Opinion : What is Faith? - Part Two

Last time, I attempted to explain the nature of faith: it’s a complete and total trust in someone or something. To summarize, the conversation narrowed towards the nature of ‘religious faith’ or ‘faith in God.’ Even if someone claims there is no god, that person still exercises faith in someone or something other than God, for God certainly does exist whether we think he does or not. Since I believe in keeping promises, we’d better start by asking the final question I posed last time: “Is it reasonable to have faith in God?” Or better, “Can we trust God?” Modern culture has practically eliminated the need to believe in any sort of divine being. We no longer ‘need’ things that, throughout most of human history, were prayed for or relied upon for God to provide. Nowadays, most ‘needs’ can readily be met with the flip of switch or the spin of a dial. Here are a few examples: rain (irrigation systems), sunlight (electrical lighting), locally-produced food (coast-to-coast grocery-store chains), safe & reliable transportation (automobiles, airplanes), face-to-face education and communication with the wise, knowledgable, dependable leaders in our families and communities (instant emails, texts, online social networks, etc.) to name only a few. I certainly enjoy the use of all these modern conveniences, but have chosen not to trust them in the same way I trust God because they merely represent the progress of human innovation rather than the all-powerful, loving, gracious acts of a divine being. And, while it may appear that people in this modern age don’t trust in any god or gods, it would be untrue to say they trust in nothing. Rather, they trust in the modern machines, systems, ideas that extend to them the safeties, comforts and thrills that were at one time considered gifts of God’s grace, or, they trust in themselves to provide these very things. So, “can we trust God?” There are a couple obstacles standing in the way from answering this directly. They are, “which god are we talking about,” and “what are that god’s characteristics?” To answer the first problem, there are an innumerable host of gods mankind has claimed: everything from hand-carved wood and stone figurines to the intergalactic stars and planetary objects. Many people these days worship impersonal things or ideas such as money, power, or prestige, but that doesn’t mean these things are not trusted as if they were gods by the people who depend upon them. Some eastern systems of religion boast of thousands, even millions of gods. The problems here are, would you trust something you made with your own hands, having fashioned it from a piece of wood or stone that you found lying around to be your divine and all-powerful god? Could it listen to you or talk with you or do things for you? Or, if you trust in the moon as your god, who’s to say the sun or any of the others stars are lesser gods? Or, if there are many gods, which one is the first god that made the other gods or the most powerful over all the others? Or, even if you were somehow to discern which god is the best god to trust, how would you know that one is reliable and trustworthy? I suppose we could try to list each god ever conceived, but it’s easier to classify the possibilities into a few general categories suited for our discussion: monotheism (one god), polytheism (many gods), pantheism (everything is god). Every categorization of gods and their corresponding belief systems have been around for a long time, but monotheism stands above the rest. Here’s why: only monotheism has ‘religious’ writings claimed to be written, recorded, and preserved by a creator / god. No other religious system offers the unique, seamless combination of law, history, song, prophecy, and eye-witness accounts of miraculous, unexplainable events as the Bible does. The Bible is literally the best-selling and most copied book of all time. There are, of course, many gods within monotheism: millions of people believe there is only one god, but their god may be different from the gods of other religions. The god I’m referring to is the one whom a 3,500 year-old document (the Bible) names as the Creator of universe, the only supreme and eternally sovereign ruler of heaven and earth, the one who revealed himself to the nation of Israel in 1445 BC through the giving of the Ten Commandments, who predicted more than 400 specific prophecies in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and fulfilled them all several hundred years before his birth, and who calls himself the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” There truly is no other god like the God of the Bible. The second obstacle to answering our question is: “what are that god’s characteristics?” If the God of the Bible is nothing more than a ‘paper-cut-out person,’ then he can be no more trustworthy than the lifeless piece of folded paper he’s made of. But if the God of the Bible is indeed the Creator of everything, He most certainly can be trusted, for He has given a book that declares himself not only to be trustworthy, but the only completely trustable and praiseworthy being in the universe. So, with the Creator God in mind, the god the Bible refers to as God, we can now finally answer our question: “Yes, it is reasonable to have faith in God.” Or better, “yes, we can completely trust God.” To trust in a humanly-devised god or something within the created world would fall incredibly short of the most rational, understandable and believable explanation for a god. In contrast, the God of the Bible declares: “Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength,” Deuteronomy 6:4-5 NLT. Not only is He trustworthy as the one true God, but He commands us to love Him with all our hearts, not simply to make our lives miserable, but to give us joy. Any god that commands our attention and affection is reason enough to have faith in him. What other god is so great to have made the universe and is willing to know me personally and individually, along with all the other people in the world? What other god can balance true justice (I’ve done bad things) with real mercy (favor and kindness that I don’t deserve)? What other god can fix mankind’s problems and give real, lasting, love, joy, and peace? The Creator God of the Bible is truly unique, offering what no other god could: rescue from a pointless, godless, self-centered, empty human existence to a restoration of the kind of joy-filled life we know in our hearts we were made for. But is it really possible to be so sure? Can we know for certain that the Creator God is the real, one-true God? Are we able to prove He exists and know that His characteristics are favorable towards us? God-willing, we’ll address these questions and more next time. ---- Pastor Zajicek, is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Vinton “Finding Christ supreme in all things” www.vintonfirstbaptist.com