While living in a smaller city, I participated in a house-to-house survey. We were asking people if they should die that day and stood before God and He asked them, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” what would they say?
Most people claimed that they lived good lives and thought that would be sufficient. While this falls short of the biblical answer, I was not surprised to hear it. Because sin is essentially turning from God and doing our own thing, trying to earn heaven by our goodness is a predictable response.
However, one person said something that I’d not heard before. She said she would go to heaven “because of my faith.” We asked further. She explained that she believed she would be there, and her belief was her grounds for eternal life. She did not mention Jesus Christ or His death on the cross. When asked what would happen if she stopped believing, she said she would not be able to go to heaven. In other words, her faith was the virtue that she depended on for eternal life. She wasn’t interested in what Jesus had done for her.
“My faith will save me” sounded good and took me a few days to sort out what she had told us. The Bible says faith by itself isn’t enough; we must also demonstrate our faith by what we do. Yet that wasn’t the explanation that made sense of her claim. Finally, after study and prayer, I began to realize that faith by itself cannot exist. Faith must have an object, something that is believed in and relied upon. In this woman’s case, her faith was in her faith.
I thought of her this morning when I read this verse: “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
God wants people to believe, but the sentence cannot end there. The blank to fill in is “to believe in _________” What does He want me to pin my hopes on? Obviously, in this verse hope is in a promise that God has made and in the fact that He is faithful to keep His promises.
Faith always has an object, a something that is grounds for its existence. Is it faith in a religious organization? In spiritual leaders? In a denomination or a creed? A more important question is asking if those things give anyone an entrance to eternal life.
Another object of faith could be the Scripture. Are we saved by faith in the Bible? I read another passage this morning where Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40).
It struck me that even though we find out about Jesus through reading Scripture and we know about eternal life and need the Word of life to inform and sustain faith, it is Jesus that gives life and our faith must be in Him, not just in the Bible, or His teachings, or the creeds, or even in His promises.
Apart from Jesus, all these things are just words and dogma. He is the grounds for and the object of Christian faith. Without Him, there would be no heaven, no eternal life, nothing for me to hope or believe in, no matter how much faith I could muster.
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