The Nature of Biblical Faith

inadequate and can easily be misleading, it may serve to focus our attention on the reason is needed. The verse says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. These words do not mean that is merely a psychological state or that man by independent ability can create what does not exist and so supply what he wants. The chapter goes on to speak of God as the One who creates the world, calls men, gives them promises, and rewards those who seek as surely as he judges those who disobey. What the verse really says is that man is finite; he lives under limitations and in a world where the best he has glimpsed is opposed and often thwarted; he faces an uncertain future with no visible proof that his hopes will be realized; and yet he has a sense of a greater reality than he can demonstrably see or expect, and so in he breaks out of the prison of the finite and the present and lives with courage because the wider horizon shows him the better future and the larger world of God. The continually recurring problem of human sin is not noted here, but it is clear that is needed because man is finite, limited, opposed, thwarted, and placed before the solid iron curtain of the unknown future.

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