Faith Toward God (Part 1)

Foundations of the Christian Faith — Steve Gregg

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Faith Toward God (Part 2)

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Faith Toward God (Part 1)

Foundations of the Christian FaithSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg discusses the importance of faith toward God as a foundation for the Christian belief system. He emphasizes the need for trust in God based on evidence and knowledge rather than wishful thinking. Gregg explains that faith is not about creating a reality but about believing in promises and embracing them, even in the face of trials. Finally, he notes that faith is a personal judgment call, but the Bible is a reliable witness to God's existence and actions.

Transcript

We come now to the subject of faith toward God. In our Foundation series, of course, we're guided in our choice of subjects by the passage at the beginning of Hebrews chapter 6. Hebrews chapter 6 verses 1 and 2 especially identify for us what the writer of Hebrews, and no doubt sharing the understanding of the Apostolic Age and the Apostolic Church as a whole, regarded to be the fundamental things, the foundational things, doctrines and practices and so forth of the Christian life. And we read in that list of repentance from dead works, of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, of the laying on of hands, of the resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.

And those are the items listed for us there in Hebrews 6, 1 and 2. And they, of course, define for us the course of our study through this series on foundations. These are the foundational issues. We have talked about repentance, and while the fact is I haven't covered all the points that I would like to have covered on repentance, we did devote two entire sessions to it, and I cannot justify in our schedule taking longer on that.

So we will move along to the second item, which is faith toward God. And faith, of course, is probably the one item on the list that everybody would have included if they were making their own list of things that they consider to be foundations of the Christian faith. Not everybody I know would have put repentance on the list, and certainly baptisms would not grace everybody's list if they were asked to come up with their idea of what the six most fundamental things were.

Certainly the laying on of hands would be on very few people's lists, and resurrection and judgments also would not enjoy a uniform universal acknowledgment as fundamentals of the Christian faith, but faith itself would. I seriously doubt that anybody, if asked to make a list of the six things that they would consider to be the summary of the foundation of the Christian belief system, would have left out faith, partly because we as non-Roman Catholics, as Protestants, we have come through a tradition that emphasizes justification by faith, furthermore, one cannot read the New Testament very far without encountering the imperative of believing and trusting and having faith. The very first recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark are, the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the Gospel.

It's in Mark 1.15. And therefore, repentance and faith are the first imperatives on the lips of Jesus in Mark's Gospel, and also, of course, they are the two things at the front of the list of the foundations of the Christian life in Hebrews. Now, faith is something that is so all-pervasive in the Christian life that the hopes of exhausting the biblical material on the subject in a couple of lectures would be hoping in vain. The most we can do is try to identify what faith is, and I think, unfortunately, in our modern evangelical climate, it's going to be necessary to identify what faith is not, as well, and then to look at the basic, basic categories in which we need to understand faith and how it relates both to our justification, to our Christian life, and what it's all about in general, what our relationship with God is and how it's affected by this issue of faith.

Now, let me, first of all, give you a definition of faith. This definition is not taken from a single passage of Scripture, but from a variety of passages of Scripture. We will have a chance to see many of them in the course of these lectures, and it is from actual passages in the Bible that I have drawn the various elements of this definition.

Nonetheless, it is a conglomerate, it is a combined definition that I've come up with based on the passages that we will have occasion to look at. So, let me give you this. I'll say it more than once in case you wish to copy it down.

I imagine that it would be good for you to do so. Faith is, biblically speaking, faith is a persuasion, a conviction, and a confidence in God that is chosen as an act of the will. Now, the definition could be longer, and in the course of talking about it, we will add some other points, but this is the basic, simple definition of faith.

Faith is a persuasion, a conviction, a confidence in God that is chosen as an act of the will. Now, the reason I stress that it is chosen as an act of the will is because many people wrongly think that faith is just something that some people are fortunate to have, and some are not fortunate enough to have. I have occasionally heard people say, I just wish I could have the kind of faith that you have.

I just wish I had more faith. As if they were the unfortunate victims of little faith. As if faith was something that they really just didn't, they weren't blessed with a great quantity of it, and therefore they just see themselves as deprived and perhaps doomed to have very little faith.

As if it is not a matter of choice. You know, if it is not a matter of choice, if a person cannot choose to believe, then how can it be that God would penalize anybody for failing to believe? How could a person be responsible before God for having believed or not believed if it were not a matter of choice? Now, it is not impossible to imagine that God could have constructed a human race in which he arbitrarily gave faith to some and did not give faith to others. God could have done such a thing had he chosen, but that's not the impression I get from the Bible.

That's not what I think God did. And if he did it that way, it would be very difficult to know how it is that he'd hold anybody responsible for having had faith or not having had faith. Yes, Charlie.

Everyone has been given a measure of faith according to Romans 12.3. God has given to every man a measure of faith. It's hard to know exactly how he means that. Every man perhaps has not been given initially the same measure of faith, but faith is something that can grow and is intended to grow and is something that can be cultivated.

It is really a relationship dynamic which increases with the increase of a relationship with God, I believe, and that is something that is very essential to understanding. Obviously, a person who is raised in a Christian home is more likely, once converted, to find it easy to have faith. A person who has a good role model in his father, perhaps, or in his parents may find it more natural to look to God as a trustworthy father and may find it just easier to believe, to have faith.

Others who have not been given those advantages may find it more of a struggle, more of a fight of faith that has to be fought from time to time. However, that fight of faith is not really a fight to obtain something called faith so much as it is a fight to overcome a wrong view of God. Because faith is a judgment that is made.

This could be added to the definition if you choose to put it there. Whether you write it down as part of the definition or not, it is something you need to have as part of your understanding. When you have faith in a person, whether it is God or some other person, you are making a judgment.

You are saying, I think this person is honest. I think this person can be trusted. And if you doubt a person, you are likewise making a judgment of them.

Faith is nothing other than a judgment call. In fact, in Hebrews 11.11, you might even wish to turn to Hebrews 11 right now because there will be many occasions for us to look at it. And even though we will look at other scriptures, you may want to put a marker in Hebrews 11 because this is recognized widely as the faith chapter for obvious reasons.

It is all about what faith is. And if we are going to try to understand the biblical doctrine of faith, certainly Hebrews 11 is going to figure significantly in our research. But in Hebrews 11.11, it says, By faith, Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.

Now, if you are reading the NIV, you might be surprised that it doesn't say anything about Sarah's faith there. I've probably pointed this out before, and unfortunately every time we come to this verse, I have to point it out again. Some of you may be using the NIV, and if you are, it will read very differently than any other version does.

And it reads very differently than the Greek does as well. Every other version of the New Testament that I'm aware of follows the Greek. The NIV on this particular verse, for some reason, the translators did not prefer for Hebrews 11.11 to make any statement about Sarah's faith, and so they changed it arbitrarily without any justification from the Greek.

They just decided that this would be, instead, a statement about Abraham's faith. And so they said, I can't quote the NIV, but it says something like, By faith, Abraham, even when Sarah was old, etc., etc., or something like that. But they do at least give a very small footnote, admitting that they've done this bit of trickery, and that way they absolve their conscience of guilt of being totally dishonest.

But the point is, not everyone reads footnotes. But the fact of the matter is, this is, I suppose, a chauvinistic translation, in that they have refused to give any woman credit for having had faith. I don't know.

Actually, I think they admit that Rahab had faith a little later on in their translation of the passage about her. But for the most part, it is a matter of astonishment to anybody who reads the NIV that the NIV translators would do such a thing as to simply, without any warrant whatsoever from the original language, depart from the way this has always been translated and the way it reads in the Greek, and simply ignore the fact that this is a statement about Sarah's faith. However, that is a side issue.

