“Believe” Can Mean “To Have Faith” – But “I Believe” Is Not Always Faith

About 15 years ago my son-in-law recommended a book to me that has had a lasting impact on how I understand my relationship with God. The book is ‘The Dynamics of Faith’ by Paul Tillich. Here is a quote from that book:

“There is hardly a word in the religious language, both theological and popular, which is subject to more misunderstanding, distortions and questionable definitions than the word “faith”. It belongs to those terms, which need healing before they can be used for the healing of men. Today the term “faith” is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternatively skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender, rejection of genuine religion and subjection to substitutes” (Tillich, the Dynamics of Faith, pg xxi).

Faith is the foundation of everything in our walk with Christ. Without faith there is no relationship with Him. “And without faith it is impossible please God” (Hebrews 11: 6 NIV). But as Tillich points out, the term ’faith’ is subject to questionable definitions and distortions. For example, there is what I call ‘true faith’ and ‘false faith’, which can also be called ‘idolatrous faith’. What are these two types and how are they different? Then there is ‘faith’ and ‘believe’. Are they two words for the same thing or is there a difference? Then there is what some call ‘saving faith’ and something different – ‘the gift of faith’. So what is faith, how do I know if I have it; and if I don’t, can I ‘get’ it? These questions and others, plus their answers (to the best of my ability), are presented in the posts that make up this series on ‘faith’.

 Summary

For those who are not interested in reading this entire post, here is the bottom line. In many verses in Scripture ‘believe’ is synonymous with ‘to have faith’. But ‘believe’ also means intellectual assent. How many Christians read ‘believe’ as in “whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life” and think that it means intellectual assent, which is what the word ‘believes’ means in the English language, and miss the point about faith. Faith is the total leaning of the human personality upon Jesus with trust and confidence, which is a very different thing than ‘believe’ as assent. Faith requires risk, surrender, and submission. It also takes courage. To ‘believe’ requires no risk, especially if you keep what you believe to yourself. As one who ‘believes’ in Jesus I can tell Him, “I will go this far, but no farther. You can have my mind, but not my heart”. This is an issue of salvation!

The Necessity of Faith

Faith is the ultimate requirement for salvation. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift from God” (Ephesians 2: 8 NIV). In the most well-known passage in the New Testament, “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes (or “has faith” – same thing) in Him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3: 16 NIV).

Faith is involved in healing. Jesus tells Bartimaeus, “Your faith has healed you” (Mark 10: 52 NIV). When Jesus gave sight to two blind men, He said, “According to your faith will it be done to you” (Matthew 9: 29 NIV). Jesus tells a sick woman, “Daughter, your faith has healed you” (Mark 5: 30; Matthew 9: 22 NIV). The Centurion’s servant was healed because of his faith. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matthew 8: 10 NIV). Lack of faith is connected with a paucity of miracles. In His hometown Jesus “did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith” (Mathew 13: 58 NIV). When the disciples asked Jesus why they couldn’t cast a demon out of a boy, Jesus said, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed . . . nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17: 20, 21 NIV).

I want to stop here and ask the question: Is faith always necessary for spiritual, emotional, or physical healing? In my experience it is a lot easier to heal someone if they have faith – at least the expectancy that God can and wants to heal them. But sure, Jesus healed people who had no faith. Jesus healed a lame man at the Bethesda pool (John 5: 1 – 15). The man did not know the name of the man who healed him – Jesus. In other accounts of Jesus’ healings and deliverances, for example the Sunset Miracles (see Luke 4: 40, 41), Jesus healed many with no indication that they had faith. However, it seems to me that the person praying for supernatural healing needs faith, even if it is faith the size of a mustard seed.

Faith is also involved in forgiving sins. Jesus heals a paralyzed man because of the faith of his friends, “When Jesus saw their faith, he said, Friend, your sins are forgiven” (Luke 5: 20 NIV), and the man got up a walked away. We don’t know if the man who was healed had faith – but we do know it was the faith of his friends that Jesus commended.

