What is Belief?
Romans 13:11

We're continuing in Romans 13:11 and tonight we're going to continue what I did last time in understanding this concept of faith and belief. What does the Bible mean when it talks about belief and about faith? What do these terms actually mean? We're coming at this out of the passage we're studying in Romans 13:11-14 which is a focus upon and a challenge to our spiritual growth.

In this verse as we looked at it last time, the Apostle Paul adds something in light of what he has already been saying. He says, "And this…" This is in addition to what he has said before in talking about government and in talking about loving one another in Romans 13:8-10. Now he adds this, "And this, knowing the time…" As we saw last time this is a causal participle meaning "because you know the time". He's referencing the fact that he has instructed the Romans already. They know this. They're aware of the circumstances such as we're learning in our Tuesday class about dispensations.

They're aware they're in the Church Age and that the Church Age is not an age related to the fulfillment of prophecy. No prophecy need be fulfilled before the Lord Jesus Christ returns at the Rapture. That's the next major event on the time scale. As we've studied there are some events that might fulfill prophecy prior to the Rapture but they have to do with fulfilling prophecy related to the Tribulation that comes sometime after the Rapture of the Church.

So Paul says because we know the time and because we know the situation, it is time to be awake, to be alert. Last time we talked about how we as believers need to be alert and to be watchful. We need to be focused on the fact that we have a spiritual mission in our life and that we are ambassadors for Christ. We're to be involved in witnessing both with our life and with our lips. So we are to be alert, not dozing or sleeping through the Church Age.

Then he says, "For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The word here for salvation is soteria. Paul uses this word in a very distinct sense in Romans. There's this whole word group meaning "to save" in English. Often because of our American English evangelical idiom we think of saved primarily as being saved from the eternal punishment of the Lake of Fire. We think of it only in the sense of Ephesians 2:8-9, "For by grace you have been saved through faith…" Yet many times the Apostle Paul uses this saved word group in distinction from justification. He talks about our future deliverance.

There are three phases or three tenses to salvation and the use of that term in the New Testament. We're saved from the penalty of sin when we trust Christ as Savior. We're saved from the power of sin during our Christian life and we are ultimately saved from the presence of sin at the time we are absent from the body and face-to-face with the Lord and we are glorified. So what Paul is referring to here is our ultimate glorification, Phase 3, and each day, we're closer to the end of our time on earth than we anticipate.

Yesterday morning I had an e-mail interchange with Mike Stallard who spoke at the Pastor's Conference in March and he informed me that one of the faculty members who happens to be the same age I am went to be with the Lord three weeks ago due to cancer. I wasn't aware he even had cancer. He seemed to be a pretty vibrant guy the last time I saw him. He was a faculty member at Baptist Bible Seminary named Rodney Decker. Those kind of things just sort of strike you and make you aware of the fact that we think we're going to live according to the actuarial tables to our mid to late seventies or if you've got good genetics and some of you, I know, have parents who lived to be in their 90's, we think somehow we're going to fit that optimistic side of the longevity scale but it may not be that way.

I remember Dick Seume who happened to be the second pastor of Berachah Church back in the 1940s. Later he was pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago and then he was the chaplain at Dallas Seminary. At the time I was a student in the late seventies he had been on kidney dialysis longer than any other person in the United States. He just seemed to be very healthy and very vigorous. Some ten years later, sometime in the mid-eighties, Dr. Seume went to be with the Lord. It had nothing to do with kidney failure. He was killed in a head-on collision.

We have no idea when the Lord's going to take us home. He has our time marked out and we may think it's going to be one thing and it could be something else. We don't know if it will be today, tomorrow, or twenty or thirty years from now. What Paul is pointing out here is that as each day goes by our salvation, Phase 3 glorification, is nearer than it was when we first believed.