Whether the statement is about Sarah or Abraham is not really the point I would like to make. The point I would like to make is that Sarah received strength by faith because she judged him faithful. And that's all that faith is, really.

It's a choice to judge God faithful. Now, we always have the power to make such choices. If you stand up here and tell me something that I cannot easily verify, suppose you told me that you were born in such and such a place, I can believe you or I can choose not to believe you.

Now, if I know you to be a fairly reliable person, if I've known you for some time and your honesty is unquestioned in my mind, if there is nothing extraordinary or unbelievable about the claim you're making, then I will find it relatively easy to choose to believe you. If, however, I don't like your looks, I think you've got a little glint in your eye when you say it that gives me the impression you're putting me on, or there's something absolutely incredible about the thing you're claiming to be true, I may have a little more difficult time believing you. In fact, I may choose, quite unrightly or unjustly, to just approach your statement with cynicism, with skepticism.

I might have no good reason to doubt you, but prefer to doubt you for some reason. Maybe what you're saying is not what I prefer to believe. This is often the case when people approach the Bible or the things that God has said.

God has really never said anything that's out of the question, I mean, something that's impossible to believe. Some might find it hard to believe in miracles, although Paul certainly put it correctly when he was standing before Agrippa and Felix and said, you know, why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead? Some people would no doubt see it as an incredible thing and think that God is asking us to believe that which no rational person should be expected to believe, that God could raise the dead. But, see, the God of the Bible, if he exists at all, would have no difficulty raising the dead or doing any of the other miracles described in the Bible.

Therefore, basically, we can choose to believe that there is such a God or choose to believe that there is not, and there is nothing intrinsically irrational about choosing to believe. This is, in fact, one of the very reasons why God makes faith the hinge of salvation or damnation. A person who shows undue skepticism toward God clearly is rejecting that which would be the basis of a good relationship with God.

And the reason a person would do so is usually not because there is compelling evidence that there is no God. There is no such evidence. The reason that people who reject faith in God usually do so is because of moral preference.

And you might think I'm being a little bit too speaking, you know, out of turn here by saying what most people think and why most people reject God. Obviously, I've never been one of them. I've conversed with enough of them, though, to be quite certain that as soon as they become irrational in their unbelief, which is not very far into a discussion usually, usually when you meet somebody who believes that they have rational reasons for unbelief and you demolish all their rational reasons for unbelief and yet they tenaciously hold on to their unbelief, you can see that their real choice to be unbelievers is not because it is impossible or even difficult to believe the things that were called onto belief, but that it is costly to do so.

That it pinches us in terms of our moral libertarianism. That if there is a God, such as the Bible describes, then we cannot do all things that we find pleasurable with impunity. We must expect there to be a judgment.

We must expect to give an account. We must expect even for there to be punishment if we do things other than what God has preferred. And so it's much easier for people to sleep at night who choose a lifestyle of sin if they simply put out of their minds that there is a God and if they tenaciously hold to their skepticism on the point.

And you can find people who have made this choice. Now it's not a necessary choice and there are people who are that way about other people. There are people who have just come to the conclusion that no one can be trusted.

And no matter what you tell them, you might be the most honest person in the world, but no matter what you tell them, if there is anything about your words that do not seem self-evidently true, the person will choose not to believe. Because they've adopted a mindset of cynicism and skepticism toward everything. Now, unfortunately, people who are quite that cynical are not in the majority.

And most people still make their decisions about belief and unbelief, at least in human beings, to believe human beings, on the basis of the evidence, on the basis of whether the person appears to be a truthful person or not. Unfortunately, there are many who have judged humans faithful and have made a misjudgment in so doing. There are many who have trusted in man and been greatly disappointed.

It says in, I think it's in Jeremiah 17.5, if I'm not mistaken, it says, Cursed is he who puts his trust in man. Now, actually, I have met people who think it's a virtue to put your trust in man, who actually think it's a virtue to be trusting souls, or perhaps we should say gullible souls, and they believe that they should have some faith in humanity and in man's basic goodness and so forth, and that it's a virtue to be trusting of other people. Even when other people have not earned trust, it is, in fact, as I said, Jeremiah 17.5, thus says the Lord, Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart departs from the Lord.

Why is there a curse on those who trust in man? Because man can't be trusted. Now, faith is therefore not itself some kind of a virtue, nor is it some kind of an essence or force. All of these things are views that have been held about faith by persons who are not using biblical definitions for it, but there are many secular people who feel that faith is a good thing.

They would call it something like, most of the time they call it positive thinking, or possibility thinking, or something like that, or just optimism. Somehow, there's a certain mindset among some unbelievers, and Christians as well, that optimism is just a good thing. You should just be optimistic and feel that everything's going to be going well and everybody who does wrong things really probably, given better circumstances, they would have done nicer things, that we trust their good intentions and so forth.

And this is not a viewpoint that's encouraged in the Scripture. Faith, in fact, is a judgment that you make, but such judgment should be made with judgment. It should be made, in other words, with some amount of discernment, with some degree of rational basis.

The Bible does not call upon us to believe in a God who has given us no reason to believe in Him. He's given us many reasons. It is true, no man has seen God at any time, and therefore we are called upon to make a choice.

Will I believe in this God I've never seen or not? Yet it is not without some kind of basis. There is not any dearth of reasons that God should be held to be trustworthy or to exist. It's quite obvious that anyone who is not biased against the existence of God would conclude that there at least is a God, from the evidence around.

And then in terms of knowing what kind of God we're dealing with, anybody who's acquainted with the biblical record can see the kind of God there is, a trustworthy God, a faithful God, one who keeps His covenant to a thousand generations, one who makes promises and never breaks them, one who is incapable of lying. And if a person sees that this is the kind of God there is, they will trust Him, period. Just like you trust people once you discover them, to be honest.

People who say, I just don't have enough faith, they often do not realize that they have probably as much faith as anybody has. They just put it in something other than God. Human beings are almost 100% creatures of faith.

I say almost 100% because the real percentage would probably be somewhere in the 90s. 90-something percent. And what I'm basing that figure on is the fact that we believe most of the things we believe without having seen them.

Most of what we know about history, we never saw take place. Most of what we read about present current events in the newspapers, we've never seen them happen. Yet we seem to have some assurance that certain things are going on in Somalia, and certain things are going on in what used to be Yugoslavia, and certain things are going on in Washington, D.C., and certain things are going on in various parts of the world that we have never seen with our own eyes, but we read the reports and we believe them.

And, well, we should most of the time. I'm not advocating any kind of attitude of cynicism or skepticism about these things. I'm just saying that is the way we live.

We have to. If we don't believe the reports, we'll simply be without information on the subject. Likewise, most of what we know about world geography or about science, almost everything in science, we've done very little of the experiments that would be necessary to do to personally discover all the things that we take for granted in the realm of science.

Certainly in the microscopic realm, as well as the astronomical realm, many of the things we believe we have never observed. And this is as it must be. I mean, I'm not complaining about this.

I'm not saying this is a fault on our part. We are simply left to this. Only the smallest fragment of the things we believe are things that we have discovered by personal experiment, to be true, or seen with our own eyes.

We are creatures of faith. And a person who says that he cannot believe, or that a person who says, I don't have very much faith, is failing to take into account that their entire life is lived essentially by faith in someone or something. We believe reports all the time.

We trust in people habitually. Even those who would say they are skeptical of human nature still trust people far more than they know. You would not get into an automobile and go out on the roads for one minute if you did not trust that the persons whom you've never even met, who are on the road with you, were going to obey some of the laws, some of the traffic laws.

