THE WINGS OF THE EAGLE

When I was in high school (yes, I can actually remember back that far, although my memories of that time are all in black and white), there were a few teachers that some of us loved to torment. One of our “terror tactics” was to wait until the teacher was writing on the board and then launch a paper airplane in his direction. The plan was to see how close to the teacher we could come without actually hitting him. When the irate teacher spun around to find out who had joined the ranks of al-Qaeda, all he saw were thirty cherubic students dutifully writing in their notebooks. The unspoken war cry among the fledgling terrorists was, at that moment, “Mission accomplished!

A paper airplane can easily be made using a standard 8 ½” x 11” piece of paper. A few quick folds and the terror tool is ready to launch. About the only thing you have to be sure to do is make the folds sharp and remember that the wings must be equal and bent approximately at the same angle. If one wing is missing, the plane will not fly—it will spiral to the ground like a broken helicopter. If one wing is elevated above the other, the plane will fly in circles, although flying in circles is fine if you don’t have a destination in mind. So we are forced by necessity to make sure the wings of the plane are good or we really don’t have an airplane, we have a crash landing just waiting to happen.

A few months ago I wrote a devotional entitled “Learning to Fly.” I used Isaiah 40:31—“They shall mount up with wings like eagles”—as a launch point. You might want to read that post along with this one. It’s stored at June 21, 2008, in the Archive Section on the right side of this page.

An eagle with one wing will never fly. It may take the leap out of the nest but unless both wings are in place and strong enough, it will not fly. At best, the eagle will helicopter to the ground.

The beautiful Old Testament imagery of an eagle soaring high above the countryside is one of my favorite pictures of the successful Christian life. On its powerful wings an eagle is lifted above the stresses, battles and mundanity of life and learns to soar and follow the winds of the Spirit. Powerful imagery, powerful word picture.

Using the imagery of the eagle as a type/example of the New Testament believer, we must then ask, What, exactly, are the wings? What makes up these magnificent wings that help empower the believer and need to be in harmony so that the believer’s life is one of purposeful movement?

So what are the wings?

“Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, ‘You have faith, and I have works.’ Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect?” (James 2:17-22).

One wing is faith and the other is action!

Like the wings of an eagle, faith and works cooperate with each other. There is a practical harmony between the vertical faith in God and the horizontal works or reaching out to a needy world. When the wings are out of synch, that is, when they are not working together, the eagle’s flight is hampered, if not completely ruined. When the wings are in harmony, the result is a thing of beauty. If faith without works is dead, then faith with works brings life!

When James said “…faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead,” he could just as easily have said, “If an eagle does not have two wings, it cannot fly.”

Faith and its companion, action, do not breed death; quite the opposite, they speak of and invoke life.