The Lord is teaching you to fly. To trust him. And if you fail, there is a gracious safety net. Look back and remember “what you yourselves have seen”—how the Lord has borne you up on eagles’ wings so many times before. Remember how he did it for Israel, not just here in the wilderness but countless times throughout their history.

In Exodus 19.4 God says that he bore his people on eagles’ wings. What does that mean? It’s a picture he returns to in Deuteronomy 32.11, where he says he dealt with Israel Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions…
When an eagle judges that its young are ready to fly, it pushes them out of the nest, forcing them to flap their wings and try to fly. If the eaglet isn’t able to do this immediately, it will drop like a stone. But the eagle swoops down underneath and catches its young and bears it up to safety. Then the process is repeated until the young bird learns how to use its wings. It sounds cruel—but it’s for the eaglet’s good. It needs to learn to fly and that will never happen in the security of the nest. But the mother is watchful, strong and swift to come to the rescue if needed.
That’s the Lord’s own description of those two or three months Israel has spent in the wilderness since leaving Egypt. The Lord has been disciplining his people, testing them and training them to trust him. Perhaps at times his methods have seemed harsh, even cruel.
Think of how he led the Israelites in a circle until they were trapped, with the Red Sea behind them and the whole Egyptian army racing towards them. How distressing that must have been for them! How damaging for their mental health! Ex 14.10 says that they ‘feared greatly’. But the Lord swooped down to catch them, parting the Red Sea and bringing them safely through.
Think of how he led them for three days with no water—right on the brink of what the human body can endure. He brought them to Marah where there was water—only for them to find the water was bitter! The Lord is tossing them out of the nest. Will they flap their wings of faith and fly? Will they trust him? No—so he swoops down to catch them and makes the water sweet.
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The epistolary exchange between Helmuth and Freya is one of the most moving in history. Studded with Scriptures and with honest reflections on God’s work in their lives, they are also an invaluable testimony of how Christians can come to grips with the prospect of imminent death. Most of the time, Helmuth found it impossible to focus entirely on either death or life. As long as there was a possibility for him to present his side of the story, he kept developing his line of defense. At the same time, both he and Freya learned to say, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). 

“One thing Christianity and we National Socialists have in common, and only one: we demand the whole man.” These words, pronounced by Roland Freisler, State Secretary of the Reich, at the time of the trial of Helmuth von Moltke, were jarring.
“I wonder if he realized what he was saying?” Moltke wrote later. “This was grim earnest. ‘From whom do you take your orders? From the Beyond or from Adolf Hitler?’ ‘Who commands your loyalty and your faith?’ All rhetorical questions, of course. Anyhow, Freisler is the first National Socialist who has grasped who I am.”[1]
Every political accusation the party had leveled against Moltke – accusations he was well-prepared to disprove – were suddenly brushed aside to reveal the crux of the matter: Moltke’s loyalty to Christ.
Now, with the cards laid clearly on the table, Moltke felt thankful and energized. “Just think how wonderfully God prepared this, his unworthy vessel,” he wrote to his wife Freya.
He then went on to list many instances of God’s providence in his life.
Chosen and Molded
Born in March 1907 in Kreisau (now Krzyżowa, Poland) to a reputable Prussian family, at age 14 he left the Christian Science his parents had firmly embraced and became confirmed in the Evangelical Church of Prussia.
He later studied law and political sciences in Breslau, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In 1931, he married Freya Deichman, who became his greatest earthly source of strength in this life. Four years later, he declined the chance to become a judge because the position would require him to join a party which had already reared its ugly head: the National Socialist German Party. Instead, he opened a law practice in Berlin, where he helped victims of Hitler’s régime t.
In spite of this, he was drafted in 1939 by the German military intelligence – an experience that confirmed in his mind the horrors of war. He learned of villages destroyed and thousands of people executed in senseless revenge. “Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day, and another thousand German men are habituated to murder,” he wrote in 1941. “May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty too? What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time?”[2]
He joined a group of friends equally opposed to Nazism. Their three meetings in Kreisau led them to be known as the “Kreisau Circle.” Believing that Germany would be defeated in the war, they focused on post-war reconstruction.
Moltke opposed the assassination of Hitler. Regardless, he was arrested on the evening of January 19, 1944. Looking back, he recognized God’s hand in taking him out of the picture just as he was in danger of “being drawn into active participation for a putsch” – a violent attempt, which was actually brought to action in July of the same year. “I was pulled away,” he said, “and thus I am, and remain, free of any connection to the use of violence.”[3]
He gratefully recognized God’s hand in bringing him to Himself, after years of nominal Christianity. “He humbled me as I have never been humbled before, so that I had to lose all pride, so that at last I understand my sinfulness after 38 years, so that I learn to beg for his forgiveness and to trust to his mercy.”[4]
He recounted all of God’s mercies since he had been in prison: God had allowed him to communicate with Freya and prepare for his death; he had let him “experience to their utmost depth the pain of parting and the terror of death and the fear of hell, so that all that should be over too;” and had endowed him “with faith, hope, and love, with a wealth of these that is truly overwhelming.”[5]
The last realization was the cherry on the cake, as he stood before Freisler “as a Christian and nothing else.” To him, this was the greatest honor. “For what a mighty task your husband was chosen,” he wrote to Freya, “all the trouble the Lord took with him, the infinite detours, the intricate zigzag curves, all suddenly find their explanation in one hour on the 10th of January 1945. Everything acquires its meaning in retrospect, which was hidden.”
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The posture of our heart reveals more about who we are than what we do. That doesn’t mean action is superficial. It just means that actions have heart roots, and it doesn’t help anyone to ignore them.

