The First Step — Believers with a Flower-Garden Faith

1He brought me back to the door of the house; and behold, waters flowed out from under the threshold of the house eastward, for the front of the house faced toward the east. The waters came down from underneath, from the right side of the house, on the south of the altar. 2Then he brought me out by the way of the gate northward, and led me around by the way outside to the outer gate, by the way of the gate that looks toward the east. Behold, waters ran out on the right side. 3When the man went out eastward with the line in his hand, he measured one thousand cubits, and he caused me to pass through the waters, waters that were to the ankles. 4Again he measured one thousand, and caused me to pass through the waters, waters that were to the knees. Again he measured one thousand, and caused me to pass through waters that were to the waist. 5Afterward he measured one thousand; and it was a river that I could not pass through; for the waters had risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be walked through.

People are born into the world without knowing God, and they can live a life of faith because God called them and led them.

A newborn baby cannot speak and walk from the beginning. In the same way people cannot hold faith from the beginning, and so they pass through several stages of faith on the way to growing into mature believers. When you begin a life of faith you come to doubt whether God is really alive, and you may even take a faith conditioned on receiving blessing for faith itself. But as you live listening to the Word and praying, your faith will grow little by little. You let go of the worldly life you had lived for yourself alone and become a believer who sacrifices himself for God. Wrestling with whether to live by human righteousness or by faith, your rough edges are cut away and what you lack is filled by God’s grace, and slowly you take on the shape of a believer.

Everyone goes through this process of faith growing, so criticizing and judging another person’s faith is not right. Condemning someone else’s faith without a thought for the time of wandering you went through yourself is itself a sin. Faith is not something to be compared with another believer’s. The faith God recognizes — when you have given thanks without conditions for God’s love, Jesus’ sacrifice and the working of the Holy Spirit — is a true believer’s faith.

Each person’s vessel of faith differs according to their character and their effort. There are people like Peter, who does not leave Jesus even after being rebuked, and there are people like Judas Iscariot, who hears the Word and cannot let go of human righteousness and goes the road of death. Because each person’s vessel for receiving the gospel differs, believers preaching the gospel need to preach the word of truth without adding or subtracting, rather than working to make people understand.

A church has some with a full faith and some whose faith is as weak as a child’s. So it is very necessary that believers become members of Christ and work together for good. But faith is a war with Satan, and a mature believer and a weak believer each have their own difficulties. Satan holds the power of the air and shakes people’s faith endlessly, to lead not only the people of the world but believers too into death. If believers know that faith is a spiritual war and lean on Jesus alone, they will overcome easily however ceaselessly Satan attacks. If each member works together for good, God will work through angels so that the church is not brought down, and will help them be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Satan’s temptation provokes sin, and this is also the reason God made the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If a believer does not fight sin in order not to eat that fruit, the plan of the God who gave free will is not carried out. Faith does not grow if a believer does not fight sin by free will, so believers must use their free will to live a good life. Everyone goes through this process of growth. So when we work at building a faith that agrees with God rather than criticizing one another or losing heart, there will be no one proud and no one who stumbles.

Ezekiel 47:3

3When the man went out eastward with the line in his hand, he measured one thousand cubits, and he caused me to pass through the waters, waters that were to the ankles.

Ezekiel’s name means *God, make me strong*. The date of the writing of Ezekiel is supposed to be around 565 B.C. Ezekiel was carried off as a captive during the second invasion by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. In his fifth year in Babylon he was called as a prophet, and for twenty-two years he prophesied, proclaiming the Word so that the people would hold on to hope toward God.

He saw a vision while praying: he saw the water flowing out of the temple rising, and he heard a prophecy about Israel’s restoration and its future. God showed him a vision in which the water of life flowing from under the threshold of the new temple runs all the way to the Dead Sea, the symbol of death, and revives every living thing. This was a revelation that Israel would end its captivity and be restored. God promised to restore Israel, captive in Babylon, and later to give the holy land to the Gentiles as an inheritance.

Ezekiel saw the water flowing out of the temple rise first to his ankles, then to his knees and his waist, and at the last become a river swollen so high that no one could dare cross it.

Reading the Bible and looking at the order in which the water rose, I came to think that this is what a believer looks like growing from a weak faith into a mature one. Watching the water rise one step at a time, I saw it as the stages by which a believer grows into a faith of a higher order. Believers confess with their lips that they love God, but what God really wants is a believer’s unchanging faith. Confessing with the lips alone, with no action, is not true love. God wants a faith that believes in the heart and so arrives at righteousness.

To live as a child of God you must first let go of your own will and take in God’s higher world; and without reading the Bible there is no way to be in close exchange with the realm of the almighty God. Only by reading the Bible can you grasp how great and astonishing the spiritual world God made is. Only by praying can you be closely joined to God and grow spiritually. Know the truth like this and you will come to know how wide and deep that love is.

