the literal. The things that are written in the Word of God are often written in metaphors because they are true on multiple levels – the literal and the metaphorical. Focus with me on the literal for a few pages, and then you can go back to the deeper meanings.
While I am on the subject, I have noticed a definite human tendency to go all mystical and metaphorical on many matters. There is a book in print called “The Secret,” and a movie by that name. The basic premise of the book is that that there is some mystical power in the universe that brings us what we think about, so by changing our thoughts, we can change our lives. The “Law of Attraction” describes how this occurs. And it must be true, because so many people have said it was true.
Logically, there is a problem with this. When something is true, it is true regardless of popular opinion. Well, not everything. By definition, the current President’s popularity is true or not depending on popular opinion… but I digress. For most things, truth is not dependent on mass opinion, and the book “The Secret” is built on the premise that if so many people (some of them even famous people) believe it, it must be true. I would rather cite scripture and admit that if the Bible is wrong, then I am wrong, too. My personal bias is to accept the Bible as the word of God.
Interestingly, the concepts in “The Secret” do have some basis in scripture, as I am attempting to bring out in this book. It is not true because a lot of people think it is true, it is true because that’s how God put the universe together.
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). King David waxed poetic and described it in Psalm 33:6 as “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” In short, all that God made, He made by speaking it into existence. Then He turned around and made man in His own image, named him Adam, and put him to work.
Examples of words at work
Throughout scripture, there are descriptions of the power of the spoken word. In Numbers 20:8, God told Moses to speak to a rock. “Take the rod, and gather thou the assembly together, thou, and Aaron thy brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water, and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock: so thou shalt give the congregation and their beasts drink.”
Side note: “Ye” is plural. The translators of the King James Bible spoke a version of the English language that is 400 years older than what we speak today; we have since abandoned the idea of singular and plural forms of “you”. So literally, God told Moses that both Aaron and Moses were to speak to the rock. They didn’t; they spoke to the congregation and hit the rock with Moses’ rod, just like they had in Exodus 17:6. In Exodus, they were told to strike the rock; this time they were supposed to speak to it. This failing later cost Moses his ticket into the promised land (Deuteronomy 32:49-52). When God says “speak”, we better open our mouths and say something, and when He says whack the rock with a stick… that is when we should get all physical with the rock.
Jesus illustrated the point about faith and speaking when He told the disciples that “…If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20). He said something very similar in Luke 17:6: “And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.”
Transplanting trees and moving mountains are given as examples of what the voice can do, when faith is present in mustard-seed quantities. Mark 4:31 tells us that the mustard seed is the smallest seed of all, so I assume that the amount of faith required for these feats is also small.
But faith quantities are not the point here; the point is that Jesus said “say unto this” mountain or tree. Speaking is the tool that our faith uses to accomplish the work.
Verbal utterances are given great weight in the scriptures; consider the following list of verses about talking:
Proverbs 18:21 - Death and life are in the power of the tongue
Proverbs 15:4 – A wholesome tongue is a tree of life
James 3:5 - Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things
Romans 10:10 - …with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
Clearly, the tongue is used in reference to speaking, rather than licking things here. James goes on to describe the tongue in more detail.
James 3:8 - But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. (9)Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. (10) Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
Clearly, the strength is there – what is lacking is direction. Our tongues should be wagging for good, not for evil.
Words cannot be recalled
There have been some times in my life when I wished I could go back and un-say something that I had said; often because it was hurtful or untrue. I have found to my great regret that words cannot be unsaid. Sometimes, you can smother them with more words, confessions, apologies, and so on… but that is not the same as un-saying them.
Isaac ran into this problem when he blessed the wrong offspring.
Genesis 27:36, 37
And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me? (37) And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son?
When Esau complained that his brother had been blessed, Jacob lamented that the words he had said could not be recalled; the blessing was given, the words spoken, and the children of Jacob are still stereotyped as wealthy… they are still blessed with corn and wine. Not only were the words “no deposit – no return”, but they were “no expiration date”… The blessings continue indefinitely.
Even God Himself cannot un-say words. In Isaiah 55:11, God says “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” In Isaiah 45:23, He says “…the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return…”
Because words are so durable and so powerful, we ought to watch them carefully!
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The book, chapter 2, part 2
What is it that faith does?
Faith literally changes the physical world. It brings about healing in the body, it changes weather patterns, and it alters the state of matter. Since it does these things, it may be useful to think of faith as an energy field that can be manipulated by human beings.
Healing is the most frequently attributed evidence of faith in action. The four friends who let the man down through the roof, the woman with the issue of blood, and other scriptural incidents reaffirm that faith brings about healing. Healing is also the easiest evidence of faith, or perhaps another way to say it is that healing costs the smallest amount of faith.
When Jesus returned to Nazareth, he did no mighty works; he just healed a few folks (Mark 6:5). The reason given for the lack of mighty works is that the local folks had little faith: “And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief” (Matt. 13:58)
How does faith work?
Faith works by tapping into the power of God. The woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and he felt virtue go out from him (Luke 8:46, Mark 5:30). The Greek word used here, δύναμιν, is more often translated “power” and is the root for the English words “dynamic” and “dynamite.”
When Jesus walked the earth in human flesh, He subjected Himself to human limitations. He made it clear that human beings could do more than He had done: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John 14:12).
