I don’t have much faith. Not if we’re talking about the kind of faith that squinches its eyes, holds thumbs, takes a deep breath, empties the mind, and waits for results. Mark Twain described this faith as “believing what you know ain’t so.” Some call it “blind faith”. It’s much easier to put your faith in something that you know is so. Then it’s more like trust.
When the subject is the Bible – all of it, from Genesis to Revelation – skeptics mock those who say they believe every word, and from their perspective the skeptics are right. Only a fool would believe that a man waving a stick could part the sea, or that another man was able to call actual fire down from heaven. Raising the dead is not possible unless you’re a modern doctor with access to every high-tech piece of equipment, and even then, it’s a stretch. Raising yourself from the dead is the stuff of fairytales. To believe any of this is the height of folly or ignorance if the most you believe in is you.
On the other hand, some people say they do believe in “God”, but it turns out that their god is just an idealized version of the face they see in the mirror every morning. That god is incapable of doing even the smallest miracle. Big miracles are just crazy talk.
Some people who don’t believe in God put their faith in the government, but they’re always disappointed in the end because the government can’t do miracles, whatever it promises. Governments routinely promise to give away free stuff that isn’t free by spending money they haven’t got until the good old-fashioned Law of Reality sets in—the Law that says, “What can’t last, won’t!” Then it all comes crashing down. Economists call this a “correction”, and it certainly is. To see how this works in the real world, look at Venezuela, or Chicago, or San Francisco. False promises, like fake miracles, always end in “corrections”.
At this point I must confess that though I don’t have much faith and I’m skeptical about a lot of things in this world (including promises from the government) I do believe that every word of the Bible is true, including “and”, “the”, and “but”. I believe it because I trust the Author. (I could go out on a limb and say I have met the Author but that would take some explaining and if you’re a skeptic I would lose you right there). Let’s just say that I trust the Author because I got tired of searching for the right answers that that fit my point of view. Sooner or later they always proved false, so I just looked for the Truth, deciding in advance to go wherever it led me.
Through a simple process of deduction, I started with what I knew—the world around me and the stars above me that spoke of an infinity beyond them, and I asked myself if I honestly believed the whole thing happened by accident. That would include me. But seeing myself as an accident in an accidental universe made life in general, and my life in particular, an absurdity that could only be answered by just sitting down to die.
Before I took that radical step I wondered if it could all be the purposeful work of a Creator who was named “God” by religious people. There is a vast array of religions that offer a multitude of theories about God and how to reach Him (or Her, or It or Them). In such a big haystack there had to be a needle, but alas, after a bit of study it became clear that religions basically all say the same thing: it is up to us to reach God, and it is hard work without any guarantee of success. That seems like a losing proposition from the start!
Could there be another possibility, I wondered? What if the God who made everything, including me, made it very easy to reach Him because He did all the work by reaching out to me first? That’s when I began to think more about the story of Jesus. It all made perfect sense when I recalled these words in a book that referenced a truth from the Bible:
God was in the beginning, and he made everything. He came to the world he created in the form of a man named Jesus, so that whoever submits to him will receive the gift of eternal life and become part of God’s personal family. Jesus is God in receivable form!
I realized then that it doesn’t take any faith to believe in God when you follow Bible Truth to its logical conclusion: it just takes surrender. And that part about believing every word in the Bible? It’s not hard if you know that God created the universe. In comparison, making available a perfectly complete and trustworthy record about Himself and His purpose was quite easy.