The Sixth Step — Believers Like an Eagle Flying in the Open Sky

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.

The eagle, called the king of the sky, can usually live about seventy years. It hunts for forty years, and when its beak and talons grow blunt it can hunt no longer, so it flies off toward a rocky mountain where there are no other eagles. Arriving there, it rubs off against the rock the old beak and talons it has used until now. An eagle with no beak and no talons can neither eat nor fly for a while, and it waits patiently because it knows a new beak and new talons will come. Once the talons and the beak and the feathers have grown in again it will soar into the high sky with strength and live another thirty years as king of the sky. It can fly a higher sky because it waited until the new beak and feathers came. This patience is what God wants a believer to look like.

To be born again as a believer you must have the wisdom and the resolve to throw away lies and hypocrisy, bad habits and moods, without hesitation; only then can you hold an eagle faith. What you are good at you can do well without being praised for it. But you cannot see your own faults, so it is a blessing to have someone beside you who counsels you about what you lack. People want to be praised, though, so they do not want to hear the counsel and rebuke their brothers in faith give them — and that attitude is pride too. It is thinking they do well that keeps them from listening to a brother’s counsel and from turning.

An eagle can fly because the mother repeats the training of dropping the chick from the high nest and catching it, until the chick flies for itself. If the chick cannot fly it dies by that alone, so the mother trains it desperately. Throwing a small chick from a high place is not an easy decision, and she repeats the training because it is the way to keep the chick alive. The chick does not know its mother’s heart in pushing it out of the nest and would have thought she was trying to kill it. When its terror reaches its height as it falls, the mother flies in like an arrow and catches it and drops it again; and only when this is repeated does it come to know that its mother’s heart in pushing it out is love. When the chick becomes a mother, it will find itself dropping its own beloved chick to the ground and going down first to catch it, exactly as its mother did. An eagle that has overcome that hard training and drifts across the high sky is plainly a winner.

If we too hold the faith of the eagle flying in the open sky, however high the world’s waves are they are no problem at all. So we must recognize God’s labor in repeatedly throwing us into suffering and catching us, to raise us strong as eagles. Believers who boldly shed the beak and talons they used for the world until now, and take the new beak and talons God gives, hold an enormous power that the world cannot give. Now you must show God a born-again faith that fights Satan boldly, taking the sharp beak and talons God gave as your weapons.

The eagle knew that a new beak and new talons would come, and tearing off a part of its own body that it had treasured like life cannot have been easy. There must have been pain beyond words; and knowing that you can live only by tearing off the useless beak and talons is exactly a mature faith.

Overcoming human instinct is not an easy thing for a believer. He knows God will help, and living by faith takes great courage and patience. The only way to carry a calling is to win the battle with yourself. Overcome the world’s temptation and overcome pride and human righteousness, and you can receive great commendation from God.

Only the one who has overcome human fear can fly high and see far, so may you hold the faith of an eagle flying strongly in the open sky. A believer with a faith as wise as an eagle’s can receive God’s inheritance as a blessing and can carry a calling for salvation.

Exodus 14:15-16

15Yahweh said to Moses, “Why do you cry to me? Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward. 16Lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go into the middle of the sea on dry ground.

God chose Moses as the leader to set free an Israel that had been enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years. To train Moses as a strong leader he entrusted him to an Egyptian princess and had him live as a prince, learning Egypt’s culture and thought in detail. And when Moses fled to the wilderness, God had him live as a herdsman keeping the sheep of Jethro, priest of Midian, and so made him grasp how precious life is and how much he himself lacked. Moses lived forty years as a prince with nothing in the world to fear, and it took forty years in the wilderness for him to grasp how frail a being he was. Through the eighty years in which Moses grew into a leader, living as prince and as herdsman, God did not rest for a single moment, working until he set Moses before Pharaoh, in order to keep what he had promised Abraham. Living as a herdsman he came to grasp how worthless the power he had once held was, and how powerless a being he had been. Once he grasped that he could become a prince because God had led the basket of reeds to the Egyptian princess, he came to know that he could lose all of it at any time God wished. Knowing now that it had all been empty glory, he looked back at his own pride before God and repented of those foolish years. Once he grasped that leading the people into Canaan was God’s will, he let go of his own righteousness in every situation and obeyed the Word. Look at the miracles he worked in Egypt and his bold acts of faith, and you see how necessary a process the training in the wilderness was.