Now I pointed out that the word "first" is not there in the original text. It is supplied by the translator to make sure you catch the nuance here, the past tense of the word believe, to indicate that this is referring to our Phase 1 belief. I pointed out a couple of passages last time related to the use of salvation as a future tense. Hebrews 9:28, "To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation." That is in the future. 1 Peter 1:5, "We're kept by the power of God through faith for salvation." This is a future tense, future time. 1 Peter 1:9, "Receiving the end of your faith, the salvation of your souls." Again, talking about Phase 3, that we will be saved from the presence of sin in glorification. That is our ultimate sanctification. So when Paul ends, he ends on this statement that our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.

Now what does it mean to believe? That may seem like a simple question to you. Some of you have gone through this with me before and others have not. Some of you haven't given it a lot of thought. But this is a word that has a lot of controversy with it, specifically related to certain theological disputes over the nature of the gospel and the nature of saving faith. Some people think that saving faith is a different kind of faith, that it is a gift of God, and it's not the same kind of faith that everyone uses on an everyday basis. Other people think that faith is simply trust.

So I want to go through about ten points. I started with the first point last week, going through introductory issues. One of the things you find among those in Reformed theology and among some who hold to what is called lordship salvation—a view of the gospel that a person needs to do something more than simply believe—is that they believe that faith somehow involves a commitment to the authority of Christ at salvation. So they would make the word faith a synonym for the word commitment. Commitment may be a result of faith but they are not synonyms. You will never find commitment listed as a synonym for faith.

So one of the ways they make a distinction is this concept of head-faith versus heart-faith. At the very core of this debate is a gross misunderstanding on their part, I believe, of the nature of faith, just etymologically and linguistically as well as its been studied and analyzed through philosophy and primarily through Scripture. Faith is just simply belief. In English probably the best word to use is either the verb belief or the noun belief.

We see an artificial distinction here. Actually the word "heart" in Scripture is often a synonym for thought or for the mind or for thinking. The word heart whether we're talking about the Old Testament or the New Testament is never used of the physical organ in the body. It's never used that way. It's always used as a metaphor. Usually it is descriptive for the center or the core of something. So when it comes to the immaterial part of the soul of man, sometimes heart refers to the entirety of the soul but usually it has an emphasis on the thinking.

We looked at several verses last time. I've found a couple more. Psalm 15:2 talks about "speaking the truth in your heart". So that would again indicate when you're thinking and when you're talking to yourself through your own rational capacity. Emotions don't speak the language within your brain. Psalm 49:3, "the meditation of my heart". Meditation is a thought word. This is the thinking of the soul. You have the "thought of your heart" in Acts 8:22. All of these emphasize heart as the center of the thinking part of the soul.

Psalm 73:21 uses heart and mind in parallelism. In Hebrew poetry you have different kinds of parallelism. This is a synonymous parallelism where heart and mind are used as synonyms. The first line is mirrored by the thought of the second line. "My heart was grieved. I was vexed in my mind." Mind and heart are synonymous here. In 1 Samuel 2:35 God says, "Then I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind." God, of course, does not have a physical heart.

Often you find as a Hebraism where two words will be used as synonyms of one another in order to emphasize the point. In Jeremiah 17:10, "I the Lord search the heart. I test the mind." Again we see synonymous parallelism in the poetry. Searching and testing are parallel to one another. Heart and mind are parallel to each other. Mind equals heart. The heart is another way of talking about the thinking capacity of the soul. We see continued synonymous parallelism in the second part of the verse where it says, "according to His ways and the fruit of His doings" which are synonymous parallelisms. Psalm 7:9 uses hearts and minds together in a couplet that emphasizes two synonyms that are used to reinforce each other. This is the same thing we see in Revelation 2:3 where God says, "I am He who searches the minds and hearts."

So these terms go together. They're not referring to two different capacities. So, just by way of introduction, I pointed out that the basic issue is the question of whether faith is an intellectual activity. The answer is yes. We believe with our mind. That's what we mean by an intellectual activity. Some people think that when you say it's intellectual that somehow it loses something. Actually, historically belief is seen as an activity of the mind that is engaged by our volition. The volition chooses to trust something. When we trust we engage our mind in accepting something to be true.

