for God’s truth). “By favor are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). God calls people out, and favoring them with His Holy Spirit teaches them about keeping the commandments. He usually teaches them through others who direct them to the truth of Scripture. God favors mankind with salvation because we bear His image, as He made us that way. If we break God’s commandments, we lose favor with God.So what then is faith? The scriptures give us, at times, “one-liner” definitions, such as these: “This is the love of God that you keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3; 2 John 6). “Sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). We also find a one-liner for faith: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Many think that faith is just belief. But real faith involves this substance, this evidence. But to have faith we must take the evidence available to support our belief. Therefore we must study God’s Word diligently for evidence.
Do you know that you don’t know that the sun will come up tomorrow? You have great faith that it will. Why? Because you have the evidence that it has come up every other day in your life! One time, when I used that example to a church friend, I said I have 99 percent faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. He humorously replied, “Only 99 percent? Oh, you of little faith!”
“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom 10:17). That is why we must read and study the Scriptures. In Jesus’ day, the disciples had Him, the Word— in the flesh—to hear and see. Jesus did a number of miracles which the disciples saw and in which they were even involved. When Jesus accused his disciples of having little faith, He referred to the evidence they had seen. In Matthew 16:8, they saw five loaves feed five thousand and seven loaves feed four thousand. They saw miraculous healings.
For us today, we have the Scriptures and many reference books so that we might know the Scriptures. Faith is having the evidence and using it. Peter walked on water (Matthew 14:31). His evidence was that Jesus was walking on water. He started out looking at Jesus doing this, his evidence, and was walking on the water too. But when he looked away from that evidence and at the waves, he began to sink.
Our Evidence
So what is some of our evidence? We read above that love is keeping the commandments, that they are not done away. We read plainly that “no man has ascended to heaven” (John 3:13); that David is not ascended into the heavens (Acts 2:34). Also, at that Pentecost, Peter says David is both dead and buried (Acts 2:29). In Acts 7:8, the account of Stephen being killed, it says that “he fell asleep.” Jesus showed the disciples that when Lazarus had died it was like sleeping (John 11:11-14). This is our clear evidence. We need to take this and other scriptural evidence as the core of our faith that people don’t go to heaven at death. We can have “seeing” faith, not blind faith. God works by giving us evidence. This is but one of the many doctrines for which we have evidence.
Now, most of us have a mixture of faith and some doubt. Satan works on doubt to deceive us. He has his ministers looking like “ministers of righteousness.” Satan himself poses as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:13-15). His ministers love to quote vague scriptures or incomplete ones such as Luke 23:43. Jesus, that day, was assuring the thief that they would be in paradise. Interestingly, the thief on the stake alongside Jesus knew more than many today, for he said, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He knew the Kingdom would come later. Since we live in a world filled with Satan’s deceitful ministers, we need to take the great amount of evidence we have in all the Scriptures and have “seeing” faith. Pray for God’s help to strengthen our faith, to help us see more evidence He has for us in His Word. Therefore we need to pray as the man did in Mark 9:24: “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”
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