For a believer to hold a mature faith, refining is necessary without fail. Painful as the training is, only such a time lets you see God’s will rightly and hold a true faith. Every life has its moments of failure and frustration, and by showing a faith that overcomes them you can receive God’s recognition and trust. Every life repeats happiness and misfortune like a squirrel on a wheel, and if you use each turn as a tool to mature yourself, you can live as a believer whose heart agrees with God’s.

I too served as a district leader before I was in pastoral work. Everyone in that district was in a two-income household, so it was hard to gather. They disliked even a district leader taking an interest in their homes, so I could not learn their circumstances at all and praying for them was not easy. When the pastor asked me to take that district, I prayed earnestly before meeting them that their hearts would be opened. They could not gather in one place because of work, so whenever I had time, two or three times a week, I went round each home and preached the Word. They grew into believers as they learned the Word, and once they grasped it they began evangelizing on their own and were faithful in worship.

When the district grew to seven households, a feeling of praising my own zeal came over me. I was praying with a smug heart, as though I had done something great for God, when a small vision opened in front of me. I saw seven balloons high in the sky, and it was a picture of me holding the strings in my hand and smiling broadly, delighted. But that joy lasted only a moment: a strong force struck my elbow, and at that shock every balloon I was holding flew away. Watching them go, I felt what a waste it was, since I had worked so hard to make them.

Then it seemed to me that I heard these words in my heart. “Beloved daughter, you have worked hard. But you did not gain those balloons because you labored for them; they are souls I entrusted to you. Right now you are only regretting the balloons flying away — have you ever thought about who gave your arm the strength to keep them from flying away? From now on, do not delight in balloons that can fly off at any moment; remember me, who entrusted those balloons to your hand.” Hearing this, I thought that my faith, delighting in balloons that might burst at any moment and fly away at any moment, was a child’s.

You will have seen how different my faith, which saw only the balloons, is from the faith of the Moses who brought Israel out of Egypt in order to fulfill God’s word. Moses and I both carried God’s work doing our utmost. I devoted my time and my money and preached the Word doing my utmost. But when human righteousness ran ahead of God’s righteousness in me, I showed a shameful faith in which my own devotion loomed large. The one who lifts you high like an eagle is God, the one who regulates the wind so you can fly the open sky is God, and the one who protects you from your enemies’ attack is God.

When you leave this world you will leave behind one picture of the life you lived, as people of faith do. What kind of picture do you want to leave behind in the world? If your children look at the picture of your life and say they too want to paint a picture as beautiful as this, there is no life better lived than that. You are a person blessed by God because of Jesus Christ. If you leave behind the picture of a life God wants for you, there is no more beautiful picture, and it will be a life given the highest blessing.

Exodus 14:19-20

19The angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from before them, and stood behind them. 20It came between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel; and there was the cloud and the darkness, yet gave it light by night: and one didn’t come near the other all night.

The faith of Moses and Joshua was of a different order from that of the people of Israel, who obeyed only when they saw a miracle. Their absolute obedience in believing and following God was a faith no one can hold without denying himself. We use the word obedience easily, and you can never obey God’s will without killing your own righteousness at every moment. You must obey with all sincerity and still keep a heart that is sorry, and be loyal and still be ashamed at yourself for not repaying God’s grace.

While they stayed in the wilderness Moses saw God protecting Israel with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He was seeing the true love of a Father who guards from before and behind, so that the Egyptian soldiers could not come near. Having seen the almighty God’s love without a lie in it, Moses came to hold the precious faith of giving his own life. Moses had suffered Pharaoh’s endless hindrance until then, and he believed God would lead him even if he met great difficulty on the road to Canaan. It was because he held a mature faith through suffering and refining.

Have you ever met the God who works in the course of a life? We can keep our faith and live because there is a Father who guards us so that a world as meaningless as mist, and wicked men, cannot hinder us. If you too obey the Word without complaining, whatever your circumstances, you can meet the God who works in a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud, as Moses did. Training for growth is lonely and wearying, and when the training is over he will send a fellow worker to work together for good and will fill every need.

Just as the eagle could become king of the birds because it was patient, people of faith could discern spirits and carry a calling because they passed through a time of spiritual patience. Moses spent forty years in the wilderness and forty years as a leader, alone, looking to God only; and Abraham had to endure a time of refining, leaving his country and his relatives and his father’s house at God’s command in order to become a source of blessing. God’s ways of calling them differed, and the process of being isolated from the world and growing in faith was the same. They went through the hard training of having to give up the world, and in the end they became people of faith and received the protection of a God who walks with them.