Now the Bible talks about different kinds of faith. All I'm saying in this point is that there's faith related to how we are justified, the faith we exercise at Phase 1 in the gospel. And then there is the faith that we exercise as we live our Christian life. So faith at salvation happens in an instance of time when we come to understand and comprehend the gospel. We reach a point where we can believe that.

Someone in the congregation was recently telling me about her husband who has now gone to be with the Lord. Some of you will know who I'm talking about. For a long time he didn't want to talk about the gospel. Then he reached a point, a conscious point, in his thinking where he said, "I can believe that. Yeah, I can believe that." That's the point we reach when we understand the gospel. We'll get into the aspects of faith in just a minute.

So the third point is that we're given a command in Acts to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Believe is an imperative mood verb. It is a command. It is a challenge so we respond to a command with a decision. We're either going to do or not do the command. We're either going to do what we're commanded to do or not. So Acts 16:31 is a command and that emphasizes that it is a volitional activity.

One of the problems that we've gotten into in the last, I would say, thirty years there's been a lot of discussion and clarification on the gospel and on understanding the gospel. When I was a student in seminary back in the 70's some of these issues were not clarified. There were people who taught these things but the ideas behind what's come to be the free grace camp and the lordship camp were not clear.

In the early 80s Zane Hodges wrote a book called "The Gospel Under Siege". This was a remarkable book. The first time I read it I was a little bit confused by some things as I went through it. He starts off by dealing with about three different problem passages in James 2 and a couple of passages in Hebrews and some things in John. I had just finished teaching James and at that time no one really had a clear understanding of James. I was sort of on track but I wasn't really real clear on James. When I read Hodges on that I was a little more confused just because of my own lack of understanding of aspects of James. Then I read through it a second time and things really began to make sense. That's just the point that when you're reading something that seems difficult, go back and read it, reread it, until you make sure you understand it. When I got familiar with what he was saying, his vocabulary became very clear.

So Zane Hodges wrote "The Gospel Under Siege" and I always got a chuckle out of the fact that Dr. S. Louis Johnson who was a well-known professor of New Testament at Dallas (Theological Seminary) and was a 5-point Calvinist gave a book review at a lunch meeting not long after it came out. He said, "The title should be repunctuated and say the gospel under siege by Zane Hodges." They did not agree with one another. Zane Hodges was taking on a lot of the statements and theology that was taught by John MacArthur and Dr. Johnson would have been sympathetic with that so they were on opposite sides. It was good to listen to those kinds of debates to get clarity.

As the free grace movement developed, it picked up this terminology "free grace." They started a theological society that was focused on doing academic research and producing a lot of publications and in-depth studies on different issues in this whole arena of debate. That became known as the Grace Evangelical Society. They had a more academic purpose. Many of you are familiar with the Grace Evangelical Society with Robert Wilkins as the president. They've produced many, many wonderful good things in the 80s and 90s. They began to get sidetracked a little bit about ten or twelve years ago.

About that same time another organization called the Free Grace Alliance was started. I was actually at the initial, formative meeting of the Free Grace Alliance and they were really focused on a more practical aspect of organizing pastors and churches and individuals who believed in a free grace gospel in terms of supporting missionaries, establishing Bible colleges and seminaries and things of that nature. Unfortunately, in my view, both of these organizations began to get sidetracked and focus on some really minimal, non-essential aspects of some of their theological thinking. It got both of these organizations off track. That is a sad thing to watch but that's kind of the state we're in right now.

One of the issues that they got caught up in is whether or not belief was volitional. I've read four or five articles dealing with this. As I've come to understand this in talking to them, they're really not dealing with what I teach in terms of faith being volitional. What they are dealing with is that there are some groups and some writings that emphasize that if you don't know when you made a decision for Jesus then you're not saved. They call that decisional evangelism. I see a number of you shaking your heads. Yes, that's wrong. So when they're making critiques on the issue of volition or emphasis on volition, that's what they're talking about. They're not always talking about the way we use it. So sometimes you have to read people in light of the debate they're in. If you take them out of context in the light of the debate you're in, it makes it sound like you don't agree. But they do have some areas where this is a problem.

