Faith is an interesting concept, one that most people seem to be quite confused about. We hear constantly about faith vs. reason, as if there is a contradiction in terms. Some see faith as simply whatever silly thing it is that you wish to believe in and has been made into a platitude with little meaning like “hope” has become. Christians are not making it any easier; a common evangelistic tract has a train with “fact” as a locomotive that pulls faith behind it, as if it was a simple matter of scientific investigation, or having the right knowledge. I know in my periods of extreme doubt I was told by my friends to “just believe” as if I could simply produce faith within me and still be honest with myself. So what is faith, and were does it come from?
The problem with my friend’s admonition was that if I truly didn’t believe something, but I tried to make myself believe it, then it was nothing more than self deception. This sort of “I don’t know if this is true but I am supposed to” mentality is a very scary idea, because if we claim that others simply make up what they believe, how do we know that we are in the right? Muslims say that they have faith; if they never questioned but simply lived up to the above challenge then they would never be anything but a Muslim. In other words, when conflicting views are all based simply on “you just need to believe” then how can you possibly determine what is true? No, I desired the true God too much to simply take that shortcut.
Hebrews 11:1 gives us a plain definition of faith “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Substances, evidence, these terms are not simply flowery feelings and wishful thinking, scripture itself points to faith as being something concrete. Faith is the substance or essence of what we hope for and it is the evidence or proof of things that we do not see. Faith is the inward confirmation of things that we do not know. The evidence for something does not come from within but from outside of a person, thus faith comes, not from ourselves, but as evidence that comes to us from without.
I know in my doubting I often wondered why God wouldn’t just make it easy for us to see a 1+1 type of proof that he existed, why would he make it so hard for us to find him through empirical means. The answer is that we were never meant to. Scripture says that “…without faith it is impossible to please him…” (Heb 11:6) God has always intended man to come to him in faith and not by any self sufficient intellectual proof of our own. That is the whole point; faith makes us step outside of ourselves, outside of our answers and requires us to be dependent upon him. It acknowledges that we are not autonomous and that we cannot figure out everything by ourselves, we must rely upon God to show us. How can we then prove God to other people? We cannot, it is impossibility, and just as was stated before, we were never meant to. My faith given to me does not prove anything to anyone else, but it does prove it to me. Each must work this out for himself and while we may point them in the proper direction, we cannot do the work for them.
This is the first of a two part post, to read the second part click here