I have just completed a word study on faith by going through the old testament and studying every time the root word (awman) for believe is used. In doing this study God has shown me that the understanding of faith that I had at the beginning was quite askew. I have found that faith in the old testament is not contrasted to reason because faith is our reasonable response to a loving Father. Further, I have found that we inherit in a way the stability of what we put our faith in. Said another way, a house built on the rock will stand because the rock stands. Read on to see how I arrived at these conclusions

The first thing that I noticed right away is that this verb in Hebrew can be used both transitively and intransitively. The transitive sense is easily recognized in English. This is the use where someone believes or trusts in someone or something else. For instance, in Gen 15:6 Abraham believes God.  The intransitive sense is also fairly easy to understand.  One example would be Num 12:7 where Moses is faithful.  What is difficult to understand here is how these two very different English renderings turn out to be the same Hebrew word.

What I noticed as I studied further trying to make sense of the link between these two sentences is that this word often occurs right along side the idea of keeping covenants.  If God is described as being faithful it is within the context of him keeping covenant or holding up his end (Deut 1:32).  If Israel is described as not being faithful it is because they have not kept God’s covenant.  That makes enough sense for the intransitive use, but what about the more typical sentence, “Joe believed Tom”?  What I began to notice is that sentences of this type tend to mean something like: Joe judges Tom to be a covenant keeper.

In our modern culture, we don’t really think in terms of covenants.  However, in a perhaps less serious way, we do understand what it means to be reliable.  If Andrew takes a job and doesn’t show up half of the time he isn’t reliable.  We also know what it means to think that someone is reliable.  If you have been my friend through thick and thin for many years I will think that you are a reliable friend and will treat you differently than someone I just met.  However, in English we don’t really say “I deem you to be a reliable person.”  We simply say “I trust you.”

With this understanding of the words I came to some surprising finds as I studied the verses further.  Many times I have Indiana Jones referenced in sermons to describe what faith really is.  There is a scene in The Last Crusade where Jones needs to cross a seemingly bottomless chasm.  He can’t see any evidence of a bridge of any kind but he has a sketch with a bridge in it.  He therefore simply steps out into the middle of thin air and to his surprise finds that there really is a bridge there, camouflaged quite nicely.  This illustration would be fine with me if it was pointed out that the sketch was done by his father so his stepping out was really done out of a trust in their relationship.  Unfortunately I have heard this used multiple times to illustrate the idea that we just need to step out there without any evidence other than the preachers claim that God will catch us.

However, I do not find anywhere in the bible the idea that we simply need to believe God without any sort of evidence.  Israel was not asked to make a covenant with a mysterious God just based on Moses’s word.  Instead, God is continually citing evidence that supports his faithfulness.  The old testament is full of lists of God’s faithful acts that read almost like a resume (cf. Ps 78:1ff and Ps 105:1ff et al.)  It is not as though a silent God asks us to summon up some superhuman feat of believing in what we have never heard of.  Instead we have a shouting, preaching, prophet sending God that reminds us again and again of the specific ways in which he has held up his end.

Therefore, the call to faith is a call to think and behave in a way that shows our trust in a loving God (ie obedience).  It would be easy to think of this trust in purely intellectual terms.  In other words, all that God is asking Israel to do is simply acknowledge that he did in fact bring them out of Egypt.  However, as I remarked at the beginning, these words are always given in the context of covenants.  Here to believe and to be faithful become one idea.  If we truly consider God to have kept his end of the covenant, the demand then is that we keep ours.  The outpouring of belief in this sense is obedience.

The final thing that I noticed about this kind of faith is that our reliability is entirely dependant on what we rely on.  In both 2 Chron 20:20 and Isa 43:10 there is a connection made between believing in God and being established.  In the Hebrew these two phrases are translations of the same word.  The concept here is something akin to the parable that Jesus tells in which a wise man builds his house upon a rock.  In the story, this man judges the rock to be a sturdy or reliable foundation for building his house upon.  Because he is correct, his house is stable and reliable through many storms.  In contrast the foolish man thinks that the sand is a good spot for his house.  Because the sand is shifting and unreliable his house quickly falls apart.  In the same way if we correctly judge that God is a good person to make a covenant with, we will not be disappointed.  However, if we foolishly judge the world to be faithful we will not have a very stable life because it will always let us down.