But if belief is an imperative mood, and that's the nature of the grammar, then it's addressed to your choice. So you have to make a choice one way or another. So it's very clear this isn't the only place belief is used as an imperative but this is one of them.

Now we get to the fourth point. This is a point that if you've never thought this through, if you've never been exposed to some rigorous logic or philosophic thought in terms of understanding some things, then this might be difficult for you. One of the things many of you have in your background is that you've heard that the difference between Biblical Christianity and religion is that Biblical Christianity is about a relation with a person. And religion in the guise of many types of religious Christianity is more about religious activity and liturgy. That's not what we're talking about here.

When we talk about faith, faith in pure logic is believing a proposition to be true. Now proposition is a technical term. I didn't understand until I took logic some fifteen or so years ago. I'd always heard, though, that when we talk about the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture, we believed that the Word of God contains propositional truth. Proposition is a technical term that refers to a statement that can either be proved to be true or false. An imperative is not a proposition. If I say, "Go to the store." you can't prove if that's true or false. If I say, "Is it raining outside?" that's a question and you can't prove that one way or the other. But if I say, "It's raining outside," you can prove whether or not that is true or false.

If I say, "The speed limit is 35," you can prove whether that is true or false. If I said, "Mohammed did not claim to be God but claimed to be a prophet of God," you can prove whether that is true or false by looking at evidence within the Koran and within history. So propositions can be proved to be true or false.

When the Scriptures describe things for us and inform us of God's plan and purposes, this can be expressed in terms of propositions. God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Is that true or false? That's a proposition that's true. God used that as a pattern for the command to the Israelites to rest on the seventh day, the Sabbath law. Is that true or false? It's true. Jesus was born of a virgin. Is that true or false? It's true. Those are propositions that can be proven to be true or false. They're not just hanging out and you just guess at them.

Faith is always directed toward an object which can be expressed in a proposition. We believe in the person of Jesus as the God/man. How do you know He's the God/man? Has anybody here seen Jesus? I hope not. Outside of the Apostle Paul and Stephen no one has seen Jesus in a long, long time. How do you know Jesus? You and I only know Jesus because He has been revealed to us through the Word of God and it has been expressed there.

John says in John 20:31, "These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." "These" refers to the signs in the Gospel of John. So we can say that the Scripture teaches that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah. You either believe it's true or you don't believe it. So what we know about Jesus and His person is expressed to us through propositions in Scripture. That is what I mean when I say we believe in Christ but what we believe about Christ can be expressed in propositional form.

Jesus is the eternal Son of God who entered into history and went to the cross to die for our sins that we might have eternal life. True or false? That's it. Okay, that's faith. We express it in terms of believing a proposition to be true. So a proposition then is the verbal expression of a thought that can be verified or falsified. Therefore faith is not a function of emotion. I don't feel like it's true. That's not what we're saying. We believe it's true because we understand it. We've evaluated it. We look at the evidence in favor of it and against it and we conclude that it is true. That is what we believe. It is a mental function.

Now historically in Reformed Christianity primarily, which are the theological systems derived from John Calvin expressed through the Scottish Reformed Church, Dutch Reformed Church, Huguenots, Congregational Church, and Swiss Calvinist as opposed to German Lutheran or Baptist, they broke faith down. This is really interesting to a word lover like I am. They asked how they could really understand faith. So they picked it apart and looked at the components so that they would know that they really believe something.

So what's involved in doing this? First of all, you have to understand it. It doesn't mean you understand what the pastor said in terms of it sounding good. No, you have to understand the content of what the pastor taught. I've heard people over the years reiterate something I've said and I go, "Really?" I'm always amazed at that. They'll say, "I remember when you taught such and such." And I'm amazed and wonder where I was that day. I've heard that about other pastors as well. People will say that they remember so-and-so taught such-and-such. And I go, "Really? Where have you been? What radio did you listen to while you were in church?"

