Also,(this might sound obvious to others) why is having faith so important to God?
Do you have any example,personal or not,of faith in God being displayed?
I worry,what if you pray to God for something and then he lets you down-wouldn’t you then feel like a fool and never trust Him again?
Faith,trust-is the same or different?
Is trusting God the same feeling as human trust or is it something spiritual God gives the person?
Thanks
From a language standpoint in Scripture, both Old and New Testament, the answer is “yes, they are the same.” But the word “faith” as it appears in Bibles may need a slight revision as people today seem to have a different concept than what was originally intended when English first starting using that word.
The Hebrew and Greek words rendered “faith” both mean “demonstrate trust.” While they both refer to having “belief” in a subject, it is not a static belief, such as merely
believing that something exists or something is true. For example, the Greek word, PISTIS, actually means “faithfulness.”
This is why Jesus says that if we have “faith as small as a mustard seed” that we can move mountains. (Matthew 17:20) The word means exercising or demonstrating your trust or faith. Even the smallest efforts done with trust or faith with move that mountain, but mere static belief that God will move it for you while you do nothing but wait for the Lord to act is not what Jesus meant.
Is it the same as you have for a person, when you have trust in a friend to come through for you? Again, etymologically speaking from the Biblical standpoint, the answer is yes. How? When you trust or have faith that a person will come through for you, you might worry and have some doubt, but your
actions will demonstrate that you expect them to fulfill your expectations. It is the same with God.
But faith in God and God’s promises has an added dimension: Grace. You can see a friend, hear their voice, see them come through for you. You cannot see God. So God gives us the grace to exercise faith in Him and any promise God makes. The same goes for faith in truths revealed that we cannot see. We have faith in them, but only due to this added spiritual help.–Galatians 5:22-23.
But what if you pray to God for something with full trust that he will come through, but then God doesn’t? That is not due to necessarily having a lack of faith. We might be asking for something we think we need but God knows we don’t.
Like a loving parent, sometimes God doesn’t give us what we want. A child might ask their parents in faith for a skateboard, for example, but the parent might know that the child is not physically capable of handling one safely and therefore deny them. Does that mean the child is a fool for trusting their father and mother? Of course not! The same can happening when praying to God. God will always give us what is really needed, not what we think we need.
Lastly, this shows a facet to faith that some fail to realize. Real faith can often live side-by-side with having doubts. You might worry while acting in faith as you wait for a friend or God to act, but it isn’t being unfaithful. At James 1:6, Scripture tells us to pray acting in faithfulness, not living in doubt, meaning not swaying in our actions as if we don’t believe God will act. The word for “doubt” here in Greek is the opposite of “faith,” meaning “exercising doubt” or “being hesitant in movement.”
