What Is Faith? B

Science can only observe what's going on and tell you what's going on, not why it's going on.

Science simply discovers laws that already exist, but science is stupidly trying to push past what it can do into what it can't do, and that is observe things before they existed. I'm afraid science can't assume that burden. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Well, would it surprise you that the famous Sunday school song, Jesus Loves Me, has come under attack over the years and by people who identify as Christians? As the song says, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so, which has prompted a question from critics. In order to know that Jesus loves you, do you have to understand and believe the Bible? In other words, does being a Christian mean having faith in whatever the Bible says? John MacArthur is going to help answer that question today as he continues his study titled The Power of Faith.

And now with a lesson, here's John. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews deals with the excellency of faith, the excellency of faith. The subject then is faith. The nature of faith is in verse 1. Then he moves secondly to the testimony of faith, verse 2. For by it, and that goes back to the word faith, by it the elders received witness. Now the elders there refers to Old Testament saints, the fathers of Israel, the greats that he names in this particular chapter. Now the word to receive witness has to do with receiving praise or approval.

They were praised or they were approved. What it means is they live by faith and therefore God approved of them. God approves those who operate on faith. And I think there's a sense in which every man who lives by spiritual faith in God has within his own heart the knowledge of the approval of God.

Don't you have that? Don't you sense a certain kind of peace and a certain kind of having arrived at reality when you've trusted God? I think we sense his approval.

And he goes all through the chapter. Abel believed God regarding sacrifice, did it by faith and God approved of his sacrifice, didn't he? Enoch believed God that he wouldn't die and he didn't. God was pleased and God approved. Noah believed God that it would reign and he inherited righteousness for believing God. God approved. Abraham and Sarah believed God for a child and God approved of their faith and they received a child. Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Amram, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, all those listed in chapter 11, all believed God and God said, it's good, I approve. They trusted in what they couldn't see.

Watch it. They bet their life on it and God said, that's good, I approve. The Bible says without faith it is impossible to do what?

To please God. Without faith you can't please. I don't care what you do, without faith you can't please God.

But if you have faith, he is pleased, he approves. The man who tries to live in this world without faith lives the kind of bleak, black, hopeless existence that runs him into a wall of destiny that doesn't have any answers. Can you imagine not believing in anything? Can you imagine trying to blind yourself so that you never thought about what happens after you die?

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine living in a world that is so black you don't have any hope in anything and you just realize that you're just a great nothing in the midst of a universe that is some kind of stupid thing? There has no meaning, especially in a world that's rejected God altogether. If there's no God outside this little pea-sized world floating around in the midst of an infinite universe, if there's no God, if existence has no meaning and no point and no purpose, then we're trapped in the most stupid joke there ever was. You know, modern man has put himself on a dilemma. This has been outlined for us today by men like Francis Schaeffer and other men who've been writing books on this subject, The Dilemma of Man. And it's the most interesting thing.

Let me just give you a little bit of insight and I'm going to give you a little bit of a philosophy lecture for a minute if I can to help you understand what happens to a man who doesn't have faith in God. For many, many years, man had what scientists call a unified field of knowledge. That is, man understood God, or understood, what should we say, God, history, science, everything within one frame of reference.

Didn't need to make a difference. Everything was existing within the frame of reality. But then we had a great movement in philosophy known as German rationalism. And the rationalists came along and said, guys, you know what we've got to do?

We've got to get rid of all this God stuff. And so the rationalists began to attack religion. And there were men like Graf, Wellhausen, Bauer, Strauss, Renan, who was a French atheist. And these men began to attack all supernatural things. And their first attacks, as they were in Europe, was the Bible. And so they just wiped out the Bible.

And some of them came up, one guy came up with 26 verses that were inspired, 26 verses that had meaning. Everything that had any kind of taint of miracle in it was wiped out. So rationalism reduced man to one level of existence.

We'll call this the level of reason. He existed nowhere else. Now this was very difficult for man to handle because this meant that man lived in a world that was purely rational and purely logical.

And man was nothing but a machine. He was only the rational. If it wasn't rational, you couldn't believe it.

Anything miraculous, forget it. This is only to be rational, empirical, what I see, I believe. There's nothing outside of my brain. And you know what happened?

Man began to scratch his head and say, good, that is terrible. I can't believe that. That crucifies half of my nature. Man, my soul longs for something out there. I must believe in something. I can't just run around in a little box thinking I'm a machine and I don't have any ultimate meaning. And so men like Kierkegaard came along and he split the field of knowledge and on the top he put faith.