So the first thing is that we have to really understand what the proposition is. When we say Jesus died on the cross for your sins, we have to have some understanding of what that means. It doesn't have to be the understanding of a Ph.D in theology but we have to understand the basic concepts of those words. So there has to be an understanding of the meaning of what it is that we're believing. We can't believe something we don't understand because how do you know you believe it? When you come to understand it you may not believe it. So it's foundational.

The second component they saw in saving faith was assensus, the Latin word for assent or agreement. "Yeah, I understand that and that's true." Then they define faith with a third word fiducia, which means belief. Here's the trouble. The English word faith comes from the Latin noun fides. Fides is the root for fiducia. Rule number one in defining things is you never define a word with itself. You use other words and other terms to define something. You can't say "I'm going to define white." White is white. So you haven't defined it. You never define a word with what it is. So it's sort of a word game here. It's sort of a semantic shell game here. If we were to translate fides here, it would mean fides. You see by shifting from Latin to English they try to avoid being seen as defining the term by itself so they've slipped something else in there.

Now the other thing I want to point out is that the English word faith comes by way of the French from the Latin fides, and then it goes into French and then into English. In the Middle Ages, mid-thirteenth century, faith is first used and it has the sense at that point of being the duty of fulfilling one's trust. Now think about that for a minute. Is that what we mean when we say do you believe that Jesus died for your sins? Are we saying that you have the duty of fulfilling one's trust? In other words, it's taking us beyond simple belief to adding a component of commitment and duty but that derives from this medieval use of the word in French coming out of the Latin.

And then the English word, belief, has its origin in Middle English influenced by medieval German and medieval Anglo-Saxon from the word glauben in German. Some other terms used in Anglo-Saxon had the simple sense of trusting in God in contrast to being loyal to a person. Belief in the sense that it had in the English word meant mental acceptance of something that is true, something that we call intellectual assent.

A lot of people just think that sounds cold and distant but that's what belief is. You understand it and you agree that it is true. When you are adding up a column of numbers which is one of my favorite illustrations because you know I hate numbers and you arrive at an answer and you double, triple, quadruple check it, what do you do? You stop. You rest. You put your pen down. You agree that what you've done is correct. It's not a commitment. You agree that this is true. You believe it's true. That's the sense of belief.  Any time I'm adding up a column of numbers if I come up with the same answer twice I know it has to be right because miracles don't occur anymore.

So the basic meaning of the English word believe coming from an Anglo-Saxon German background meant mental acceptance that something is true. But when you come along into the 1500s things change. Remember English as a language in 1500 was not anything like it was in 1600. It goes through its greatest development between 1500 and 1600 and why is that? It's because the Bible is being translated into English. You have Tyndale's translation and Coverdale's translation. You have the Geneva Bible translated into English and then people want to have the Bible in their own language and it begins to solidify and stabilize the language.

And then what happens at the beginning of the 1600s? Two things that remarkably stabilized the English language. William Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Both appear roughly at the same time and this takes English out of its formative stage into a whole new arena where it's used in poetry, in drama, and in expressing extremely high and complex thoughts. Today English is one of the most profound languages on the planet.

If you're ever been on the mission field taking the Bible into some other language that doesn't have the history of English it's really difficult. English has developed due to the impact of the Reformation in Britain and brought an extremely technological vocabulary. You go over to some place like Russia where they use the Russian Synovial text and every time they have the Greek work dikaiosune for righteousness in the Greek text they translated it with the Russian word pravda which means truth. Truth and righteousness are not the same thing. You don't have a lot of words that are used in this area.

I remember the first time I went with Jim Myers to Kazakhstan. That was one of those summers in the first week of August and it is in a high desert like Tucson and the temperature during the day would reach 112 to 115 in the shade. We had a room about a third the size of this room and there were approximately 90 students crammed into that room. They slept there at night. They just folded up their chairs and tables and put their pallets down on the floor and they slept there and in a couple of other rooms in this house that served as the meeting place of the church.

