Faith: Living in the Real World

Faith, hope and charity, that’s the way to live successfully. How do I know? The Bible tells me so. Those words from a children’s Sunday school song that got lodged into the deep recesses of my mind a long time ago are now surfacing as I think about my next series of meditations on living in the real world.  That song expresses the simple truth that the first requirement for living successfully in the real world is to have Biblical faith.   So I will start by looking at what the Bible says about “faith.”

Hebrews 11:6 tells us that “…without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” (NKJ)  Having faith means that we come to the unseen God believing that he is real and that, as we diligently seek him, we are doing what pleases him, and he will reward our search by showing himself to us. That is, he will give us more faith. The writer of the book of Proverbs puts it this way,  “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” (Prov. 3:5)  That is a promise.  When we put our faith in God our Creator, He will show us the way to live successfully in the real world he created. Biblical faith is living confidently, looking to the future, which we do not yet see, with a hope that is sure. “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Heb.11:1).

I now contrast this Biblical faith in the unseen God with the faith of the naturalist who lives by sight and says that everything we observe must have a naturalistic explanation – one that can be formulated as a law of nature and verified by careful observation with the physical senses and scientific instruments. This philosophy governing scientific method worked very well when the things being observed were physical phenomena studied by physics and chemistry. The laws formulated had great certainty.  Yet, as science has evolved probability has replaced certainty so that today no scientific law is said to be absolutely certain, just more or less highly probable.  Laws and theories, once considered highly probable, can also loose that status, as exemplified by “the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature” which, according to the well-know naturalist philosopher Thomas Nagel, is “almost certainly false.” Many have chosen to live according to the philosophy of naturalism because they were deceived into thinking that Darwin’s theory did away with the need for God. For them, the theory of evolution explaining how all life, including human life, evolved from inanimate matter made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. They put their faith in the philosophy of naturalism rather than the unseen God who has revealed himself in scripture, and in these last days by his Son. My next meditation will be on Hope: Living in the real world.