I used to immediately lose interest when someone brought up faith. Faith brought to mind the cryptic words from Hebrews 11, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This made me shut my mind down to avoid confusion. Faith just didn’t make sense.
Then I read Hebrews 11 again two months ago. The sliver of text that always irritated me, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” suddenly lost its baffling familiarity. I was finally seeing something I’d looked at my whole life. I could finally recognize what had been there all along.
I was already familiar with the idea that faith moves in the face of minimal evidence; what faith believes in can’t be seen by the human eye, after all. But at that moment, I realized that this idea was only half the point. Faith may move in the face of minimal evidence, but it doesn’t result in minimal evidence. As faith works, evidence grows. The more acts of faith, the more pieces of evidence that arise in its wake.
How does this work? How is it that faith creates evidence? It does so like a falcon creates evidence of aerodynamics: it dives. In response, the air, though invisible, carries it faithfully. But it does so only after the bird leaves the ledge. Evidence of aerodynamics can be seen only in the falcon’s dependence on those laws; that is, the evidence can be seen only in flight.
In the same way, evidence of God’s existence can be seen only in dependence upon that existence. The act of dependence must come first; then God provides the evidence. Yet his response isn’t erratic. His response to faith is akin to the air’s response to the wing of a falcon. It’s a law of nature. Falcons fly; faith produces evidence. The Bible is confident about it, and so were the people listed in the rest of Hebrews 11.
This leads to a second point about the nature of faith and the purpose of the evidence it produces: Faith often produces future benefits, rather than immediate ones. Faith doesn’t always provide instant encouragement or sudden reward. Rather, acts of faith are intended for future encouragement, and not only for the individual who acts, but for everyone around them, even their descendants.
I was introduced to this idea during a rebellious period at age 18. I found myself thinking of my future kids, and I realized to what extent my actions would affect them. What if destroying myself through sin didn’t just destroy me? What if it destroyed my children? The thought stopped me in my tracks.
At that point, I realized the weight of influence that one life carries. Rebellion in one moment often leads to difficulty in the next. Rebellion in one life often leads to difficulty, even destruction, in the lives that follow. In the same way, faith in one moment means evidence in the next. Faith in one life means strength — even redemption — in the lives that follow.
So the challenge is clear. The stakes are high. But we need not run blindly; those who have gone before in faith have left plenty of evidence behind them.
