Riders On The Storm – Trusting In The Unseen

 

Living a life of faith, especially in a world that feels so undeniably tangible, is a challenge. It’s like trying to live in two worlds at once—the physical, which is right in front of you, demanding your attention, and the spiritual, which is harder to perceive and requires you to trust in something that’s not immediately visible. It’s easy to get pulled into the hustle of the daily grind: work, relationships, our to-do lists—things we can touch, measure, and feel. These things are real. They're part of our experience. They shout at us for our attention. And yet, in the midst of all that, there's this other world, the invisible realm, that we can't see or touch. It’s the world where faith lives, where we’re asked to trust in something beyond what our eyes can see.

Think about it this way. We’re born into this world with no say in the matter, just like Jim Morrison’s haunting line in Riders on the Storm—“Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown.” We didn’t get to choose the rules of the game, and yet here we are, thrust into existence, having to navigate a world we didn't ask to be a part of. The physical reality—the stuff we can see, touch, and feel—becomes the only world we know. And even though there’s this spiritual reality underneath it all, it’s hard to even begin to understand, let alone trust it, because we’re so immersed in the world we can perceive with our senses.

Here’s where it gets complicated: we know there’s something more. We’ve been told by the Bible, by prophets, and by teachers that there’s a God who is working behind the scenes, in the unseen realm. And yet, day after day, we struggle to believe that He’s there, even when we can’t touch Him or see Him in the same way we experience the physical world. It’s like we’re being asked to trust in something we can’t fully grasp. We can’t measure it with the tools we’ve been given. That’s the tension—the gap between the physical and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen.

This isn’t a new challenge. The early Israelites faced this same struggle. The Hebrew Bible—the Tanakh—is filled with stories of people grappling with this very issue: trusting in a God who is unseen, who doesn’t always reveal Himself in ways that make complete sense. Let’s look at the name of God in the Hebrew scriptures. YHWH. We typically translate it as “the LORD,” but that translation barely scratches the surface. The name itself is tied to the concept of being and existence. In Exodus 3:14, God reveals Himself to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM.” When we go back to the Hebrew, we see that the name God uses, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה), comes from the verb hayah, which means "to be" or "to exist." This isn’t just some casual declaration of existence like “I exist.” It’s a profound statement of eternal, uncaused existence. God is the unmoved mover—the One who simply is, without relying on anything else for His existence. God’s essence is being itself, something that cannot be defined by the physical world.

The beauty of the Hebrew here is that God isn’t just telling Moses, “I exist.” He’s declaring Himself as the uncaused cause, the very ground of all being. His name, YHWH, is wrapped in mystery—something that transcends the limits of the material world. So, even though He reveals Himself through miracles, through fire, through signs and wonders, God remains fundamentally mysterious. His essence is beyond full human understanding. And still, the people are asked to trust Him, even though they can’t fully comprehend the depths of His nature.

This tension between the visible and the invisible doesn’t go away in the New Testament. In fact, it gets even more complicated when Jesus enters the scene. Jesus is God revealed in the flesh—God incarnate. But even then, the full mystery of God isn’t completely revealed. Jesus, while fully God and fully man, remains a mystery. In the Gospels, we see Him perform miracles, heal the sick, raise the dead, and give profound teachings. And yet, He constantly tells His followers that belief in Him requires faith. Faith in what? Faith in the unseen reality of God’s plan. Jesus’ physical presence on earth was only a glimpse of the fullness of God. He told His disciples in John 20:29, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This wasn’t just about belief in a historical figure. It was about belief in a spiritual reality—the invisible, eternal kingdom of God. Even though He was right there in front of them, His disciples were still being asked to trust in what they couldn’t fully see or understand. The message is clear: faith requires trust in the unseen.

Faith, or pistis in Greek, is a central theme in the New Testament. But what does it actually mean? We’re talking about something deeper than just a casual belief or a mental acknowledgment of truth. Pistis is a personal trust. It’s a heart-rooted conviction. The kind of faith that the Bible calls us to isn’t just about believing that something is true; it’s about trusting in it so deeply that it shapes how we live, even when we can’t prove it in the way we can prove the physical world around us. The word for faith doesn’t just mean “belief” as we understand it in everyday speech. It’s a deep-seated trust in something we can’t always see, a conviction that leads to action.

Let’s look at Hebrews 11:1, which says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This verse is foundational, but it’s easy to misinterpret it. Faith is not about wishful thinking or blind hope. It’s about the assurance of things hoped for. The Greek word for “assurance” here is hypostasis, which means “substance,” “reality,” or “foundation.” Faith, then, is not a vague idea or feeling. It’s something solid and substantial. It’s a foundation—a deep conviction that the promises of God are real, even if we can’t directly experience them in the material world. It’s not about seeing it all laid out in front of us. It’s about believing that God’s promises are trustworthy, because His character has been proven time and time again throughout history.

When we talk about faith in the unseen, we’re not talking about some abstract, ethereal idea. We’re talking about something that holds us steady in the midst of the storms life throws at us. Faith isn’t about being able to prove something with scientific evidence or physical proof. It’s about trusting in something that transcends what we can touch, see, or measure. This is where the Bible calls us to live: in the tension between what we can see and what we cannot.

And think about the Israelites again, wandering in the desert for forty years. They were promised a land flowing with milk and honey, but they couldn’t always see how that promise was going to come to pass. Day by day, they had to trust that God would fulfill His promise. The physical reality of their situation—their tents, their lack of food, the desert sun—was overwhelming. But they were called to live in the unseen reality of God’s faithfulness. They couldn’t see the Promised Land right in front of them, but they had to trust that God was leading them there. That’s what faith in the unseen looks like: trusting in God’s promises even when you can’t immediately see how they’re going to be fulfilled.

The Apostle Paul echoes this idea in 2 Corinthians 5:7 when he writes, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” This verse doesn’t mean that we ignore the reality of the world around us, or that we live in a fantasy. Instead, it means that we live with a deeper awareness of a spiritual reality that supports everything. The physical world is real, yes, but there’s more going on. The unseen realm—where God’s kingdom is at work—is equally real. Walking by faith means that, even when we can’t physically see the fulfillment of God’s promises, we trust that He is at work in ways that transcend our understanding.

In the end, this is what faith is all about. It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about choosing to trust in the One who has proven Himself faithful throughout history, even when we can’t see Him with our eyes. It’s about walking in the tension between the seen and the unseen. The beauty of faith lies in that very tension. It’s about stepping out in trust, knowing that God is there, even when we can’t see the path ahead. That’s the beauty and the challenge of faith. It’s choosing to believe, even when the way isn’t clear, and trusting that God is leading us, even in the dark. That’s enough. It’s enough because He is the Light that guides us.