And they had one window unit. It ran full time 24/7 and it kept the temperature down to about 98 degrees in the room. We had two sections of the class because half the students were Kazak speakers and the other half were Russian speakers. So when I would give a sentence it would be translated into Russian by one translator and translated into Kazak by the other translator. Now Jim had hired these translators. Actually the Kazak translator was the wife of a pastor. She was fluent and almost unaccented in four or five different languages.

The guy we originally hired for Russian had translated for a number of well-known English pastors who had come over and taught in Kazakhstan. When I used words like justification and sanctification he looked at me like I was speaking another language he didn't know. That's a sad commentary on the fact that traditional words in the English Bible are not used commonly by pastors. But we had to get a new translator because his theological vocabulary was just impoverished. He didn't know how to handle these things. It took Jim Meyers several years with Margaret, his first translator, in working through Bible verses, crafting how to correctly translate these technical terms like justification, propitiation, faith, belief, and things like that. So it's very important to understand that.

But this is important in terms of the lordship/free grace debate because lordship says faith is better because it adds this component of loyalty to God whereas belief is simply assenting to the truth of Scripture. But the English word belief is almost identical in meaning to the Greek word pisteuo, which is the word faith through its Latin/French background. It picked up additional meaning in the sense of loyalty so that you will have pastors who will say it's not a matter of simple belief. It's not just head faith; you have to have heart faith. So they create this artificial distinction between the two even though the core meaning is simply assent or agreement that what the Bible says is true.

Hold your place and turn over to James. This is one thing you often hear people say, "This is just simple intellectual assent. The demons have it and they're not saved." In James 2 James is talking about the person who has faith and no works and no application and the person who has faith and has application. He gives an illustration of this in James 2:19, "You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe and tremble." What is it the demons believe in that verse? They believe in one God. Is believing in one God salvific? No, that's not the gospel. They believe that there's one God; unbelievers believe there's one God. People who are going to go to the Lake of Fire believe there's one God. That's not the Gospel. So this isn't a picture of false faith or pseudo-faith in the gospel or simply intellectual assent that doesn't do them any good. They truly believe there's one God. They know there's one God. Not just by faith but by sight.

But believing that God is one is not the belief proposition, which is that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and that He paid the penalty so that by faith alone, in Christ alone, you can have eternal salvation. So point number five is that since faith is in a proposition we don't believe directly in a person. I've heard some people say, "I don't believe a proposition; I believe a person." But we only learn about the person through propositions. The propositions tell us who the person is; so we are believing the propositions. We haven't seen Jesus. We believe what John says. We don't believe directly in the person or come to salvation through a relationship with Jesus.

That's another way in which people often confuse the gospel. They say you need to have a relationship with Jesus. Well, guess what? Judas Iscariot had a relationship with Jesus and it didn't do him any good. He wasn't saved. Jesus' brothers had a relationship with Jesus for many years and it wasn't until after the resurrection that they believed in Him as their Savior. Having a relationship with Jesus wasn't the issue. The issue in Scripture is belief.

John uses the verb 98 times without any modification in his gospel. Over and over and over again the issue is believe in Him. By the way, that's another way in which people try to distort this. They say that there's a difference between believing that Jesus is the Christ and believing in Him. I could give you many citations that linguistically there's no difference between believing the Greek phase "believe in" and "believe that". They are semantic equivalents so they mean the identically same thing.

So what this tells us is that faith is rational. It's not irrational. That's what a lot of secularists would have us believe, that it's irrational. They separate faith from reason. They separate faith from science. They say faith is just what you have to believe as if it has nothing to do with the intellect or with evidence or thought. You just have to believe it because there is no evidence. But the writer of Hebrews says that faith is the evidence of things hoped for. Faith is knowledge. It's not just knowledge through perception. It's knowledge based on the revelation from God.

So point number six says that faith is an activity of the mentality of the soul, which is the affirmation and agreement that something is true. Now let me clarify this. There's a difference between saying, "I believe the Bible when it says Jesus died on the cross for my sins." Let me give you an analogy; I believe that Darwin taught that human beings evolved from monkeys. Does that mean that I believe that human beings evolved from monkeys? No, I'm just saying that I believe that Darwin said that. There are a lot of people that might say that they believe the Bible says Jesus died for their sins but they don't believe that Jesus died for their sins. That's just what the Bible says, according to them, but they don't believe it.

