NIV-Hebrews 11:1-2
[1] Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. [2] This is what the ancients were commended for.
Ever since the Enlightenment, there has been a huge debate between Faith and Science, as if these two entities were polar opposites and sworn enemies.
Even nowadays, there is a group of mostly religious people who are labelled ‘people of faith’ who are largely derided, and sometimes persecuted by ‘people of reason’.
The largely compassionate and gentle approach of the modern Gen Z has eradicated a lot of the animosity, but has built their belief (or lack thereof) on the post-modern belief that no-one has the right to impose their beliefs on anyone else and that what’s right for you is right for you.
What the Bible teaches about faith is radically different. Christianity has, and always be, a reasonable and rational faith: a faith based on the fim ground of evidence. It is not, never has been, and never will be, irrational and based on myths or fairy stories.
Perhaps that surprises you. Perhaps you did not expect faith and reason to be included in the same sentence. Perhaps you also perceived them as enemies to the end.
If so, then this series will be a long litany of surprises to you, because we are about to explore people of faith, explore the reasonableness and the rationality of their faith, and see the amazing deeds it led them to do.
But firstly, before we go any further, we must examine the nature of faith – what it really is.
And to do so, we must not do what so many have done for generations: we cannot differentiate between religious faith and scientific faith, between natural and supernatural faith. We have to examine faith as a concept that exists independently of them all. In other words, we must examine faith as a concept separate from the contexts in which it is applied. That way we can truly understand it, unaffected by the ‘noise’ caused by its context.
The first thing we see is that faith has a cause.
In other words, faith is not ex-nihilo: it does not come out of nothing. It is never completely blind. At the heart of every faith, regardless of what we have faith in, is something we have deemed to be trustworthy and true.
How do we know this?
The writer to the Hebrews uses two pictures to help us understand what faith truly is.
He firstly talks of being sure of what we hope for.
The language here is of a contract that has been signed and will determine the delivery of a property or good, but the object of the contract has not yet been received. In other words, the signed contract is the reasonable evidence that we will receive what we have agreed.
The second picture is that we can be certain of something we cannot see.
This picture is that of a trial, where the judge hears evidence about an event where he was not present and uses this to infer guilt or innocence on the accused person in court.
In other words, again, faith is not based on a blind leap into the dark, but on evidence.
Faith without evidence is not faith, but stupidity.
But what is it that makes faith faith?
That is why we must move on from the cause to the leap.
Look again at those two pictures.
You have the contract, but not the thing you paid for. However, on the basis of the contract, that thing is yours, even if you don’t have it yet.
That is a leap of faith. You are entrusting yourself to the other party’s integrity and the legal force and enforceability of the contract.
And then the court case. The judge and/or jury, who were not present when the incident took place, will infer what happened, to the best of their knowledge, from the evidence they have to hand.
Should that evidence be tainted or biased, it will affect their view of the incident.
Using evidence to reasonably reconstruct an incident where you were not present requires a leap of faith.
Those are two pictures that don’t seem to be particularly religious or spiritual. They are grounded deeply in the ‘so-called’ secular world. No cynical mind could ever undermine them, because they are elements from everyday life to which we entrust ourselves all the time.
Yet – and this is the argument of the writer to the Hebrews – they both apply when we talk about spiritual matters: about things for which we have written promises and which we cannot see.
Another useful picture is something that is going out of fashion – a cheque.
If someone writes a cheque for you, taking that cheque to the bank and paying it in is an act of faith. You can’t see their bank balance. You don’t know if they are good for the payment.
But you pay in that cheque in the faith that the money will be transferred from their bank account to yours.
The cheque itself is the evidence; the act of paying it in is the leap of faith.
That simple transaction of assessing a situation and making a leap of faith based on the evidence is something we repeat many, many times a day: sitting on a chair, turning on the TV, using transportation, heeding our boss at work... so many times a day.
And yet ‘people of faith’ who use the same decision making process to trust God are ridiculed by those who use the exact same process to trust in science or the teachings of their particular ideology or politicians or other leaders.
It is the same decision making process. There is nothing different about it at all.
Except the evidence.
Christians accept the Bible as evidence. They corroborate it with their own experience and the experiences of billions of other Christians.
Secularists do not.
That is the difference.
But we must move on to something that differentiates Christian faith from all others.
That is not just the cause or the leap, but the witness of faith.
You see, the modern translations don’t quite cut it. The meaning of the Greek is that the ancients – our leaders and forerunners in the faith – gained a good witness because of their faith.
That is, they could testify of the greatness of God and what He had done in their lives because of their faith in Him: because they trusted to the cause of their faith and took the leap of faith to believe God when there seemed to be no evidence.
The writer to the Hebrews wrote these words, I believe, because he wanted the Hebrew believers to bear that same good testimony.
I believe he would want the same for us.
He wants us to be able to bear witness, and bring glory to God, because we have put our faith in Him and He has come through for us.
Back when I was a missionary, my organisation used to train its ship-based missionaries using what they called a ‘faith adventure’. They would be dropped in the middle of nowhere and would have to make their way back to the ship. The idea was to teach them reliance on themselves, yes, but most importantly, reliance on God.
I’m not sure if they are still allowed to do anything as radical as that. Not now the world is known to be such a dangerous place.
However, each of us has an opportunity to have a thrilling and exciting faith journey. What God wants us to do is to see the evidence that He is good, that He cares for us, loves us and provides for us, and then trust Him, based on that evidence, for the challenges we have ahead.
And then, when we come through it all, we can testify freely to the goodness of God.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, as I explore the reasonableness of my own faith, strengthen it, I pray. Help me to trust more to the evidence I already have and then trust You where I have none. Amen.
Prayer
1. Define faith in your own words.
2. How do the two pictures in these verses help us understand the nature of faith?
3. Why is faith important?
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