The stairway of faith begins with the step of a flower-garden faith, and then there is the faith of the stumbling block, the sharp low hill, the high mountain and the deep valley, the faith that overcomes the waves of the world, and the faith of the eagle flying in the open sky. And at the very last there is the step of despair, the final faith that human eyes cannot see and that can only be seen with God’s eyes.

There is a ladder joining all those steps, and that ladder is Jesus Christ. If you come to grasp, within God, his deep love toward souls, you will be able to stand on the step of despair. And if, standing on the step of despair, you come to see the marks of sin that the world and its souls have made, you will come to know that God’s love for the saving of souls is a pain that could do nothing but take up the cross. Believers set out with a faith like a child’s, like the flower-garden faith; but if they grow as far as the step of despair, they can know how thankful a thing the almighty God’s grace is, and how astonishing a miracle salvation is.

When you begin a life of faith, the first thing you meet is the flower-garden faith. Holding a flower-garden faith does not mean your faith is poor, and holding an eagle faith does not mean you know everything spiritually. But it is true that an eagle faith has more strength to bear each moment than a flower-garden faith, and the ability to leap over suffering when it comes. Hold a faith like the eagle’s and you gain eyes that discern with spiritual wisdom, so you can judge Satan’s movements easily and are not deceived. So rather than a flower-garden faith that sways easily in the wind, you must work at holding an eagle faith that can bear with the Word and with faith.

Everyone likes a pretty flower garden in full bloom with flowers of every color. Looking at flowers wide open, the world’s cares and the worries other people bring, the things that weighed the heart down, disappear. With butterflies and bees flying among the beautiful flowers the heart grows richer still, and happy. So people work at owning a bigger garden, more splendid and more worth boasting of than anyone else’s. A wide garden becomes the strength to rule over people, so they run without rest toward getting on and getting ahead.

But however much care goes into tending it, a garden in this world becomes a shabby thing in a moment if frost falls unexpectedly in the night. Frost is not something a human being can stop, so the flowers can be lost in a moment. Once life is lost, whether a person or a plant or an animal, it can never be brought back. The owner of every created thing is God, and so believers must obey his limitless power.

Satan pours into people a greed for possessions, and envy, and jealousy, and temper, and whips them on to run for success. Someone whose heart Satan has taken, running toward the world, will feel the joy of success the higher his tower of Babel rises. But before he has time to rejoice over the rising tower, it collapses to nothing at the hands of someone else working to take it from him. So people spend their lives building a higher wall of sin with a harder heart, and cut off every relationship. Whoever gives in to Satan, who cannot give life, will in the end lose everything at God’s cold breath. Anyone who has once owned a beautiful garden cannot easily forget the charm of the flowers’ splendor and scent, and that is why they circle around it. But a person who throws faith away easily does not hold Satan’s interest, so he is cast off by God and by Satan alike.

Stay at the flower-garden faith and you do not agonize much over sinning against God. But if you know that life is a spiritual war and live by a firm faith, you will not stay at the flower-garden faith. Giving up the garden that is your own boast, for a God you cannot touch and cannot feel because he is spirit, is never easy. Letting go of the nature of a human being made from dust, and the faith that says you will live by God’s will, is itself having a new wineskin that can hold God’s grace. When you stand before God with that new wineskin, only then will you come to know the eternal time and the world and your own being that human ability cannot see. A person without a new wineskin watches bees and butterflies flying about his own garden and shows a faith of a low order, thinking God loves him in particular. Someone who testifies that he prayed and was filled with money, that he was loyal and his children were blessed, is not pure but immature. Such a person, seeing someone else’s garden do well, will complain at once that he was not given a greater blessing.

You too will feel unsettled if a person of the world seems to be getting ahead of you. Perhaps you will not stop there but will wonder what religion that person holds, and standing before someone successful you may feel yourself grow small. Feelings like these come from not believing in the plan of a God who works in his own time. A person who cannot be content has no choice but to leave for the world in search of a splendid garden, for the power that comes with a wider piece of ground. But fill the field with flowers in riotous bloom and one cold breath from God will freeze it all. However greedily people live, staking their lives on it, the moment they take off the body when God says come, all they own becomes someone else’s. I am not telling you to live poor; I am telling you to live knowing what comes first. What comes first is living by God’s will, not owning what the world owns.

Know what comes first, and because you know the sea-wide world of heaven you will not fret over a cupful of water slopping about, and you will never be proud or afraid. Foolish human beings do not know how great a sin against God the building of a tower of Babel is, which is why they think that simply building one will lift their own names high. If a tower built over a lifetime could be carried into the next world, there would be some point to it. But heaven is a place to which even our bodies, which we treasured as though they were everything, cannot be carried. Believe that no human effort can avoid death, and that no effort of Satan’s can take life away, and devote yourself to God’s kingdom.