So saving faith is believing that Jesus died on the cross not just for the sins of the world but for your sins. It's personal. Jesus died for you. I remember I had a camper when I was in college working at Camp Peniel who came to me one night to talk. He'd grown up in a Bible church here in Houston, in a Christian family. I knew his brother real well. The camper said that he just realized that night that Jesus died for him. Now he may have been saved before that but I think he reached the point where it was now a reaffirmation. He believed it was the first time in his life that he realized, not just that Jesus died as an historical fact, but that Jesus died for him.

That's that personal object that says, "I believe that Jesus died for my sins and that's the basis of why I go to heaven." If someone were to sit you down and say, "God is going to ask you when you get to heaven why He should let you in, what's your answer going to be? How would you answer that? It's very simple. The answer is because Jesus died for my sins. I asked that question one time when I was interviewing someone for membership. I said, "Well, tell me, if you went before the throne of God and He asked why He should let you into heaven, what would you say?" She looked at me like I'd grown a horn between my eyes. It was causing her to have to think and to put it together in a way that she'd never heard it before. I had to talk to her awhile. I was pretty sure she was saved but she had just never thought about it quite that way before.

Point seven is that faith has no merit in itself. All the merit lies in the object of faith. Faith is the conduit. The Scripture says we're saved through faith, not because of faith. Faith is like the electronic wiring in the building. The wiring doesn't generate power. The wiring isn't the source of electricity. It is simply the conduit that moves the electricity from the generator to the light bulb. It's the means by which something gets from one point to the other. So the object of faith, the Lord Jesus Christ, is what has the merit, not the fact that I'm so smart that I believe but that Jesus is the One who died. That's the point. It doesn't matter how much faith I have or how sincere I am.

If I believe I have a thousand dollars in my checking account but I only have a dollar, I'm in trouble. Faith means that the object has to be worthy and true. I'm believing in Christ. It's not the sincerity or the quality of my faith. I may believe the wrong thing. The issue is I have to believe the right thing, which is that Jesus died on the cross for my sins.

The eighth point says that faith as an intellectual activity excludes emotion. It's not about how we feel. There may be feeling associated with it. When some people come to understand Christ died on the cross for them, they can be quite emotional. I remember when my parents told the gospel to me I was so excited I just lit out of the house and found my best friend. I was excited. Other people are just overwhelmed and they may weep because they realize that they're saved. There's all kind of emotions that may come with the faith in Christ but they're not faith in Christ. They're simply the consequence of the intellectual activity.

Now there are four ways historically that have helped us determine how we come to know anything. The point I'm making here is that faith is always present. The most devout atheist operates on faith. The devout scientist operates on faith. Now they may try to juxtapose faith and reason but their belief in reason is a belief. See, it's a belief of the reason that comes before the reason. So I break it down into the four ways we come to know anything.

The first is rationalism which is the idea that we start with certain innate ideas and our faith is in human ability to understand and logically develop first principles. So it's built on an independent use of logic and reason. That is, independent of God. The second, empiricism doesn't start with innate ideas. It starts with sense perception, what we see, hear, taste, and touch. Plato in the ancient world is an example of rationalism. Descartes in the modern world is an example. Rationalism couldn't really get to ultimate causation. Empiricism can't either. Empiricism operates on the idea of observation and external experience.

Now both of these are true in a limited sense. We learn a lot from both rationalism and empiricism. In terms of empiricism, Adam learned a lot in the Garden. He was to name all of the animals and he learned about all the trees and all the different kinds of fruit and the food that God provided for Adam and Eve. But there's one thing Adam couldn't learn in the Garden through either rationalism or empiricism. And that was that if he ate from the fruit of one tree he would die. He could only learn that if God told him.