It’s fascinating how much you can learn about secular culture when it’s not trying to express its beliefs. This comes out in films, TV series, and popular fiction, among other places. I guess that’s another piece of support for the argument that we’re most ourselves when no one’s looking.
One theme that comes up repeatedly is very popular, so popular it’s assumed to be a core doctrine: what you do matters more than what you believe. Morality should trump religion. Doing is always worth more than believing.
You can see both the appeal and the danger of the mantra. One the one side, it’s appealing because it seems easier to show goodwill and moral character through actions, especially actions that appear detached from a system of belief (I say “appear” intentionally). In fact, it’s almost as if such acts (e.g., donating to a local food drive, affirming someone’s worth with verbal encouragement, being environmentally conscious, making meals for someone in the hospital) build up credibility for people so that they can (if they dare) someday hint at their personal beliefs. We’d never lead with personal beliefs. In the words of Captain Hook, that would just be “bad form.” On the other side, the morality-over-religion mantra is dangerous because it ignores the truth that all actions are tied to underlying beliefs. There’s no such thing as an action detached from a belief system. There are only actors ignorant of their belief systems.
The greater problem for Christians is that all of this is diametrically opposed to the teaching of Scripture.
In the Beginning There Was Doctrine
I love how J. Gresham Machen could cut cleanly to the heart of an issue simply because he knew his Bible so well. In Things Unseen, he has a chapter that I think is worth the price of the whole book. It’s called “Life Founded upon Truth.” (see my full review here). Here’s some of its wisdom.
Do not be deceived, my friends. This notion that it does not make much difference what a man believes, this notion that doctrine is unimportant and that life comes first, is one of the most devilish errors that is to be found in the whole of Satan’s arsenal. How many human lives it has wrecked, how many mothers’ hearts it has broken! That French novelist is entirely right. Out of the Pandora box of highly respectable philosophy come murders, adulteries, lies, and every evil thing…
What does the Bible say about the question whether doctrine is merely the changing expression of life or whether—the other way around—life is founded upon doctrine? You do not have to read very far in the Bible in order to get the answer. The answer is given to you in the first verse. Does the Bible begin with exhortation; does it begin with a program of life? No, it begins with a doctrine. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). That is the foundational doctrine upon which everything else that the Bible says is based.
The Bible does present a way of life; it tells men the way in which they ought to live, but always when it does so it grounds that way of life in truth.J. Gresham Machen, Things Unseen, p. 63
In the beginning was a doctrine, a teaching, a truth claim. That’s how Scripture starts. Our first response to revelation is not doing; it’s believing. In the beginning, there was doctrine.
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