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Transcript 151A — How are We to Understand Faith?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. Good evening. I'd like to ask you a question regarding biblical faith as it applies to the believer. The Scriptures say, "The just shall live by faith . . . Faith without works is dead." And in Hebrews 11, we're given a series of illustrations of faith. Specifically, in the sixth verse it says, "Without faith it is impossible to please God." And I was wondering if you would define or tell what the Bible means by faith, in the context of these verses, or some helpful comments on this as to the exercise of faith.
HC: All right. Fine. Thank you. The question is raised concerning faith. What is it? Just exactly how are we to understand faith?
Now in Hebrews 11:1 we have a definition: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Putting it in another way, we could say that faith is a childlike, naive trust in God, that what He says is as certain and true and dependable and accurate as if we could see it before our very eyes, taking place. In other words, when God says that "the wages of sin is death," we don't really see an immediate connection between sin and death. We know that death is all around, but we can't really connect it to sin. Faith is that attitude toward God where we say, "Well now, God says that death is the wages of sin. And therefore, because God says it to be so, it is absolutely true and trustworthy."
Or again, the Bible says that the wrath of God abides on the unsaved (on the unbelievers) such that mankind outside Christ, because of his sins, is subject to hell, and that hell goes on for eternity. Now there's no one that can see this anywhere as an actual fact. But faith declares it to be an actual fact. We are ready to hang our whole life on the truth of these statements of the Bible, that what God has declared is really so; that is, is dependable and certain, as if it had already happened. The Bible says that if we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour, if we hang our life on Him and repent of our sins, we can have eternal life. Now we can't see this with our physical eye. We can't see Christ with our physical eye. We can't feel the forgiveness of our sins. But because the Bible declares it to be so, by faith we are absolutely convinced that it is so. It is as if it was something that we could really take hold of and see with our eyes. We know that it is absolutely so.
Now this is faith. Incidentally, everybody has faith. We mustn't think that faith is a word that is related only to the believers in the Bible. The secular scientist has faith that mankind evolved from some lower creature. He has faith that this world began without an omnipotent power of some kind. He has no way of proving that this is so, but by faith he says this is so. He's putting his trust in what someone has told him, or what his own mind declares to him.
When you walk into a building, you have faith that that roof is not going to collapse. You aren't worried about your safety at all. You trust that the builder of that building was a good builder, and that it is structurally sound. Everything we do is related to faith in something or another.
Now the sixty-four dollar question is, do we have faith in these precepts and rules that God has laid down for us in the Word of God? And right at this point there is a vast problem that arises. And the problem is this: mankind has been deceived into thinking by his own mind, by his master Satan, that he himself is the master of his own fate. He has been deceived into believing that he himself is the captain of his own soul. He has been deceived into believing, into having faith, that the pleasures of sin, the pleasures of doing his own thing, are the greatest and highest pleasures that one can have.
And so when the Gospel comes to this individual, he has to make a choice. Is he going to give up his trust in what he believes to be true, in his sin-darkened mind, particularly those things that seem so tangible? After all, the joy of sin is right here and now. The security that he finds in the creation is right here and now. This is something that is tangible, much more tangible than a faith in a God that he cannot see, in a salvation that cannot be displayed before his very eyes, faith in what the Bible says about something that happened 2,000 years ago.
But unless we abandon ourselves to the teachings of the Bible as being entirely true and trustworthy (and this is what faith is), we are going to remain in our unbelief. You know, I might also add one other thought here, and that is that there are two kinds of believing. Jesus spoke about one kind in Luke 8, where He talked about the Parable of the Sower. There were those who were like the seed that fell on rocky soil, the seed being the Word of God, the rocky soil being the hearts of these. And the seed began to grow, and then, because there was no good soil there, it soon died. And Christ likened this to the Gospel that is sown in the hearts of those who believe for a while. But because there is no root, when the temptations of the world come, they fall away.
Now we might call this intellectual or miraculous faith. It's the kind of faith where we place our trust in Christ because it makes sense or because it is going to do something for me. I expect a miracle from God, or whatever. It's that kind of a faith. It's emotional, or it's intellectual. It is not faith that is of a nature where we have abandoned ourselves to Christ, where we are ready to be obedient to Him, come what may, because we have entrusted ourselves altogether to Christ.
Only if we are born again will we actually entrust ourselves altogether to Christ. Only then will we have true saving faith. Only then will it be of an eternal variety. And of course salvation is eternal. The kingdom that we enter into is an eternal kingdom. Now the evidence of this faith is that there is an ongoing earnest desire to be obedient to what we read in the Bible. We not only read it and trust in it with our minds, but we trust in it with our whole being, with our whole will. We want to be obedient to it because our whole life is hung on this. We've abandoned ourselves to Christ and what He teaches. We know that regardless of anything else, we can depend on what the Bible says, and we're going to stick with that through thick and thin. And this will only occur when we have become born again. That is true saving faith.