So I'm not saying empiricism and rationalism are wrong. They're just limited. They can't get us to ultimate truth. Now sort of a perversion of both of these is mysticism. Mysticism is the idea that I can come to know truth on the basis of some sort of inner feeling, some sort of intuitive flash of insight, and this is not subject to verification through logic or anything rational. It's non-verifiable. I just know it's true because it's true. Don't confuse me with facts. Don't confuse me with logic. I just know it.

How do you know UFOs exist? Oh, I just know it. There has to be someone living on other planets. I just know it. On what basis? Is there any evidence at all? No. None whatsoever. Mysticism was the basis for many of the ancient, pagan religions. You see where does all the activity take place in rationalism? Between your ears. Where does all the activity take place in mysticism? Same place, between your ears. Mysticism is rationalism gone to seed.

That's why you can say the whole modern environmental movement, if you understand its pagan roots, is ultimately the result of mysticism, not science. In fact, there's a new DVD out that I'm hearing from people that is fabulous on the whole issue of climate science and global science and environmentalism. I'm thinking this is something we need to address so we'll be showing that sometime during the summer. I'm going to watch it. I ordered it a couple of days ago. Charlie Clough has been really high on this for several months. Dan Inghram watched it a couple of weeks ago. I want to sit down and watch it. It's an hour and a half. I think it's too much for one Bible class so I'm thinking about cutting it in half and having some discussion questions about it, which is very important.

So the fourth way we know truth is through revelation. God tells us things that we can neither learn from rationalism or empiricism, such as if you eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. And so when we view revelation, there's objective revelation from God and we use logic and reason to understand it but we don't develop an independent system of reason that tells us that God could not do some things. That's what 19^th century liberalism did. It came along and said, "Well, we've got what we think are facts that we discovered in science that tell us that the earth is really old. We can't figure out how that can fit with the Bible so therefore, the Bible must be wrong."

Where are they putting all their faith? In their human ability to properly interpret those facts. Now some 200 years later we see they misinterpreted a lot of those facts and scientists know that but they still cling to the theory of evolution. So we have to use logic and reason but we assume the Bible is true and that's our starting point, not something within the creation.

So then, under point 9, we understand that faith is not something we do. It's not something we get merit for. It's something that is a channel. The merit is in the object. We speak of faith as being non-meritorious. We're saved by grace, through faith. And then the last point is that I've alluded to already is that Scripture divides faith into two types. So when we look at a passage that's talking about faith, we need to ask if this passage is talking about faith-related to Phase 1 justification or is this talking about faith toward the promises and statements of Scripture for my spiritual growth and spiritual life?

Okay, that's a lot on faith. It's very important to understand this that faith is simply belief that what the Scripture says is true. It's important to understand that in regards to the gospel, believing that Christ died for my sins is what I believe. And if I believe that, then I'm saved. But what about what some people say? Do I have to believe in the deity of Christ? Well, you can't reject the deity of Christ but that may not be an issue when someone explains the gospel to you. It's implicitly there but it's not explicitly there. You can't explicitly reject it but you're implicitly believing it when you believe the gospel. You're implicitly believing in the resurrection and several other things in a normal gospel presentation that aren't necessarily talked about.

When we've gone through the whole illustration of the Barrier, the different dimensions of what Christ did on the cross, we see that Christ died to redeem us from our sins. He died to propitiate God. He died to justify us. All of these are different facets of what Christ did on the cross. We don't have to understand all of them to be saved. We just have to understand that Christ died on the cross for our sins. A four year old or three year old child can understand that. He can barely understand what death is. But he can comprehend to some degree that he has a problem and that Jesus solved the problem when he died on the cross and if he believes that, he'll go to heaven for eternity. They can comprehend that.

There's a lot more to the gospel than that because we spend our whole lives trying to comprehend it all but you don't have to comprehend it all to get saved. You just have to believe that basic principle, that basic proposition of Scripture that Christ died for your sins. So next time we'll come back and start looking at the next few verses which are some of the most significant verses related to the spiritual life in the New Testament. They really connect the passages of Ephesians 4, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, James 1, 1 Peter 2, and others so we'll come back to that next Thursday night.

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