For example, if the person's going the opposite direction from you on the same road, were not to stay on their side of the road, then it would be incredibly dangerous, in fact it would be idiotic, to go out on the streets. Yet you don't even know the people who are going to be coming the other direction on that road, yet you trust basically that they shall stay where they belong. Now, that trust is sometimes misplaced, because there are a very small percentage of drivers out there that are drunk, or that are, who fall asleep at the wheel, or who perhaps are suicidal or something, or just careless.

And they don't stay where they should be, and accidents occur. But if you were going to impose doubt on the whole human race based on those few cases, you would never go out on the street, because you'd realize, if there were not some degree of trust that you could put in human nature, at some level, you simply couldn't live in this world. You couldn't eat any food that you hadn't grown and prepared yourself, or which you hadn't personally watched being prepared.

You never know. It might have been poison. You couldn't eat at a restaurant, for instance.

You couldn't believe anything you read in books or in magazines or in newspapers. You just have to be skeptical about virtually everything, except those very, very few things that you have seen with your own eyes, and which you have found by your personal experiment to be true. Obviously no one can live like that, and no one attempts to.

And so those who say that they have no faith really are not taking into account the fact that they live by faith every moment of every day. The difference is they don't all put their faith in God. Many people put their faith in themselves or in some other person, perhaps their parents or their husband or their wife or someone else, their pastor, their employer, whatever, their best friend.

Some place their faith in the government or the economy or in the military or in some other thing larger than themselves that they hope will give them a sense of security by trusting in. This is a choice that people make. David said, some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.

In Psalm 20 and verse 7, I believe that is. That is a choice that is made. Some choose to put their trust in horses and chariots, which of course in David's day was simply a way of saying the military complex.

But we make a different choice. We choose to put our faith elsewhere, in the Lord our God. That is a choice we make.

And a person trusts continuously other human beings whether they are aware that they are doing so or not. So how can they say they can't trust God? The Bible says if we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. That would seem obvious to anybody who knows anything about God.

That by the way is in 1 John chapter 5 and verse 9. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. We do receive the witness of men continually. So why should we not believe God who cannot lie? It says in Romans chapter 3, let God be true and every man a liar.

And though every man is a liar, we are still unfortunately by the state of our existence compelled to believe in some men for some things. That faith is sometimes unwarranted, but we have no choice in the matter. When persons take vows at the altar to be married to each other, obviously that man and that woman are putting faith in each other.

They believe that those vows will be kept. Too frequently they are not. In fact, I don't know if there's ever been a marriage where everything vowed to at the altar has seamlessly been kept unbroken by the parties.

Even in marriages where there's no infidelity, still the kinds of things that are promised there at the altar often are pretty idealistic and give credit to human nature perhaps a little more than is deserved. But the point is there are people who have put their trust in spouses who turned out to be untrustworthy. Or in employers who promised certain benefits or wages who did not pay them.

Or in sales persons who made certain claims about their products and you purchased them and the products didn't live up to the claims. We live in a world where we are compelled to believe. We're not compelled to believe everything, but we are compelled to believe many things.

And many things that we cannot verify. In some cases we get burned. In some cases we find that the person that we believed is unreliable.

But that doesn't prevent us from ever believing anyone again. We cannot live in this world without believing in some people. Therefore, why couldn't we believe in God whose word has never been found fallacious? Who has never made a promise he didn't keep? Who never falsely advertised anything? And who has kept every covenant he's ever made? Even when provoked strongly to break it? Why should we not believe God then? John? Are you going to tell us why not? Well, that's not entirely true, but that is true.

Okay, good point. He says everything we know about God is written by men. That's not 100% true because I know some things from God in my own personal experience.

But it is true that the first things I learned about God and my initial decision to believe in God was based on the testimonies of others. Before I had any personal experience with God, I had to, in some sense, make a judgment about the testimonies of others. And it is true that most of what we know about God we get from the Bible, which was written by human beings.

Of course, under inspiration, we believe, but that, of course, is not something assumed by all parties. What about that? Well, I think we've touched on this briefly when we were talking about the authority of Scripture, but let me make this point again. It is true that most of what we believe, for instance, about the life of Jesus and what he taught, we have not learned by special revelation ourselves, but we get it by reading the Bible and trusting those who recorded it to be accurate witnesses.

We're trusting in men. But, as I said a moment ago, we do this continually. We do it all the time.

The question is not whether we are making ourselves vulnerable by trusting human testimony. This is something we don't have a choice about. We have to accept human testimony on many things.

We don't have to accept the testimony of those who wrote the Gospels. We can doubt them. We can be unbelievers if we choose.

The question is, do we have better reason to doubt these men than we have to doubt other people that we trust? The fact is that most people who do doubt the Bible doubt it not because these men have been found to be unreliable witnesses, but because they do not particularly like the things that these people are saying, and they would prefer to believe something else. I think that responsible Christian faith should rest upon very good reasons for believing. In fact, that's why we spent some time in the first week of this school going over the reasons for believing in the Bible, because most of what we believe about God we get from the Bible.

It's very important that we know why we would believe in the Bible. It's not enough that it just claims to be telling the truth. Many books claim to be telling the truth and are false.

What grounds do we have for believing that the Bible's claims are true? Well, we looked at that for, oh, how many hours? Six, seven and a half or so? And we do that at the beginning of the school for that very reason. We don't want anybody to have an irresponsible faith that is mainly based on wishful thinking. We want them to know that there is a credible basis for faith.

We don't want you to believe every book that comes along and claims to be the Word of God, only those that have a credible claim. And what we sought to show is that the Bible has an incredibly strong claim to being the Word of God and to being reliable. And until persons can find compelling reasons to disbelieve those claims, I feel that we're very safe in accepting those words.

Therefore, to say, well, the reason we don't believe God, even though we believe men, is because what we know of God comes from the writings of men, well, that's not really a fair statement. Why should we reject what these men say about God when we don't reject what a number of other human beings say about other issues we can't confirm by personal experience? At least we can confirm what they're saying about God in our personal relationship with Him. We can know Him.

I may never know for sure what the shape of the continent of Africa is except by looking at it on a map and trusting the cartographers who drew it to be accurate. I may never be able to discover that by personal experiment to be true, but I can live with their decision on the matter. I can live with accepting their expertise on the point.

Fortunately, I don't have to live that way on the matter of God. There are some things the Bible says about God that I'll never know for sure until I see Him, that is, by experiment, but I can at least find out whether such a God exists by having a personal relationship with Him and finding out whether He's a faithful God after all. The point I'm making, however, is that faith is not an unusual trait that a few people possess and other people are simply left without.

Now, I might as well make it clear. There is a major theological stream that disagrees with me on this point, and that is basically that which is called Calvinism. There may be some Calvinists among you.

Please bear with me when I point out to you where I would differ from Calvinism. Respectfully, since many of my favorite authors are Calvinists, I nonetheless have to disagree with some of the propositions of Calvinism. It is the view of Calvinism that nobody possesses faith of a sort that could save them unless God infuses it into them or creates it in them.

They base this on a number of factors. One is that the Bible says a few times that faith is a gift from God. For example, in Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace you've been saved through faith and that, they understand that to refer to the faith, that is not of yourselves, it, that is the faith, is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.

Now, I might say, first of all, that it's not entirely clear that that, which is not of yourselves but is a gift of God, is a reference to faith. It may be the salvation, that is a gift from God and not of works. But even if we accept the Calvinist understanding that faith is a gift from God, it does not necessarily follow that only those who have a special gifting can have faith and that others are simply not able to have it.

It could be said that God offers faith to all men as a gift, but not all except the gift. Those who do have made a choice to. Those who do not have likewise made a choice to.

It is not simply a God of, it's not just a matter of God selecting arbitrarily, he's going to give it to that person and not that person and I'll give it to that one and not that one. Which is how some people almost picture the situation that God has made arbitrary decisions about whom he will save and whom he will not save, and the ones that he chooses to save, he simply gives them the faith as a gift. Yet, you know, that's not quite how I understand the biblical teaching on the subject, but I have no trouble saying that faith is a gift from God.

