Peruse Bible teachings and church happenings
“Faith-Building Fridays | Why Should It Depend On Faith?”
Categories: evidences / apologetics“Look, I get that there’s a lot of evidence out there, but I still don’t understand why we have to believe. God has the power to just appear and prove who he is, so why doesn’t he just do that and remove all doubts? Why doesn’t he do a great miracle or something? If I saw something like that, I wouldn’t need faith—I would just know.”
By human wisdom, it does seem more plausible to think that God would have more followers if we saw him rather than being asked to follow him by faith. And yet, the Bible is clear that would not be the case. In fact, the people who saw his greatest wonders were often held up as class examples of failure to follow him.
God speaks regularly throughout the Old Testament about how the people who saw his works refused to know him. In Psalm 95, he said, “though they had seen my work for forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.’” (Ps. 95:9-10) They were characterized by short-lived repentance, by single-generation faithfulness, and by egregious departures from his ways right after they had seen him the most directly (remember: the Golden Calf incident happened just about 40 days after they saw his terrifying presence on Mt. Sinai). Indeed, the people who saw the most of him fell woefully short of rightly following him.
And the same is true in the life of Jesus. Many people saw miracles. They all had the same evidence of who he was, but they did not all respond and accept him equally.
And so this leaves us with a powerful truth from both Testaments—a truth which the apostle Paul noticed when he read the Scriptures. “Faith comes by HEARING” (Rom. 10:17), and it often does not come by seeing. Israel saw his great wonders, but Rahab heard the word about them… and she was the one who believed (Js. 2:10-11). The Jews saw Jesus’ signs, but Zacchaeus heard his teachings… and he was the one who believed (Lk. 19:1-10).
Faith—the willingness to take God at his word and trust him—is what truly changes our hearts and makes us his own. As Jesus himself said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (Jn. 20:29) That is why he asks us to believe in him.
- Dan Lankford