But unlike us, Jesus Christ came to this earth to atone for sin and was utterly abandoned by the world and by people and left alone. There was no one in this world who became a witness in order to save Jesus. Only those who grasp the deep purpose of the Christ who atoned for human sin without a single witness can go the narrow and hard road of salvation. Salvation is not a wide road, so it will be lonely; but if believers who go that road are patient and obey, they will enjoy within God the freedom and peace of an eagle flying the open sky.

Hebrews 11:17

17By faith, Abraham, being tested, offered up Isaac. Yes, he who had gladly received the promises was offering up his one and only son,

Isaac, whom Abraham received at a hundred years old, was a son he treasured like his own life. Then one day God called Abraham and commanded him to offer that son, more precious than his own life, as a burnt offering. Abraham held the faith that God is absolute, and so he set out for Mount Moriah with Isaac. But offering a son as a burnt offering is never an easy thing.

How much pain must God have felt, too, when his Son was nailed to the cross? If, in the course of God’s great work, you were commanded as Abraham was to offer your son as a burnt offering, what would you do? It is a question worth considering once for believers who pray every day that God solve this problem, since they will live by his will.

From Isaac’s side he must have wondered, going up Mount Moriah with his father. So he asked his father where the offering for God was, since there was fire and there was wood. Abraham answered that God himself would provide it for him, and his heart must have been in agony.

Looking at the question and the answer of those two, I have thought that God’s heart, when Jesus prayed earnestly that this cup might pass if it were possible, must have been like Abraham’s when he received Isaac’s question. You know now that Isaac did not die, so you may not feel the pain of having to kill your own son with your own hand.

But Abraham did not hesitate, because he knew there is a God who raises the dead, and that there is eternal life and that kingdom. At the moment Abraham was about to strike Isaac, God said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy,” and said, “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son.”

Why do you suppose God tested Abraham? Did he really not know that Abraham held a faith that obeyed God with a faith in resurrection? What God wanted revealed was Abraham’s faith, loyal to the death, and whether he loved God more than Isaac.

Every believer holds faith, and revealing that faith through the act of obedience is never easy. But if you do not show your true faith through action, you cannot show fully the faith by which you were saved through God’s absolute choosing. God recognized Abraham’s faith when he made the final decision that said, if I die, I die. Do you see when the moment is that God recognizes your faith?

Isaac did not die, because God stopped him; and to Abraham, Isaac was a son already dead. Isaac was now not an ordinary son held in Abraham’s arms but a son under God’s absolute protection. After showing a faith in resurrection, Abraham received as a blessing, through Isaac, descendants as many as the stars, exactly as God had promised. God’s grace shone the brighter through Abraham’s act of faith.

Frankly, God’s commands cannot all be understood by human thinking, so there are times when obeying is hard. But the knowledge and the greed a human being holds are like a single scrap of cloud floating in the sky, like a single ship floating on the sea. How can one scrap of cloud understand the whole wide sky, and how can one small boat see that whole wide sea? So entrusting your future to a God to whom a thousand years are like a day is a very wise choice. Entrusting your life to the owner who gave it, and your life’s course to the Creator who made us, is evidence that a believer holds a true faith.

What is the fruit precious to you? If it is the craving of the flesh, nail it to the cross with Jesus; and if it is the world, may you throw away without regret a world that will rot. If it is your children, move them from your own arms into God’s arms and look at them as God’s children and pray and raise them without greed. When you look at them as God’s children and pray for them as persons, God will take your children into his own care and protect them.

Abraham gave Isaac to God, and so Isaac lived his whole life at peace within God, on his father’s faith. Whether your faith is the mother eagle’s or the chick’s, if you hold an eagle faith that lives according to God’s high purpose, God will guard you like the pupil of his eye.

We are all people of a holy nation and believers chosen by the Lord. Even now God is walking with believers so that they can preach the gospel, and is pouring out a full grace so that they can enjoy peace and rest. Live by the Word without leaning to the left or the right, and God will protect you with his great grace and power.

Live as a believer who does not fear the world and is not greedy but is faithful in the reality given, and God will become your refuge. Fly up strongly toward God like an eagle and God will block the wicked man and the wicked spirit, so you can live as a mature believer bearing abundant fruit. May you be a believer who receives God’s love and protection and enjoys peace and rest.