Reasons for Faith
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.”
So begins Hebrews chapter 11. The words on the face of it may be difficult to understand
and yet they contain a simple truth. Faith is not blind, it isn’t something you just
have or don’t have, it is something of substance and it is based on evidence.
All
the examples in Hebrews 11 are of people who saw what God could do and acted on the
evidence of what they saw. A fantastic example of this is Rahab the Harlot who lived
in Jericho. When the Israelite spies came to Jericho she knew her history. These
people had defeated Egypt some 40 years earlier and everyone was amazed. The God
of Israel had made a mockery of the god’s of Egypt. Each plague had been a direct
attack on the Egyptian god’s and proved them to be nothing more than wood and stone.
So when the Israelites came threatening Jericho, she knew who would win, she made
the decision to put her old life behind her and trust in the God of Israel and not
the god’s of the Canaanites. The evidence was Israel and the way God had brought
them out of Egypt.
Today we can see similar evidence of the power of God:
- Israel are a nation again with a land, Jerusalem is their capital city. This is in direct fulfilment of Prophecy and is a necessary prerequisite for other prophecies to be fulfilled, in particular Jesus return to the earth.
- Archaeology has proven the Bible account to be accurate again and again.
- The Bible itself is a remarkable book and how it came to us can be traced as accurate and essentially unaltered during it’s passage through the centuries.
The following pages give some of the detail of this evidence and explain why we are so confident about our faith in the Bible message.
It is often thought that to believe in God you have to choose between logic or faith, with the presumption that faith is blind whilst logic is rational. This notion, however, could not be further from the truth. Faith in the bible is grounded on the rational evidence that the bible is true, whether it is archaeological evidence, or prophetic passages that against the odds have come to pass exactly as described, or the internal harmony of the text itself. True faith is not some special ability that some possess and others do not, it is never blind but is firmly based on the straight forward evidence set out in the pages of scripture. In the same way that you can trust a person that has shown over time that they are reliable, the bible contains very powerful evidence for its reliability… Click here to read more.
Why We Have Confidence in the Accuracy of the Bible Text.
It has become quite common in recent years to question the accuracy of the bible text. The evidence for the accurate transmission of the bible text through the centuries is very powerful.
Follow this link for two video presentations which show this evidence in more detail.
Six short videos in which scientists, historians and other experts give their reasons for putting their trust in the Bible. Click here to view the videos.