I certainly believe that I must give God the credit for the fact that I have faith today, but that doesn't mean I didn't make a choice or could not have made a different choice than what I made. If I believe it is because God has given me something to believe. He's given me a witness.

He's allowed me to hear the gospel. He first sent his son in the first place. He has demonstrated his faithfulness.

He's exposed me to his word. He's given me the opportunity to hear the gospel. He's even, perhaps, disposed me in some measure to receive it.

Jesus said, no man can come to me except my father who sent me draw him, and therefore I have no difficulty saying that my coming to Christ was a result very much of God's activity upon my own heart and in my circumstances to give me opportunities to know what I know and to hear what I heard and to believe what I have chosen to believe. But, having said that, I can say, therefore, I have to give God all the credit for the fact that I'm a believer today. He gave me the gift of being able to be a believer by giving me something to put my faith in and gave me good reasons to put my faith in.

But that's not the same thing as saying that he just unilaterally put faith in me and that there was nothing I had to say about it. You see, God could have presented the same gospel to me and given me all the same incentives for belief that he did, and I could have, in my rebellion and stubbornness, said, well, I still choose to live a life of sin. I prefer not to believe those things.

I still choose to be an unbeliever because that agrees more with my disposition and my goals in life. And it is my opinion that people have that power and that people do that very thing. This, however, is not what Calvinism says happens.

The Bible indicates that we are dead in trespasses and sins, and to the Calvinists that means really dead. So dead, in fact, you can't even exercise faith unless God puts it in you because he has elected you to be one of the ones who will be saved. And if he does that, then you are drawn irresistibly.

One of the basic tenets of Calvinism is irresistible grace. If you're one of the elect, God irresistibly draws you, and irresistibly means you don't have the power to resist. Nor the inclination to resist.

Why should you? He's worked in you in such a way as to make you want to be saved and so forth. And so it's not really a matter of you're resisting but can't hold back. It's more a matter of it never occurs to you to resist because God has done all the work in you to make you want to move forward.

Now, frankly, I want to say this. While I'm saying I don't agree with that view, I'm not really opposed to it in the sense of finding it dangerous or anything like that. I could easily interpret my own Christian experience in terms of the Calvinist explanation or not.

There's nothing in... Calvinists usually think that if someone who takes the contrary view is trying to salvage human virtue or give credit to humans and not give God all the credit. I have no problem giving God all the credit. I'd like to give him all the credit entirely, to tell you the truth.

But unfortunately, along with all the credit would have to come all the blame for persons that he didn't give this faith to. And, you know, I don't mind giving God all the credit for my salvation. He certainly deserves it.

And I don't particularly desire to salvage any of it for myself. I am concerned, though, about the implications of such a doctrine. And, of course, mostly I'm concerned about whether it's biblical or not.

And I don't believe it is. But the implications are if God puts an irresistible attraction to himself in the hearts of those whom he chooses, then anybody who doesn't have that, God simply hasn't chosen to give it to them. And had he chosen to, they'd be saved too.

They are not saved because he has not chosen to give them that. Therefore, it would seem to be a folly to say that God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance when it's entirely in God's power to bring everyone to repentance by an act of irresistible grace. You see, if God's the only will in this matter, if God's the only one making choices in this matter, then everyone who goes to hell goes to hell because God chose for them to and for no, really ultimately no other reason than that.

I believe the Bible teaches there's much more human responsibility involved than that. And that is why God can righteously damn the lost, is because they do have opportunity to believe but resist it. Stephen said to the Sanhedrin, you people always resist the Holy Spirit in his sermon in Acts 7. Jesus said to the Pharisees, How many times I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chickens under her wing, but you would not.

Very clearly God would love to draw some who simply will not come. And therefore this idea of salvation is God's the only agent involved, that you're just laying there dead and limp and God puts faith in you and draws you in an irresistible way and he could do that to anyone he wants to, he just chose you and didn't choose someone else. It's maybe flattering to you, but it's not exactly, to my mind, fitting the biblical material.

So I might as well let you in on the fact right off that I am not Calvinistic in this respect. At the same time, I don't want you to get the impression that I've got any kind of vendetta against Calvinism. Most of the people I know who are Calvinists are very good folks and some of my favorite commentators would have to describe themselves as Calvinists.

I just have to take, like you do with all commentators, some of what they say with a grain of salt, recognizing the grid they're reading through and talking through. And no doubt you have to do the same when you hear me teach, whatever I may be teaching. But what I want to say to you is this.

Calvinism itself does not really place much in the area of choice in the matter of you believing. They do not agree with what I said. When I said everybody has faith, it's just a matter of choosing to put it in Christ or in something else.

Some people want to put their faith in Buddhism or in Islam or simply in mankind. And others make the right choice and put their faith in Jesus. The Calvinist says, no, Jesus isn't one of the options for anybody except those that God just puts it in them to believe in Jesus.

But that's not how I understand the Bible. Cain was the first unbeliever, I think, we find in the Bible. He's even said to be, when 1 John 3 speaks of him, he was of the wicked one.

Certainly that would seem to be a non-elect sort of person, if he's of the wicked one. And he didn't get saved, as far as we know. And therefore, we'd have to say he was non-elect.

God did not draw him with irresistible grace. God did not put faith in him. And yet God reasoned with him and said, listen, Cain, why is your countenance fallen? Why are you so upset? If you do well, you'll be accepted too.

That's a very important statement. Either God was just playing with him and mocking him and teasing him or else God was making a bona fide offer. Listen, Cain, Abel is accepted by me because he made the right choice.

If you make the right choice, you will be accepted too. Now, if God arbitrarily makes choices, this person I want to save, this person I don't want to save, then we have to clearly say Cain was one of those that God did not choose to save because he is of the wicked one and killed his brother and died in exile from God and so forth and certainly we do not expect to see Cain in heaven. So he was not chosen to be saved.

Yet, did he have an opportunity? He did. Yet, God held him accountable for his choices. He said if you made a different choice, you'd be in the same category as Abel.

So certainly human choice plays a role here. And it seems fairly obvious that two persons exposed to the same information, let's take it out of the realm of religious information, let's just say any information, any information that neither party has ever confirmed by personal experiment to be true, two people are exposed to it, one can choose to believe it and the other sitting there with equal intelligence can choose not to believe it. Now what makes one person choose to believe it and another person choose not to believe it? Maybe any number of factors may be drawn to explain it.

Perhaps one feels that they don't have enough evidence, that the claim seems somewhat unbelievable by its very nature. Perhaps they don't like the looks of the person who is telling them or they have judged that person to be a liar. Maybe they've caught that person in a lie before.

Or maybe there's just something about the information that goes against what they prefer to believe. They've already got their own philosophy in place. They've already got their own opinions about the subject and it's not in their interest to humble themselves and say they were wrong.

So they simply choose to be skeptical about the information they're now hearing. The other person without those factors present believes it easily. And I believe that that is the same when a person is exposed to God's witness, God's record.

A person can judge God to be faithful, and if they do, they believe. Or they can judge Him to be a liar. If they make that judgment, obviously they disbelieve.

Now, I've known all my life, since my youth, the doctrine of justification by faith. Being raised in the home I was, an evangelical home, I have never been ignorant of the fact that people are saved by faith, not by works. And that faith is all important.

In fact, it was quite clear to me at an early age that the Bible indicated that faith was essential to almost everything. When you pray, you're supposed to pray with faith. You receive the Holy Spirit by faith.

You receive salvation by faith. It seems that all the blessings of God come through faith. James said of the man who has no faith, or the man who wavers in his faith, he said, let not that man think that he will receive anything from the Lord.