And the big one for me “I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt . . . you can say to this mountain, ‘Go throw yourself into the sea’, and it will be done. If you believe (it is clear to me from this context that ‘believe’ here is synonymous with ‘have faith’ – more support for this below), you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matthew 21: 21, 22 NIV). Faith in Jesus and faith in this promise! Faith unlocks the power of God to be released through our prayers.

Without faith we live in our own power in the kingdom of self, which is the kingdom of darkness, at the mercy of this corrupt and fallen world, and the work of the enemy. Faith is required for a life in the Kingdom of God (aka salvation), freedom from emotional and spiritual darkness and prison, and access to the power and authority God gives to His people to partner with Him to accomplish His eternal purposes. To receive the love of the Father and to love like the Father, we need faith. But faith always involves risk. That is why faith is defined as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11: 1). We put our ‘faith’ in something we hope for and cannot see. Because we take that risk, and we might be literally risking our life, faith requires courage. And as I wrote above, without faith we cannot please God.

The Faith and Believe Confusion

I began this journey into the topic of faith with this passage of Scripture: “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (Romans 3: 22 NIV). What a powerful statement about the importance of faith! But hold on – Paul calls us to “have faith” and “believe”. Is he saying the same thing twice, for example, “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who have faith”? Or is there a difference between ‘faith’ and ‘believe’ in this passage, other than that faith is a noun and believe is a verb? And is it a difference that makes a difference? Maybe not the best place to begin looking into what faith is, how we ‘get’ faith, and the different types of faith. But it was where I found myself, so I thought, “I will follow these questions and see where they led me”.

In my concordances I found that ‘faith’ (pistis in Greek) means “the leaning of the entire human personality upon God or the Messiah in absolute trust and confidence”. Believe is more complicated. ‘Believe’ (pisteuo in Greek) can mean “to have a mental persuasion that a person or statement made by a person is true”. In other words, a mental assent to something or someone as true. But it can also be used interchangeably with faith. For example, in the Souter Pocket Lexicon ‘believe’ also means “to cast myself upon someone or something as stable and trust-worthy, with energy of faith”. In Strong’s Concordance, ‘believe’ is defined as “to have faith in, upon, or respect to a person or thing, to trust, to put trust in.” So in many verses in the New Testament ‘believe’ means ‘to have faith’.

For example, in Matthew 21: 22:

“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (NIV).

But in another translation, the words “have faith” are used,

“Whatever you ask for in prayer, you will receive if you have faith” (ESV).

Two different words – believe and faith – same meaning.

Here are two other examples where believe and faith – or in these cases ‘unbelief’ and ‘faithlessness’ – have the same meaning. In Mark 9, Jesus casts a demon out of a boy with epilepsy. He asks the father, “Do you believe I can do this?” The father answers, “I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief” (Mark 9: 24 NIV). The Greek word for ‘unbelief’ in this passage is apistia, which is very similar to pistis (faith). Apisita is best interpreted as “no faith”, faithlessness, or lack of faith”. The father is really saying “I believe in you Jesus as mental assent to who you are and what you can do, but help my lack of faith or faithlessness. The same word – apistia – is used in Mark 6: 5,6. Jesus could not do miracles in His hometown, “and He was amazed at their lack of faith” (NIV). The Greek word for “lack of faith” in this passage is apistia. So, unbelief and ‘lack of faith’ are synonymous. But it is interesting that the Father’s “I believe” seems to mean “I accept the truth of who you are and what you can do”. He just hasn’t made the leap to trust and surrender his entire life to Jesus – which is faith.

As I wrote above, in John 3:16 we read: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life”. It is clear from the context of this passage that John used ‘believe’ to mean ‘ has faith’, rather than a mental assent. The Amplified Bible picks up on this when it translates John 3: 16 this way: “For God so greatly loved and dearly prized the world that He even gave up His only begotten unique Son, so that whoever believes in – trusts in, clings to, relies on – Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (AMP). “Trusts in”, clings to”, “relies on” are not words about a mental assent. They are words that describe faith.

