For We Walk by Faith, Not by Sight (2 Corinthians 5:7)

2022-06-22

For we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7)

The subtlety of this verse is that faith is like one of the senses. The five senses take the reality of the world and make them real to us in our experience. It is how we perceive the reality apart from ourselves. We can know something about reality by its appearance, sounds, taste, smell, and feel. If our senses fail, we can no longer see or hear the world. We cannot know the world because the gateway to knowing the world is gone. However, this does not change reality. It is all still there; we just cannot perceive it.

Faith is the spiritual sense that takes spiritual realities and makes them real to us. By faith in Christ, we can know what we have in the person of Christ. We have His righteousness. We have His deliverance from our sin. We are dead with Him. We are risen with Him. While the physical senses are the senses of the old man in Adam, faith is the sense of the new man. “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). If our faith fails, we may no longer experience these wonders we have in Christ, but they are nonetheless still there and true as ever.

The senses of the old man are Adamic in nature and are not reliable. We need faith, which is from Christ, for us to know anything about the reality, the “really real,” in Christ.