It seems very clear that faith is a key to almost everything, if not everything, in the Christian life. And I guess my young mind, growing up, could not help but wonder, why? Why faith? Why not something else? Wouldn't God have been in the position, had He chosen, to make the conditions of salvation and blessings something other than faith? Is faith the only option that He had, or did He just choose that out of a bag, and say, well, you know, there's got to be something to differentiate between those who are saved and those who are lost. I guess it'll be, I think I'll make it faith, you know.

If He had chosen, could God have not made it so that a four-minute mile can be saved? Those who are born with red hair can be saved. Those who stand more than five foot two can be saved, or something like that. I mean, or, you know, people who have a good disposition can be saved, or something else.

Couldn't God have made it one of those other things, or any other thing? Were there a number of options available to God, and out of those options He chose faith to be the thing that He decided to bless and to honor? I used to think so. And when I was growing up, not having thought this through quite adequately enough, I concluded that the reason He chose faith instead of something else was because that makes it accessible to everybody. Because even children can have faith, and faith is something that, it doesn't take strength or moral fortitude or whatever.

It's more or less something that anybody could do. Even a paraplegic or a quadriplegic can exercise faith. Even though they may not be able to exercise any muscle of their body below the neck, they can still exercise faith.

And so I figured, well, faith, probably God chose it to all be on faith because that makes it accessible. And no doubt there's some truth in that. I don't suppose that was an altogether wrong conclusion, but it certainly wasn't as comprehensive as I now feel we can answer on this matter.

I'd like to give you several, or a few reasons anyway, why faith is all important, and why faith is the thing above all others that matters to God. We're at Hebrews chapter 11. I don't know if you're still there, but we were there a while ago, and I want you to turn there again now if we could.

I'd like to read the first three verses, and this will help us to appreciate why God has made faith the all-important factor in a relationship with Himself. Hebrews 11, 1 through 3 says, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it, that is by faith, the elders, which means Old Testament saints, obtained a good testimony.

So they were saved by faith too. The Old Testament people were saved and received a good testimony from God by their faith also, just like New Testament people. Verse 3, By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Now let's stop there for a moment. The first verse is a very well-known verse, and it deserves to be well-known. It's full of information, although I must confess I've known this verse.

I knew this verse for many years before I had ever really thought through and understood it quite the way that I do now. He gives us what is at least a functional definition of faith in verse 1. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things that are not seen. There are two realms here that faith helps us to access.

One is the realm of the future, things that are hoped for. The other is the realm of the unseen, the invisible realm. Both of these are realities.

Both of them are important for us to know something about. But both of them are inaccessible to us through the normal means of knowledge. Most of the things that we learn about the material world, we learn because it is material.

We can see it. We can feel it. Experiments can be done on it.

It can be measured. It is substantial. And the best evidence we have that it exists is that we can see it.

The material realm is that which we're all born with an awareness of, and our awareness of it grows through the natural senses as we live in this world. But the invisible realm is not something that people are born with an automatic apprehension of, or that they automatically accumulate data about by growing up. This is something that has to be accessed through something extraordinary, through another means than simply the five senses.

Likewise, the future is something that no man knows with certainty about unless it be revealed from God, because only God really knows for sure what the future holds. And therefore, the only thing we can know anything about the future is if God says something and we believe what he says. What we're saying is that faith is a means to knowledge.

It is the only access we have to certain kinds of knowledge, and these kinds of knowledge are very important to God for us to know. There are things that he wants us to set our sights on in the future. He wants us to know that there is, for example, a second coming of Christ and a resurrection from the dead.

This affects the way we make our choices. He wants us to know that there is a future judgment. He wants us to know that there is a life after this life.

These are things we hope for, but they are things that we could not have any knowledge of or have any access to unless somebody told us who knows, and only God knows. And, of course, we have to believe what he says, because God could tell us all that he knows on the subject, and we could still not know it if we didn't believe him. Faith is that which accesses the realm of the future, the things hoped for.

And it is the only evidence we have of things that can't be seen or tested through the senses. Now let me talk about these two points just for a few moments, because this really unfolds quite profitably for us if we understand it. To say that faith is the substance of things hoped for is saying a great deal, because things that are hoped for have not yet materialized.

They are not yet substantial. They don't exist in material or what we would normally consider substantial form. They don't have substance, because they're not here yet.

This podium has substance, and even some non-material things that are present have substance. My relationship with my wife and children is a non-material kind of thing. It's a dynamic thing, but it is real.

It is something I can count on. It's something that I know is really there. It's substantial.

It is real to me. But the future, how can any future thing that has not yet happened be equally real to me? How can I live as if the resurrection is a reality, just like I can live as if my relationship with my children today is reality? As you know, I've lost a wife to death. And when she died, one of the things that made it possible for me to cope well with that was that I knew I'd see her again.

I knew there'd be a resurrection. I knew that her battered body, in which the paramedics said virtually every bone in her body was crushed by the impact of the truck that hit her, and she was just a clump of human tissue on the ground with shattered bones. I knew that someday that flesh and bones would be resurrected.

I knew that for sure. In fact, that reality was as real to me, and I could embrace it as real as much as her death at that moment was real to me. But only because I really believe what the Bible says.

Because I really believe what God has said about this. I have not yet seen the resurrection take place, but I live in its reality. I can embrace it as substantially true, even though it's in the realm of the inaccessible other than by faith.

If I did not believe the promises of God, I would have no way to appreciate anything future. I would have no assurance whatsoever, and could certainly not embrace as a reality the resurrection. But, since I know God is telling the truth, and because I believe Him, the resurrection is just as real to me as the things that are happening right now are real to me.

Because God, who cannot lie, has told me what He knows about the future, and I can embrace that as if it had substance right now. My faith is the substance of it. Faith gives this reality.

It gives it a reality to me which is not artificial. It is, in fact, something that has not been realized in history yet, but it is real because God has declared it to be real, and I can embrace it as if it had already come, because God has guaranteed that it shall. And I can embrace it now.

It is what I hope for, but it is real enough for me to embrace it now. Look at verse, in Hebrews 11, look at verse 13. After it is listed a number of people of faith, most recently Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob, it says in verse 13, these all died in faith, not having received the promises, meaning the things promised, but having seen them afar off, that is in the future, they were assured of them and embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

Now, they embraced these things, although they never saw them materialize in their own lifetime. They lived with the reality of them as if they were substantial, they could just lay their hands on them and put their arms on them and hold on to them and experience and enjoy their reality now. We have talked in other sessions about trials and the fact that the Bible guarantees us that all things work together for good to those who love God and who are called according to His promise.

That means that even the trials are there for an eventual benefit that I will realize. Therefore, while I am in a trial, if I really believe what God says, if I really have faith in what God says, then I know for a fact that while I may not know exactly how this trial will work for the good, nonetheless it will, that someday this trial will be over and what will be in its place will be some benefit that came about as a result of the trial. I know that because the Bible says so.

Furthermore, I have seen that to be the case in past trials. No trial that I have ever had so far lasted forever. Like the Bible says, it came to pass.

Which is not exactly saying the same thing as what it sounds like when I say it that way, but it didn't come to stay, it came to pass. The trials that I have had in the past have passed. And what I have in their place is some better thing.

I have more experience, I have more perseverance, I have learned lessons, I have turned from wrong courses of action and so forth as a result of my past trials. It's true. They have worked together for good.

I can see that is true and I can at this moment in time rejoice that I went through everything I've ever been through, including the things that were not easy to rejoice in at the time. I now, in hindsight, can rejoice in them because you know why? What was only at that time hoped for, namely relief and benefit from the suffering, at that time it was hoped for because it was yet future, but it's been realized now. Therefore, I can see that God's promise was true, He kept His word, and I can now rejoice that I went through such a thing.

