Christ's Second Test: Faith Without Proof

Mat 4:7 It is written again, You shall not test the Lord thy God.

This is the third phrase spoken by Christ in the Gospels. He said this in response to Satan asking him to prove that he was the son of God by demonstrating that God would take care of him. In other words, Satan asked him for a miracle.

This second test or temptation of Christ (again, to "tempt" and "test" are the same word in Greek. Here it is ekpeirazo, "to test by," and in Old Testament Hebrew, nacah) flows naturally from the first test. In the first test, we are asked to trust that our spiritual needs are more important than our physical needs. In this second test, we are asked to trust that God is working in the absence of proof. This is, of course, the big question that agnostics always have: why doesn't God (the existing one) prove his existence beyond all doubt? Here, Christ gives the answer: reality is not subject to proof. We are on earth to be tested by God. We are not here to test God. The relationship is, by definition, asymetric.

We live in a universe in which nothing is provable. In science, theories can be disproven, but they cannot be proven. Every current scientific theory is a place holder until a better theory can be found. We can know the truth of some statements, but we cannot know the truth about reality. The most obvious truths about reality down through history (the sun rises, the earth is flat, etc.) have been proven false time and time again.

This impossibility of proof becomes one of the themes of Christ's life. Throughout his teaching, despite his many miracles, Christ said again and again that no "sign" would convince people who do not want to believe. Every miracle in our own lives can be explained away as "merely" natural or "merely" a coincidence. No matter how big a wonder we are confronted with--and the universe itslef is as big as wonders come--we do not have to believe in anything. Belief is always left to our choice. The world is constructed exactly that way because our testing (not God's) is its only purpose.