And everybody went, phew, feel better now. Something to believe in. But you know what he put up here? He put up here faith, no content. It doesn't mean...there's nothing to believe in. You can believe in anything. Just believe in believing.

Get a grip on something. And then philosophers called it the leap of faith. They were trying to live in the world of reason and they couldn't do it and so they said, we've got to leap. And so they jumped up into the world of faith and believed in anything. And one of the secrets of philosophy is you never have to tell anybody what you leaped on to.

Shhh...that's my leap. It's not communicated. This is existential contentlessness, non-rational and illogical. You say, well how can a man live in a tension like that? How can a man say, I only believe in what's reasonable except when I leap into what's irrational?

But that's what man has done today. And so what happens is for a long time, man lived in a rational world. In German rationalism, everything was in a box and everything was very real and then men started to jump.

And boy, when they started jumping, everything went. The first thing to go up here in what Schaeffer calls the upper story was philosophy. And all kinds of screwball philosophies came along. Immediately after philosophy came art. And it used to be that art was reasonable. When a guy painted a picture of a cow, it looked like a cow. When a guy painted a picture of a house, it looked like a house. When somebody painted a picture of a lady, it looked like a lady. Then all of a sudden you have Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso and abstract and you've got stuff that looks like nothing anybody ever saw. And you have modern art which is nothing but man's leap. And if you go up to an artist and say, what does it mean? You have insulted that guy.

Leave him alone. It's his leap. And after art went music. And you have all the screwball stuff and it doesn't have to have any rhyme or reason or any sense to it. And then you have culture.

Culture leaped upstairs too to maintain its existence. And people began to write and people like Dylan Thomas, people like Arthur Miller who write things that just smash everything, just smash every moray, every morality, every code of ethics, everything, just smash love, smash honesty, smash what is right, just wipe out everything, just jump up there in an amoral, illogical, contentless kind of nothing. No truth, no morality, just despair. The last thing that went was theology. And somebody bounced along and said, guess what? God died. Remember that? And everything went up there in the upper story, a contentless leap into nothingness. And you know what? You know what I call this whole thing up here? The absurd.

You can't do that. And it's best illustrated, I think, by a – I read a movie review in the Times and it was a review of the film Catch-22 and I've used this illustration with many student groups, but the film Catch-22 is about an island in the Mediterranean and the island's name is Pianosa and on it is a squadron of flyers who are flying missions over southern Europe during the war. Americans. And there was one man on the island, Yossarian by name, who was one of the flyers and he hated it. He just absolutely despised it, could have cared less about patriotism or anything. He just wanted to save his hide and these missions were dangerous. And the only way you could ever get out of this deal was after 25 missions. Well, then they got a new colonel and when the guy hit 25, he raised it to 30.

Colonel Kothcart raised it to 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, you know, ad infinitum. There wasn't any way out. Only one thing to get out. That was if you were insane.

And that was the catch. If you were insane, you could get out. But you had to turn yourself in for being insane. And only insane people would fly those missions, so if you turned yourself in for being insane to get out of it, you wouldn't be insane.

Right? So there was no way out. There was no way out. So finally, Yossarian comes to the end of his rope and he does the only thing he can do. He says, I'm going to build a raft and float to Sweden. You see, you can't do that.

The currents go the other way. Don't bother with me. It's my leap.

Leave me alone. You say, what's he doing? When all of the rational boxes have closed up, he does what's absurd. You know why people take drugs today? They've run out of rational options. And it's a leap to find some kind of escape from a smashing world of reason that leads them nowhere.

It's a leap into something to grab onto. And kids are taking drugs and talking about an experience, aren't they? And people are grabbing onto reincarnation and witchcraft and astrology and all kinds of screwball stuff because they've lost all the rational options. And they've exed God out along with everything else and they're just jumping all over the place into contentless, meaningless stuff. You see, that's what happens to the man who cannot have a content-oriented, substantial faith in God, you see.

You don't need to jump into this, the absurd. There is a God and He's real and you can put your faith in Him. You don't need to believe in believing.

You can believe in God. Everything is hopeless for man, everything unless there is a God. He winds up jumping around like a man on a proverbial pogo stick from one leap to another and every one of them is as vapid and empty as the one before. And he's trapped in this horrible tension and that's why he kills himself.

That's why he does stupid things like build a raft and float the sweep because he has no rational answers. There is only one rational answer and that's God, God who made the universe. And there have been men from the time of Adam who have believed in God and life for them has been meaningful and life for them has had substance. Life for them has had the conviction of a future reality that they based their life on and you know what, when their life ended they were right. Believing in God gives reason for living. So we see the nature of faith and the testimony of faith. The people who do believe God don't get trapped in the absurd.