Now, if I have faith, then the trial I may be in right now, I can trust that God is telling the truth when He says someday this will have worked for my good, I will be able to look back at the present trial, even as I can now look back at past trials, and I will be able to rejoice that I went through it, having seen what is, from my current vantage point, only something hoped for. In the midst of my trial, what I hope for is the end of my trial, and that it be not wasted, that I might gain something in God as a result of having gone through it. There is a guarantee of Scripture that I shall.

And that being so, I can trust in what God has promised, and in the midst of my trial, I can reason thus. When this trial is over, I can rejoice that I went through it, because I will have gained from it. Therefore, by faith, I will rejoice in it now.

Why wait until then? My eventual benefit from this trial is something yet hoped for, but my faith can embrace it now. I can rejoice as if I possess it now. Why not? If I really believe it.

Faith is not trying to psych myself up into some phony optimism. It is simply laying hold on what I know to be true about the future, because God has said it, and I believe Him. And how can I not believe Him? And therefore, how can I not live in the joy of what I know He has promised will come about in the end? This is giving substance to things that are hoped for.

It makes them real to me before they actually materialize. Not artificially. Not by creating new realities.

Now, by the way, here's where I need to clarify a point. There are some who take this Scripture, faith is the substance of things hoped for, and who paraphrase it, faith gives substance to things hoped for, and then they say, now faith is a force that creates realities. That if you hope to have a Cadillac, if you hope to prosper, if you hope to be healed, then all you need to do is focus your faith on that, and that reality will come about as the result of your faith.

Your faith, therefore, is almost like a power, a force, almost like magic, really, which you decide what it is you're hoping for, and you put your faith in it, and begin to confess that this is so. And in doing so, it will give substance to your hopes. In other words, it will create realities, is how they understand this.

Now, that's not what I understand, and that's certainly not how I'm explaining it. I'm not talking about faith as a force that creates things. I'm saying, faith is putting my trust in what God has declared will be true someday, allowing me to embrace it as if it were real now, because I know that it will be.

My faith is not creating the reality. My faith is just allowing me to enjoy the reality before it materializes. It's allowing me to say, well, God is going to give me a cause to rejoice for this later.

Therefore, I will rejoice now, because I really believe that the time will come when I'll find it impossible not to rejoice about this. Therefore, why should I be grieved? Why should I dishonor God as if something is not going to work out the way He says it is? Why should I not live in the reality as if it were real now? My faith is not going to create the reality. My faith is not a creative force.

My faith is simply laying hold on what God said and trusting Him and really believing Him. And that gives substance, things hope for, in the sense that it allows me to enjoy them and embrace them even though I just see them afar off through the promises of God. That's what it says in Hebrews 11, 13.

These died in faith. They had not received the promises, but they saw them afar off and were assured of them and embraced them as if they had already come about. Why? Because God had said it and they were quite sure God could not lie about this and what God had said was surely going to happen.

Even if they did not live to see it. So, their faith gave them something to embrace, something substantial. But the other part of verse 1 of Hebrews 11 says, And faith is the evidence of things not seen.

Now, we've already explored this point a little bit earlier in this lecture when I said, you know, we believe a lot of things that we haven't seen. We have to. If our knowledge was to be confined to those things that we had personally witnessed or proved by experiment to be true to our satisfaction, our knowledge would be extremely narrow.

We would know very little. We cannot trust any human being unless they told us such things as we already knew from experience. And although we might know by experience that such persons had been friendly and honest to us in the past, we couldn't be sure that they would always be so in the future, so we'd have to live with a continual skepticism and a continual distrust of people because we have not yet seen what they will do tomorrow or even today, later today, and therefore we could not trust them because we haven't proven that they will be trustworthy.

There's no way to do that. And therefore, we trust all the time. We can't live that way.

We have to trust in things that we haven't seen. Faith is the way we have access to information that we didn't learn by experiment. We trust in what other people have learned by experiment or what others have witnessed, what others have testified to, and we count them honest, if they are or if they seem to be, and we believe it.

And then, by believing them, we suddenly have access to all of their information that they've learned by their experiences. And if we read good authorities on certain subjects, all the years of research they've done, all the things they've proven by their experience to be true, if we count them honest men and we count them competent, then we have access to everything they know without doing all the same experiences or experiments ourselves. You see, faith opens up a world to us that is otherwise unseen and inaccessible to us, because we'll never have the time to visit every place on the planet.

We'll never have time to look at everything through telescopes and microscopes that others have seen. We'll never be able to get in a time machine and go back and see whether the history we've heard really happened. This information is in the realm of the unseen.

We don't see it. Some people may have seen it, but we haven't seen it, and yet we have access to it and we have evidence that it is true by our trust in persons who testify to it. Now far more important in the realm of the unseen is the realm that no one has seen, in which category belong God, Jesus Christ, no one in this generation has seen Him, the Holy Spirit, the angels of God, the demons, the devil, even issues of eternal life.

No one has ever seen hell. No one here on earth has seen hell. I've heard testimonies from people who claim to.

I don't put my faith in those testimonies. However, even though I do believe in hell, I don't believe much of the witnesses who say they've been there. I've heard a number of them.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that heaven and hell, God and Satan, angels and demons, salvation and the lost state are all issues that are part of the unseen realm. None of us have seen these things. So how are we to know about them? How can we possibly know them? Only by faith.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen. How do I know about you? How do I know you exist? Well, I can see you. You are in the tangible, visible realm.

And the best evidence a man can have, it would seem to me, of that which is visible is that he has seen something. In a court of law, an eyewitness is the best kind of witness you can have. It's much stronger than having somebody sit down and reason from circumstantial evidence that such and such must have been the case because it makes the best logical explanation of the facts.

Although sometimes, no doubt that's all the court has to go on is the logical application of circumstantial evidence, but no one saw the crime happen. Yet, an eyewitness is far better than that. Hearsay evidence also is not usually acceptable in court.

I heard that someone said that he did it. Well, get another witness. You know, I mean, that person doesn't know anything.

He said, what he heard. To have heard something, to have reasoned something out, these are not considered to be anywhere near as good evidence of something that really happened in the tangible, real world as having a living eyewitness who said, I saw it, and I know it happened because I saw it. The eyes are considered to be the best evidence, gatherers, of things in the real world.

How do I know the grass is green? Because I can see that. If I were blind, I'd have to take your word for it. Although the word green might not mean anything to me if I was blind.

It wouldn't matter whether it was green, blue, or some other color because I wouldn't know what those looked like. But the point is, I can see many things in the visible world. And once I've seen them, there's very little to convince me that things are otherwise than what I've seen them to be.

I don't see any black people in this room. We have had black students in the past, but we have all white students here right now. Nobody could convince me that there's a black student in this room right now.

Do you know why? Because I can see every face in this room. And also, those people might say, well, by the law of averages, the population of the United States and Canada being a certain percentage black, there should be X number of black people in here, just on the statistical averages. Well, I trust my eyes more than the statistical averages.

I don't see any black people. And I don't necessarily wish it were that way. I wouldn't mind having more black students.

But that's the fact of the matter is my eyes tell me what statistics could not. And my vision is the best evidence I have of things that are seen. But what evidence do I have of the unseen? I know that you're here because I see you, but how do I know that angels are here? The Bible says, the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers him.

And he's given his angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways so that in their hands they will bear thee up lest thou dash thy foot against stone. Do I believe that? I do. Therefore, because I believe it, I know it.

I know that you are here not because the Bible tells me so, because it doesn't. The Bible doesn't tell me whether you're here or not. I have to resort to my eyes to get evidence for that conclusion.

