A Leap of Faith?

We live in a time where we’ve been infected with what’s called fideism, which says, “I don’t need to have a reason for what I believe. I just close my eyes like Tiny Alice and take a real deep breath and scrunch up my nose. And if I try hard enough, I can believe. And I jump into the arms of Jesus. I take a blind leap of faith.” I hear that expression all the time. And every time I hear that expression—people say, “Take a leap of faith”—I have a pain that starts at the back of my feet and goes all the way up my back. And I want to say, “No, no, no. The Bible never tells you to take a leap of faith into the darkness and hope that there’s somebody out there. The Bible calls you to jump out of the darkness and into the light.”

And that is not a blind leap—that the faith that the New Testament calls us to is a faith that is rooted and grounded in things that God does that make it very, very clear that this is the truth. For example, when Paul does encounter the philosophers at Mars Hill, and he says to them, “The former days of ignorance God overlooked, but now God commands all men everywhere to repent because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by that one whom he has proven to be his son by the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 17:30–31). Now, it’s not like God comes down in the form of Christ and Jesus goes into a closet someplace and offers an atonement. And after He offers the atonement, then God in the closet raises Him up from the dead and nobody sees Him. There’s none of that in Christianity.

When Paul is before Agrippa, he said, “King Agrippa, these things were not done in a corner. Jesus was crucified openly. And it’s not like we went to an empty tomb and say, ‘We can’t figure out what happened here. Somebody stole the body,’ but Christ came out of that tomb, not in secret, but publicly, where we have eyewitness after eyewitness, over five hundred people who saw him at one time. And as one born out of due time, O, king, I saw him with my own eyes” (Acts 26).

Now, ladies and gentlemen, maybe you think that Paul’s testimony is that of a lunatic, and you don’t want to give credibility to it. But do you see the difference between making a case for the truth claim or just saying, “Well, yeah. No, nobody saw Him die. Nobody saw Him rise. God did all that in a corner someplace or in a closet. I’m asking you to believe it, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and take it by faith.”

That’s not faith. That’s credulity. That’s superstition. And the task, again, of apologetics is to show that the evidence that the New Testament calls people to commit their life to is compelling evidence and worthy of your full commitment. Now, that involves often a lot of work, and sometimes we would rather duck the responsibility of doing our homework, of wrestling with the problems and answering the objections, and just say to people, “Well, you just have to take it on faith.” That’s the ultimate cop out. That doesn’t honor Christ. We honor Christ by setting forth for people the cogency of the truth claims of Scripture, even as God does, even when God sends Moses to Pharaoh’s court and says, “You tell Pharaoh that I said to let my people go and to bring them out where they can worship me at this mountain” (Ex. 7:16).

And Moses says, “How am I going to know? How am I going to get in there? Who am I to tell Pharaoh that? And will the people follow me? How are they going to know?” God says, “Here’s how they’re going to know, Moses. Put your hand in your shirt.” And he puts his hand in his shirt. God says, “Pull it out, pull it out.” It’s leprous. Moses is terrified. God says, “Put your hand back in your shirt.” Moses puts it back in his shirt then pulls it out. It’s gone. “Take your staff, throw it on the ground.” It turns into a snake. God said, “That’s how you’re going to know. I’m going to empower you in such a way that even Pharaoh won’t be able to deny that it’s the Lord God who is behind this mandate.” And that’s why we have to take the trouble to do our work before the Spirit does His work because the Spirit does not ask people to put their trust and their faith and their affection in nonsense, or in absurdity, or in unsubstantiated truth claims.