And the Lord answered me: “For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come;…the righteous shall live by his faith.” – Habakkuk 2:3-4
When Habakkuk the prophet laments before God about why he seems to be doing nothing about the evil and unbelief that Habakkuk sees growing around him, God comes to him with an answer that comforts his heart. “The righteous shall live by his faith.” You going to have to trust me, God is saying.The Bible insists that having strong faith is an essential key to living life well in this world (1 John 4:10). Why is this? Well think about it.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem that God is doing anything. Where are you God? we cry out. But God is always doing things. The Father is always working, Jesus said. It’s just hard for us to see sometimes. So faith fills in that gap of seeing.
And sometimes it seems that God is so slow in coming. God, do you even hear my prayers! we cry out. But God is working out a plan that’s been in place from the beginning of creation. God has a timetable he is keeping. “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.” So faith fills in that gap of waiting.
And sometimes it seems impossible to make sense of what’s going on around us. Why do the righteous suffer so much? No good deed goes unpunished! we cry out. Meanwhile, godless and evil people just seem to be having the time of their lives. They get away with everything. So faith fills in the gap of our not understanding.
It’s not like faith is something that only religious people use. If faith is, as the Bible says, “the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) then unbelievers use faith all the time, however much they might protest.
Do you send your food out to be tested before eating it? Probably not. But people have died eating toxic food. How do you know for sure that you won’t die? You don’t. But you eat anyway. That’s faith. Do you get out and visually inspect a bridge before driving over it? No. You trust that the highway department inspectors are doing their work. That trust you’re using is faith. When you make a bank deposit, do you have the bank manager show you the vault and open up its books? No, you trust the “full faith and credit of the United States”. There it is again…faith.
“Well even if those things are a sort of faith, it’s faith built on evidence and experts and eyewitnesses and experience!” the skeptic might protest. In saying that, they admit that there is such a thing as reasonable faith as opposed blind faith.
Guess what? That’s the same kind of faith that Christ asks of us in following him. True Christianity is a faith built on evidence (such as fulfilled prophecy), experts (people of science, philosophy, the arts, etc. across the centuries who chose to follow Christ, eyewitnesses (from the original apostles, to members of Jesus’s own family, to the persecutor Saul who saw Christ and became Paul the missionary, and hundreds of others who launched the early Church), and experience (of countless thousands across time who placed their trust in Christ and found him to be fully trustworthy and worthy of worship.}
The proof underlying our faith is substantial and undeniable. No other religion has the evidence undergirding it like Christianity. But even so, you still need faith to complete the journey that connects you to Christ. The disciples saw Jesus with their eyes and heard him with their ears but for all their experiences, Judas still betrayed him, Peter denied him, and Thomas doubted him.
And so “we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor.5:7). We each must come to that place where we say for ourselves, “Lord Jesus, I know enough, I’ve experienced enough, I love you enough, to make the choice to believe in you and follow you the rest of my days.”
What’s keeping you from making that choice today, right this minute?