But the conclusion that angels are in this room or that God is comes from another source. Those are in the realm of the unseen. What evidence have I of that but my faith in what God has said.

Faith is the evidence of the unseen realm. And by the way, it's better evidence than I have in my eyes. My eyes have on rare occasions deceived me.

I thought seeing someone in the distance that it was somebody other than it was. And when I got closer, I found out my eyes were wrong. I've watched sleight of hand magicians on stages deceive my eyes.

All of your senses can be deceived. For the most part, they're what we're stuck with. And they can be relied on most of the time.

But there are times when even they will deceive us. Even what a person believes he saw may not have happened. Therefore, although it is the best evidence we have of the seen realm, our vision is not perfect evidence.

It is not the absolute arbiter of truth. I could be dreaming that you're here. You might not really be here.

This may be a dream I'm having. I could be wrong about that, but I can't be wrong about whether angels are present or God. You know why? Because I know that on the basis of believing a witness who has never lied, a witness who cannot fail to tell the truth, a witness who has never given misinformation.

Therefore, and this is not simply said for effect, this is absolutely true, I am more sure there are angels in this room than I am that you're here. Though I must say, I'm quite convinced you're here. I'm not really living under any delusions about that.

I'd say I'm 99.999% sure that you're here, but I'm 100% sure that God is here and angels are here because I have good evidence of it. He said so, and I believe Him. And faith is the evidence of things that are unseen and is the substance of things hoped for.

Therefore, because I have faith, I can have access to such information as God desperately wants me to know Himself. He wants me to know that my name is written in heaven, yet how can I know it? I've never been there. I've never seen the register to see whether my name would be there.

But Jesus said I should rejoice that my name is written in heaven. How can I be sure of it except that I believe it? It's unseen to me, but God has given me the criteria for being there, and I've met the criteria by His grace, and I'm there, and therefore I can live in that reality knowing full well. Nothing can dissuade me from this.

I know for a fact that if I die today, I have a place in heaven. And I can, in fact, I can wrestle wild beasts and Ephesus or hazard my life on a daily basis like Paul said he did. Why would I do that if I were not 100% sure of things that can only be known through faith? That's a good question.

Once we have faith in the Bible, is that more reliable or more to be trusted than logical evidence? Yes. Once we have a reliable faith in the Bible. You see, what we sought to do a couple weeks ago was to determine whether we have good grounds to have faith in the Bible.

Whether it really does. No, not at all. Not at all.

Although one does feed the other, it doesn't create a cyclic reasoning. If I'm looking at a, if there's a number of books laid out before me and they all claim to be inspired by God. You know, I've got the Upanishads, I've got the Bhagavad Gita, I've got the Book of Mormon, I've got the Bible, I've got the Koran.

All of them claim to be revelations somebody got from somewhere other than human sources. Okay, now I say now, which, if any, of these are true? Maybe they're all frauds, or maybe they're not all frauds. They can't all be true because they contradict each other.

Therefore, at most, one of them could be true and at worst, all of them could be false. So, if I look at them, I really am in a position to have to decide which one is a reliable witness. You see, I don't just go eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

I feel good about this one. I'm getting good vibes, you know, off this book here. I need to say, well, do I have reasonable, is it reasonable and rational for me to accept the testimony of these witnesses? That's what I have to decide.

Once I have made a decision that it is, that changes the whole level of my thinking. Once I say, okay, I have become convinced that these guys are truth-telling men, and that when they say they heard from God, they were, then they become the source of my understanding about the subjects about which they speak. I don't have to test every individual claim they make after that, once I have discovered they're honest witnesses.

Just like, you know, using again the example of the court of law, if a witness is caught in one lie, then it's likely that his entire testimony is going to be open to question. But if the man has excellent character references, and he's known to be an honest, you know, upstanding citizen, and he has no obvious reason to be lying about what he's saying, and that no lie is found in his testimony, then he's going to have credibility, and much of what he says will be accepted simply on the basis that he has credibility as a witness. If a person loses credibility as a witness, then of course, it sends you back to square one.

You know, you don't know if anything they said is true, so you've got to go back and try to do the research from scratch. What I'm saying here is that if the Bible, if the writers of the Bible are reliable witnesses in the matters of which they speak, then having established that that is true, we can look at their testimony and say, this is the most reliable stuff we have, and even my reasoning cannot overthrow what was revealed to these men by God. You see, I must trust in the Lord before my heart and not lean on my own understanding.

Certainly, my mind must be involved in the decision of whether these witnesses are to be trusted. I mean, let's face it, there are some books like the Gospel of Thomas that claim to tell the story of Jesus, and it claims to be written by Thomas, who, if he did write a gospel, would have been presumably a good witness. He was an apostle.

But why don't I let, why don't I just read the Gospel of Thomas and accept, you know, gullibly everything that's in there? Well, because I use my brain a little bit. I say, well, first of all, the Gospel of Thomas didn't appear until the second century after Thomas was dead. Secondly, it ascribes to Jesus things that are totally out of character for Jesus as he is, as he is described in the realistic and, you know, trustworthy gospels that were from the first century and were from eyewitnesses.

Therefore, you've got a different Jesus here in the Gospel of Thomas than you have in these gospels that are known or believed to have good reason to be accepted. So, my decision about the Gospel of Thomas, toss it. It's, you know, it's not a reliable witness.

Now, if I made the same decision about the writings of Paul or Matthew or Mark or Luke or John, then I'd be left without a Bible to trust in. But, since my judgment of these men is that they are telling the truth, that they are reliable witnesses, then, of course, I don't have to question every individual thing they say or try to find a reasonable basis for it. Like, can I figure out how God made a virgin pregnant? Not important to.

You know, if these guys really know that it was true and they're honest men and I've discovered them to be speaking from God, then I can accept that God made a virgin pregnant without my reasoning telling me how or why or how frequently or how likely that is to happen or whatever. Okay. Human reasoning should not be given more authority than the Bible.

Okay. Let me put it this way. I would say, I'm not saying our faith is a better witness to the reliability of the Bible, per se.

It is a better witness to the facts and truths that are stated in the Bible. Now, that's a slight different thing. In other words, if I'm asking the question, is the Bible as a document a reliable witness? I don't use my faith to make that decision.

I use my thinking to figure that out and to see the evidence to see whether it's a good proposition to hold to. Now, if I make that decision, then on the question of what about the individual truths and facts that are contained there? Yeah, I don't have, I can take those by faith and the fact that the Bible says them is a better reason for me to believe them than private research I can do elsewhere or my reasoning or something else I could do. Right.

In other words, if the Bible says the sun stood still for about a day and my mind tells me that doesn't make much sense, you know, that would seemingly, you know, throw everything into chaos, you know, if God made the earth stop turning and so forth, my mind may tell me that, but somebody who I have decided to believe as a witness from God, an inspired writer has told me it did happen. Really, my reasoning has to bow to the revelation that God has given once I have understood that it is a revelation. Okay, so it's more like the individual facts and declarations of the scripture.

My faith in the scripture overrides my human reasoning about whether those declarations are true or not, but only after I have reasonably reached, come up with some reason to believe that it is a reliable book and that it really is from God. Okay, so, faith is, and that didn't get us off the subject, by the way, that's exactly to the subject we're talking about. Faith is that which gives us access to knowledge of things that we would not know by reasoning or by seeing, and these are things that are not minor things.

The existence of God, what kind of a God He is, is He this kind or is He that kind of a God? Did Jesus rise from the dead? Is my name written in heaven? Is there a hell? Are there demons and a devil that I should be watching out for? Are there angels surrounding me, protecting me, and ministering to me? Those are all issues that can only be answered not from the seen world, but from the unseen world, and the only evidence I have of that is believing, believing what God said. God has seen those things. They're not unseen to Him.

