WILLIAM KILLIAN

There is a quiet peril in trusting only what your eyes can measure. We navigate the physical world admirably enough, reading hunger, sensing danger, smelling smoke before we see the flame. These senses are gifts, marvellous and necessary. Yet they were never designed to carry the full weight of our most consequential decisions.

Consider Lot, Abraham’s nephew, standing at a crossroads with the whole of the land before him. He lifted his eyes, surveyed the Jordan Valley, and saw what any reasonable person would see: lush, well-watered ground, rich as the garden of Eden, fertile as Egypt along the Nile. By every natural measure, it was the obvious choice, the sensible choice. And it destroyed him.

He journeyed east, incrementally, almost imperceptibly, from camping near Sodom, to residing in Sodom, to leading within Sodom, until judgment rained down and everything he had built by sight lay in ashes. The text does not spare us the commentary: the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord.

How often do we perform our own version of this same calculation? We weigh salary, location, opportunity, and comfort, factoring in everything visible and measurable, while the unseen promises of God gather dust in the corner of our thinking.

Faith is not the absence of wisdom; it is wisdom’s completion. It incorporates what the eye cannot reach, what the senses cannot verify, what only the word of God can illuminate.

Abraham, by contrast, rested in promise rather than prospect. He did not need the best land because he trusted the God who owns all land.

 for we walk by faith, not by sight

2 Corinthians 5:7