God shook people’s language for a moment, and those who had been building the tower of Babel with one tongue were all scattered. That every nation now uses a different language is the evidence that the tower of Babel really happened, and it is the result of sin. Thinking, as they did, that owning much can make you as high as God is being taken in by Satan’s scheme to ruin God’s masterpiece, the human being. Of course, people are born with Satan for a father, so going against human nature and living by God’s will is never easy.

Even so, God had mercy on the people who joined in with a sinful heart in the lie Satan let fall. He made it so that believers who trust in the atonement of Jesus at his first coming can fully overcome Satan’s attack. Believers who carry the light of Christ must preach the gospel boldly to our neighbors, who live as Satan’s slaves. God’s will is that the gospel be preached in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, and so living the life of a witness is doing a child’s duty in full. This is how God gives blessing in spirit and in body, so work first at your soul being strong and you will receive the blessing of things going well in all things.

Genesis 19:11

11They struck the men who were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves to find the door.

When the angels came into the city of Sodom and Gomorrah, the men of that city beat on the door in order to sin sexually with them. They had come as a crowd, so they said quite boldly what ordinary people would be too afraid to say: “Bring them out! Let us sin!” Sodom and Gomorrah were already flooded with sin, and homosexuality had taken hold among people who wanted greater pleasure, so they had grown dull to sin. Perhaps at first even they hesitated at the thought that it was sin, and the fear disappeared once the same act was repeated. As time passed a lewd mind darkened them, and as the number of homosexuals grew their spirits would have turned seared. Had they feared God, when the angel darkened their eyes they would have wondered at least once why they could not see now, whether they were being judged by God. But they searched for the door until they wore themselves out, and to the last moment they could not leave the place of pleasure and lewdness.

Look at the destruction of the city of Sodom, and you see that Satan takes a great deal of time and slowly changes a person’s character. Satan was patient to the end and slowly brainwashing people, until they held the thought that living according to the desires of the body is not sin. By that effort of Satan’s they came not to count homosexuality as sin. Once they were darkened spiritually they did not fear God even while switching sexes for enjoyment, and they behaved as Satan drove them even while looking at angels. They were stained by wicked habits and a filthy environment, and drifting further and further from the vast and eternal kingdom of God. That he came to judge even people who had abandoned him like this shows how great God’s interest in a devoted believer is.

It is the same with us who believe in God now. We say with our mouths that we received eternal life from God for nothing, but in fact we act as though we were doing God a favor by believing, and want the world’s blessing as the price of that favor. And yet the almighty God saved sinners shut in death, by Jesus’ blood, with no conditions at all. Not knowing this, a person will think less that God’s judgment is fearful than that they are dying because they failed to escape the flood, like the people dying in Noah’s day. It is like everyone rolling in a mud puddle: you cannot tell that you are filthy yourself.

Believers today attend church and do not believe God, own a Bible and do not read it, have the time and do not pray. Like the people of Sodom, so very many believers hold a faith that seeks blessing, and so they are not ashamed of not knowing scripture. On the contrary, absurd things happen: a believer who works at learning the Word is asked whether he is making a fuss because he wants to become a pastor. Once that thinking takes hold, people boast about outward things, treating a pastor’s schooling and office and the size of the building as though they were their own faith, just as they build a tower of Babel.

What is truly grievous is that the number of people chasing an illusion, rather than the end and the judgment of the last day, is growing. This fall of the church and of believers is finally making a place, with their own hands, for the abomination of desolation to stand in a holy place. That Christianity has fallen this far is a truly unhappy thing, and that is why the whole church, its pastors and its believers must repent.

Once the world accepted homosexuality people’s resistance weakened, and once religious pluralism gained strength they persecute belief in one God as though it were a narrow faith. When Satan claims that every religion must become one in love, people know perfectly well that they can never become one and are still thrown into confusion — “is Christianity not rather short on love?” — and are afraid of being left out of the world. All of this is what comes of holding a weak flower-garden faith. Think about it a moment and you see that believers shaken by a faith like this are no different at all from the people of the world who worship idols. They are no different from people who carve stone and wood into an idol and bow to it, because they believe in a God who is dead.

Unless believers look for the true truth of Christ and turn now, they cannot help chasing an illusion that looks like a garden Satan made. Of course money is needed, because the gospel has to be preached in order to save souls. Money and power for the gospel can be good tools, but what is held out of greed is nothing but useless garbage. Believers must live in the bright place lit by the light of Jesus Christ if they are to see the world clearly. Living wisely with ears to hear and eyes to see, you can look at the spiritual fruit God gave by grace and feel happiness in it.

Now may you lift God up with a more mature faith. Just as a seed planted always breaks through the ground and sends up a shoot, plant the seed of faith in God and it will grow into a tree where birds nest. Just as a house built on sand cannot last long however grand it is, a thin faith cannot put down roots and rots. A mature faith, like a great tree grown through patience, will stand tall in one place through any wind and rain, so that God can see it.

May you be a great tree that does not sway even in a typhoon, rather than a flower garden that loses everything at once when the frost falls.