They have meaning to life. Thirdly, let's look at the illustration of faith and this is good. Verse 3, through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Now here's what he wants to do. He's saying to these Jews, you must have faith. And he's saying in effect in verse 3, and you already do because you already believe that God created the universe and surely they did.

And so he's saying, I'm not asking you to muster up something that you can't muster. You already have a faith in God that He is and that He made the world and the universe. So you've got a beginning of faith.

Now that's a fantastic statement in verse 3, belief that the visible world and the universe and the ages are created by God is a conviction of faith not sight. Nobody knows that by sight. Nobody can say, well, I was there when it was done. Yes, I saw how it all started.

You can't say that. Nobody was there. The only thing we know about the creation of the universe was what we know by faith. And so he simply says, through faith we understand the world is reframed by the Word of God. I mean, all of us Jews believe in God and we all believe that the world is reframed and the only way we could ever know that is by faith.

We could never know that by sight. So he says, I'm not asking something of you that you don't already have. All the readers believe this, surely of the book of Hebrews. And he says, we understand or we perceive with intelligence, no eo, that the world's reframed by God. Now you know there are some people who don't know that? You know there are some people who don't know that God made the universe?

That's right. Some people who have very high IQs. Now the word for worlds there is aion, ages. It has to do not only with creating the universe but all of the ages of administration within the universe. It means the whole of creation, the whole thing was formed by the word rhema, the specific utterance of God. God spoke and it came into existence. Now Moses had taught them this. They had a Pentateuch. They had Genesis. They knew how it all began. You see, he's simply establishing here that faith is not so much a foreign thing to them. By faith they believed that God made the world. Do you know that the origin of the universe is a problem that philosophers can't solve? Did you know that?

They can't do it. Bertrand Russell spent 90 years as a philosopher. On my desk I have a book that he wrote entitled, Why I Am Not a Christian. In it he gives some of the most inept arguments against Christianity conceivable. And he blasts Christianity and he spent his life blasting it. And he had all these answers about origins. And he summed up his life after 90 years of philosophy with these words, philosophy has proved a washout to me.

He never did get any answers. He once boldly wrote in that volume, Why I Am Not a Christian, these words. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world. The whole conception of God is derived from ancient oriental despotism, a conception quite unworthy of free men. He went on to say, we must conquer the world by intelligence.

Sounds vigorous, doesn't it? After 90 years of that he said, the whole thing's a washout. He died not knowing anything.

Absolutely nothing. He didn't have anything to believe in. Colossians 2, 8 says this, beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy. You say, well science knows the reason the universe came. Science has got it. Philosophers might not, but scientists know. Scientists don't know. You say, you mean scientists don't know how the universe began?

Of course they don't. Science can only observe what's going on and tell you what's going on, not why it's going on. Now watch this. Science simply discovers laws that already exist. But science is stupidly trying to push past what it can do into what it can't do and that is observe things before they existed. I'm afraid science can't assume that burden.

You see, you might call me John. That's one thing. But that doesn't begin to explain my existence. Now science can say, oh, that is a rock.

Oh, that is a chemical. Oh, but it cannot say where it came from or why it came. It only knows what it observes. Science has no access to the why of anything. There's nothing wrong with good science, observable science, but science has no business getting into origins. You know that what the philosophers and the scientists can't discover, you and I can? By faith, we know that God made the worlds. Science and philosophy doesn't give up.

It takes our children in school and teaches them all of this baloney. And you know what all of evolution is based on? It's based upon the astute principle, nobody times nothing equals everything. And even the evolutionists are doing tailspins trying to figure out what they're saying. Kierke, who is an evolutionist of some great rank in the world from England, has written a book. And in that book, he, writing from a view of an evolutionist in an anthology of evolution, a very important statement, he takes all of the basic tenets of evolution and says, gentlemen, we cannot prove any of them. In fact, they are probably more likely to be disproved.

We better rethink our case. And I read a quote from one evolutionary scientist who said this, I reject the idea of a creator God, so what other alternatives do I have? He didn't have any. Professor T.L. Moore of the physics department of the University of Cincinnati said, to talk of the evolution of thought from sea slime to amoeba, from amoeba to a self-conscious thinking man means nothing. It is the easy solution of a thoughtless brain.

End quote. I open my Bible in Genesis 1 and it says God made it all. God made it all. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God. That's something the smartest people in our world haven't learned yet.

And we're not lording it over them. We're only trying to show you that these things are ours apprehended by faith. The whole concept of trying to explain everything without God is a fool's effort. We understand it by faith. Faith comprehends that which the mind of man, no matter how brilliant, cannot understand. In 1 Corinthians 2, listen to this, verse 9. But as it is written, eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for them that love him. You see what he's saying?