Therefore, He is an eyewitness of those things for which I can never be an eyewitness until I die and go to heaven, and until then, I've got to have some way of knowing. Faith is the evidence I have. If God said it, I simply believe that He is a truthful God.

Now, faith, therefore, and to put it really in summary fashion in verses 1 through 3 of Hebrews 11, faith is that which gives us access to necessary knowledge of God and of other things important to God for us to know. So, it's not as if some other thing other than faith could have been put in that position instead of faith. But faith is a necessary thing.

By its very nature, it is required for me to have knowledge of things that are unseen and to be able to embrace as substantial things for which I can only now hope. An example of that is given there in Hebrews 11 verse 3 where it says, By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God. Well, no one was there except God.

How could we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God if not that we just trust God when He says so? That's how we understand it. Faith gives us understanding of an unseen reality of the past which persons who lack that faith do not understand. It's through faith that we understand.

It's through faith that we know what happened because no human observer was there to testify and those who reject the witness of God simply must live without knowing. They must live in ignorance. They must live without understanding of what happened.

But those who have faith can understand, can know, can be sure. And that is, of course, the first reason that faith is necessary. The second is also in Hebrews 11 verse 6. Hebrews 11 verse 6 says, But without faith it is impossible to please Him.

For he who comes to God must believe that He exists and that He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Now, there's two things you have to believe about God if you're going to come to Him and have a relationship with Him. One is that He exists, of course, and the other is that He's the kind of God who appreciates and rewards our attempts to seek Him out.

In other words, He wants to know us. He will not hide Himself if we seek Him. It will not be an exercise in futility and frustration if we set our sights to seek Him diligently, but rather it will be rewarded.

We'll find Him. He's a findable God. He's a knowable God.

He's not a God who desires to hide, but who desires to be known. And no one will ever come to God unless they have these basic convictions that there is a God and that their pursuit of Him will not be in vain. In other words, faith is necessary for a relationship to God.

And that is by its very nature the case. It's not that God could have said, okay, everybody who's got brown eyes can have a relationship with me. Relationships are not based on brown eyes.

Relationships are based on faith. That's what all relationships are. This is simply what a relationship is.

If we were to take faith out of the picture and say, well, you can have a relationship with God on the basis of, you know, having brown eyes and red hair or whatever, then we have to redefine what a relationship is. Because what a relationship is by definition is two people who trust each other at some level. That's what makes a marriage.

Now, you might think that love is what makes a marriage. Well, ideally. But not all marriages are ideal.

Ideally, people who are married love each other supremely and unendingly. But that's ideal. Many people find after they're married that their love, at least the kind of euphoric infatuation that they felt at the time they were married, eventually was not constant.

They might have it at various points during their life together, but there are certainly times when they don't feel that euphoric. There are times when that kind of love is not their experience. It would be wonderful if it were.

There are times when they might even wonder whether they even love each other anymore. But if that were the basis of marriage, then such people should divorce when that love is gone. But that's not what's right.

Of course, that's what the world thinks because the world thinks that love is the basis of marriage. In fact, some have even changed the vows to say, I'll stay with you for better or for worse, you know, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and health, as long as we both shall love. Instead, as long as we both shall live.

But you see, that's actually a vow that's sometimes taken by secular people now because they think, well, love is the basis of marriage. As long as I love you the way I feel like I do now, I'll stay true to you. As soon as I don't love you anymore and we don't love each other, well, then we can go off and find someone else we love.

That is reasonable thinking if the basis of relationship is love. The basis of relationship is not love. The basis of relationship is faith.

Trust. That is why vows are made at the altar. Because certain promises are made and the parties agree to the terms only because they trust each other to be telling the truth when they make those vows.

Persons who live together unmarried do so because they can't make such vows or could not live up to them if they made them. They cannot be faithful. Or at least they don't want to commit themselves to be.

They don't think they can be faithful. Therefore, they don't make any promises to that effect. And the party they're living with doesn't expect anything in terms of long-term faithfulness from them or else they get married.

Marriage by its very nature, which is, by the way, a divinely instituted picture of our relationship to God, is it not? For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church, Paul said. Marriage is a picture of our relationship with God.

What is marriage but promises that are made of exclusivity of relationship, of commitment and loyalty, which can only really make sense if they're being made by people who make them in good faith, who are honest, and if both parties can trust the other to be telling the truth. If a woman ceases to love her husband, that's not necessarily the end of the marriage. It might make the marriage less happy than it was.

Obviously, love is a principal factor in happiness in marriage, but happiness is not all there is to life. It's all most carnal people are seeking, but there's more important things even than happiness. Holiness is more important than happiness.

A.W. Tozer said, if I have to choose between holiness and happiness, give me holiness. I've got eternity to be happy. Now, it'd be nice to be happy and holy, and it is possible to be, but we have a choice into whether we'll be holy, and actually we do have a choice of whether we'll be happy too, to a certain extent, but we don't have the choice as to whether our circumstances will always be such as will be conducive to happiness.

Those things are sometimes beyond our control, and if you marry somebody and later they don't live up to what you thought they should be like or your love for them diminishes, there's no excuse there for divorce. You've made a vow, and faithful people keep their vows. There's never been a marriage broken yet because of sexual differences or financial pressures or otherwise disagreements over children and children's upbringing and education and so forth.

These are the things that the world claims breakup marriages, but none of those things break up marriages. I know that because I know people who differ from one another in their marriage on those points and still stay married. I even know people who have marriages that are like hell on earth but stay in them.

Therefore, no amount of trials can be blamed for divorce. Only one thing can be blamed for divorce, unfaithfulness. Both parties stood at an altar and said, I will not back out of this deal until I die, or until you do.

And that is in sickness and health, for better or for worse, till death do us part. That is a vow that was made, and if that person is a faithful person, they will keep their vow no matter how uncomfortable, how costly, how painful it is to keep that vow. They keep their vows.

That's what faithful people do. And the reason that relationship can be expected to last forever is because of the good faith of those who made promises and the fact that they trust each other to keep their promises. And they seek to be the kind of people who can be trusted also.

Faith is the basis of a relationship. A woman may stay with her husband for a long time when she doesn't love him anymore, but there's not any relationship there if she doesn't trust him anymore. She may still remain married to him, but there's no relationship of any description if there's absolutely no trust.

If the man can't trust his wife, if she leaves the house and is out of his sight for a few minutes for fear that she might be having an affair, the relationship is at a much worse place than if their initial infatuation has simply gone away, but they both trust each other to keep their vows. It's a very different kind of problem. Relationships are based on faith.

And therefore, no one can come to God except with faith. And no one can have a relationship with Him except with faith, because faith is what relationships are built out of. And that's one reason that faith is essential.

It's essential because there are so many things that God wants us to know that can't be known except by faith. It's also essential because it's the basis of relationships. And God wants a relationship.

It is also, of course, as I pointed out very much at the beginning, a judgment call. If you disbelieve what I tell you, it's because you judge me to be a liar. Or at least you don't judge me to be 100% truthful.

And that's a judgment call. If you don't believe what God says, you're making a similar judgment of God. Obviously, that can't be something God would tolerate in a relationship, is that you call Him a liar, or you live as if He is one.

But if you believe Him, it's because you judge Him to be truthful. And therefore, there is grounds for continuation of relationship and for you to have access to such things as you would not be able to know unless you trust God. So that is what faith is about, and that's why faith is so important.

We're going to take our break. That is, of course, timely here. And when we come back, we're going to take another session on faith.

We're going to talk about the main categories in which the Bible calls upon us to have faith. We'll even talk about how to increase your faith. Those are some of the things that remain to be discussed before we're done with the subject.

So we'll take our break at this time and come back to it afterwards.