If faith is the extension cord that plugs into the power, then when Jesus was in his own country (Nazareth) where the people had little or no faith, He endured the same limitations as the rest of us – he could do no mighty works, except to heal a few people.
Some commentaries say that He was unwilling to do the works; however, the text says He was unable – the difference between unwilling and unable is significant. Jesus said that all power was given unto him (Matt. 28:18), so our expectation is that he had the ability to do mighty works, but chose not to; that’s not what the verse said. It said that He could not do many mighty works.
The word for mighty works used in Matthew 13:58 has the same root as “power” – the word is δυνάμεις, just a different word ending than δύναμιν. The word translated as “power” in Matthew 28:18 is a different word - ἐξουσία – which is also translated as “authority.” Jesus has all power as in permission to do anything; His ability while clothed in flesh was limited to that set of abilities that are common to humanity.
Because there was so little faith available, He could not tap into His cosmic power to accomplish mighty works.
Volumes have been written about the dual nature of the man Christ Jesus; I will not delve into that topic here. Since He was both the omnipotent God and a limited human being, Jesus experienced some unique things. One of those things, in my opinion, was that feeling of power flowing from Him as the woman with the issue of blood touched him. As God, He is the source of that power. As a man, He could only tap into that power through the same set of tools He provided us all with. Faith unleashes the power of God. It is not itself the source of power, but merely a necessary accessory.
Electricity can be harnessed in many ways; humanity has been able to make electricity flow through wires or through the air. We use magnetic fields to transfer electrical energy from one voltage to another; we manipulate it in many other ways. But without some conduit, some conductor, some medium for it to flow through, it is worthless to us. On a hot day, having an electric fan can be nice – but unless it is plugged into the wall, it can be frustratingly still. The power is available in the wall; the fan is available, but if the power cord is missing, the voltage is useless; it cannot turn the fan because it cannot reach the fan.
Electricity is a parable, a model, a metaphor for the power of God, and an illustration of the way that faith works. If God’s power is electricity, then Faith is the wires. Faith is what brings the power to where it can be used. Faith is something that we can get more of, just like we can go to the hardware store and pick up more extension cords. How we grow our faith is through the words that we use.
Faith literally changes the physical world. It brings about healing in the body, it changes weather patterns, and it alters the state of matter. Since it does these things, it may be useful to think of faith as an energy field that can be manipulated by human beings.
Healing is the most frequently attributed evidence of faith in action. The four friends who let the man down through the roof, the woman with the issue of blood, and other scriptural incidents reaffirm that faith brings about healing. Healing is also the easiest evidence of faith, or perhaps another way to say it is that healing costs the smallest amount of faith.
When Jesus returned to Nazareth, he did no mighty works; he just healed a few folks (Mark 6:5). The reason given for the lack of mighty works is that the local folks had little faith: “And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief” (Matt. 13:58)
How does faith work?
Faith works by tapping into the power of God. The woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and he felt virtue go out from him (Luke 8:46, Mark 5:30). The Greek word used here, δύναμιν, is more often translated “power” and is the root for the English words “dynamic” and “dynamite.”
When Jesus walked the earth in human flesh, He subjected Himself to human limitations. He made it clear that human beings could do more than He had done: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John 14:12).
If faith is the extension cord that plugs into the power, then when Jesus was in his own country (Nazareth) where the people had little or no faith, He endured the same limitations as the rest of us – he could do no mighty works, except to heal a few people.
Some commentaries say that He was unwilling to do the works; however, the text says He was unable – the difference between unwilling and unable is significant. Jesus said that all power was given unto him (Matt. 28:18), so our expectation is that he had the ability to do mighty works, but chose not to; that’s not what the verse said. It said that He could not do many mighty works.
The word for mighty works used in Matthew 13:58 has the same root as “power” – the word is δυνάμεις, just a different word ending than δύναμιν. The word translated as “power” in Matthew 28:18 is a different word - ἐξουσία – which is also translated as “authority.” Jesus has all power as in permission to do anything; His ability while clothed in flesh was limited to that set of abilities that are common to humanity.
Because there was so little faith available, He could not tap into His cosmic power to accomplish mighty works.
Volumes have been written about the dual nature of the man Christ Jesus; I will not delve into that topic here. Since He was both the omnipotent God and a limited human being, Jesus experienced some unique things. One of those things, in my opinion, was that feeling of power flowing from Him as the woman with the issue of blood touched him. As God, He is the source of that power. As a man, He could only tap into that power through the same set of tools He provided us all with. Faith unleashes the power of God. It is not itself the source of power, but merely a necessary accessory.
Electricity can be harnessed in many ways; humanity has been able to make electricity flow through wires or through the air. We use magnetic fields to transfer electrical energy from one voltage to another; we manipulate it in many other ways. But without some conduit, some conductor, some medium for it to flow through, it is worthless to us. On a hot day, having an electric fan can be nice – but unless it is plugged into the wall, it can be frustratingly still. The power is available in the wall; the fan is available, but if the power cord is missing, the voltage is useless; it cannot turn the fan because it cannot reach the fan.
Electricity is a parable, a model, a metaphor for the power of God, and an illustration of the way that faith works. If God’s power is electricity, then Faith is the wires. Faith is what brings the power to where it can be used. Faith is something that we can get more of, just like we can go to the hardware store and pick up more extension cords. How we grow our faith is through the words that we use.
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