Two things there. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. Now that's talking about physical perception, empiricism. Neither have entered into the heart of man.

That's talking about philosophy or rationalism. Man does not know by science nor by philosophy the truth of God. Eye hath not seen it, it hasn't entered into his heart. But God has revealed it unto us by His Spirit. You see the next verse?

Fantastic! Faith comprehends. Faith not only comprehends God and creation of the universe, but faith comprehends salvation in Jesus Christ, doesn't it? How are they just to live? By faith.

Jesus said, he that believeth in me hath life. John Goff, the evangelist of years gone by, told a story of two little boys he once saw in a London hospital. Lovely story, listen to it. Their cots were side by side. One had a fever, the other had been struck by a truck.

His little body was all broken up. The little fellow with the fever was very weak and the other little boy spoke to him and said, Say, Willie, I was down to the Mission Sunday School and they told me about Jesus and I believe if you ask Jesus, He'll help you. They said that if we believe in Him and pray to Him, when we die, He'll come and take us to be with Him. Willie said, But what if I'm asleep when He comes and I can't ask Him? The other little fellow said, Just hold up your hand. That's what we did in Sunday School. We held up our hand.

I guess He sees it. Willie was too weak. So, his little friend managed to lean over and prop up his pillow and brace it under Willie's arm. Willie had his arm up and he fell asleep.

In the morning when the nurse came, she found Willie dead. But his arm was still propped up. Now, you know that the Lord saw his arm. You say, Well, that's awful simple faith. And Jesus said, Except a man become what?

As a little child, he cannot enter the kingdom. Father, we thank You that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. We thank You that we can believe in You, that You're worthy to be trusted. God, I thank You that You're so real. I've never seen You. I've never seen Jesus, never seen the Holy Spirit. But You're so real to me, there's a present reality. Oh, I know You're here with me. And heaven is real, Father. And Lord, even Your second coming is real. I know You're coming. I even visualize what it's going to be like when You call me and I meet You in the clouds of the air. God, I don't have any previews of it, but I know it by faith.

And not only that, I'm banking my life on it. I'm giving You all the years of my life to the teaching of the Word of God because I believe it. Bless our time and our closing response in Christ's name.

Amen. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. He's continuing his series titled The Power of Faith. Well, as this study unfolds, John is going to look at some Bible characters who at times lacked faith. Rahab, Samson, David, each of them is listed in Hebrews 11, and yet each one of them sinned publicly and profoundly. So, John, why are these people essential members of the Faith Hall of Fame?

Because there aren't any other kind of people. We all fail. We don't necessarily fail as epically as perhaps David or Samson, but we all fail. God is limited to using people who will fail.

But that doesn't mean that He will fail, because He will not. And where there is genuine faith in Him and in the gospel, God will strengthen and build us up and sanctify us in spite of our weaknesses. Now, I want to mention our latest study guide titled The Power of Faith. It covers Hebrews 11, 1 to 12, 4. This study guide is the perfect companion to the current series.

If salvation is by faith, and it is, of course, then it's critical to recognize what genuine faith looks like and how it behaves. The author of Hebrews spells that out for you, as you will see in this new study guide. And this, by the way, is the ninth volume in our relaunched series of study guides. They've been very popular, and they're great tools for studying with a group or for a personal study and devotional reading. The study guide is 240 pages, so it's comprehensive, affordably priced, and obviously available only through grace to you. The title, again, The Power of Faith. Order that study guide today.

Thanks, John. And, friend, we want to help you take in all you can from this series, The Power of Faith. And that's why we created this companion study guide.

It takes you deep into each lesson, giving you detailed outlines and questions that will enrich your personal or group study. You can order a copy if you contact us today. Call us here at 855-GRACE, or shop online at gty.org. The Power of Faith study guide costs $9, and shipping is free. Again, to order a copy of The Power of Faith study guide, call 855-GRACE, or visit gty.org. That's our website, gty.org. And while you're there, remember, you can download the messages from John's current series, The Power of Faith.

You can do that when you order the companion study guide. And at our website, you'll also find dozens of other topical studies, as well as hundreds of sermons that you've never heard on the radio. In fact, all of John's sermons, over 55 years' worth of preaching, are free to download in audio and transcript format at gty.org. The website is also the place to purchase John's New Testament commentaries, the MacArthur Study Bible, the systematic theology book called Biblical Doctrine, and much more. Our website one more time, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for joining us today. Be back tomorrow as John highlights how the faith of Abel and the hostility of Cain can help you evaluate your own faith. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.