And another example: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (1 John 5: 1 NIV). If we replace ‘believes’ with ‘has faith’, the sentence still makes sense – “Everyone who has faith that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”.

But, there are passages in Scripture where ‘believe’ or words that obviously mean ‘to believe’ are not synonymous with faith, or at least do not seem synonymous to me. In these passages ‘believe’ means knowing with the mind that Jesus is who He says He is. How can we tell the difference between ‘believe’ meaning faith, and ‘believe’ meaning mental assent? The only way is by the context in which the word is used. Here is an example from James.

In James 2, James is writing to some fellow Christians about faith, believe, and deeds.

“What good is it my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? . . . In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. . . Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder. . . You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless?” (James 2: 14 – 20 NIV).

According to James, the men he is writing this letter to ‘believe’ in the sense that they “believe in one God”, which is intellectual assent. Event the demons ‘believe’ as they do; and demons definitely do not have faith. They have confused this ‘believe’ with faith. They do not have true faith, because they do not have deeds. But there is at least one more layer of complexity to what James is telling them. He acknowledges that they have a type of faith, “In the same way, faith by itself . . . is dead”. There is a type of faith, which James calls ‘dead faith’. I call it false faith. True faith produces deeds that glorify God. False faith produces deeds that glorify the deed doer – which to James are not deeds at all.

I think James is pointing to something fundamental about ‘faith’. Everyone has faith in something. Basically, there are only two kinds of faith: true faith, which is faith in Jesus; and false faith, which is faith in self. These two kinds of faiths are directly connected to kingdom life. There are only two kingdoms: the Kingdom of God, or the kingdom of the world, also known as the kingdom of self. We all live in one kingdom or the other. We cannot have dual citizenship. Jesus makes this clear, “No one can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6: 24 NIV). In the same way, we cannot have two faiths – we either have a true faith in Jesus, and live in the Kingdom of God (although not perfectly – that is why God gave us the gift of repentance); or we have a false faith, which is faith in the things of the world, and live in the kingdom of the world. True faith is the key that opens the door into the Kingdom of God. I was thinking, does false faith open a door to something also? Yes!

In an earlier post I shared my testimony about how I became a Christian. I had a dream in which I stood at a doorway, looking into a beautiful white room lit with dazzling white light. Jesus asked if I wanted to go into the room and live there forever. I said, “yes I do, but I don’t have faith”. Jesus told me “you have my permission to enter. I will give you the faith you need”. I have often thought of that moment – I went in and never looked back. It was the instant that my life changed. But because of my recent thinking, reading, writing, and praying about faith I realized I had probably misunderstood that moment. It wasn’t faith I lacked – well, yes it was – I lacked faith. More fundamentally I lacked belief. I didn’t believe anything about Jesus – His life, His death, His resurrection, His miracles. Jesus gave me faith ultimately, but first He had to give me belief. That is what I received when I crossed that threshold – belief, as in “I believe the truth of who Jesus is and what He did”. Faith came later, also a gift from God, but it developed over a longer period.

But, and this is an important point, I cannot have faith in something in which I do not believe to be true! ‘Believe’ as mental assent is a critical first step in the development of faith. It is a necessary step, but it is not sufficient.

I asked a question about ‘faith’ and ‘believe’ at the top of this post In Romans 3: 22. Do they both mean faith or do they have different meanings. I think, based on my work, that Paul is calling us to ‘believe’ in who Jesus is and what He did (trust) and then on that basis, plus the work of the Holy Spirit, we receive faith. As I write in another post, the ability to believe and have faith are gifts from our Heavenly Father.

And So . . .

I believe that these ideas about true faith, false faith, and ‘believe’ as ‘knowing truth’ are important. They get to the heart of what faith is and what it is not. And they are connected to salvation and kingdom life. Bottom line – is it possible that many Christians are comfortable with their ‘faith’, when in fact what they are doing is ‘believing’ the truth about Jesus, which is not faith at all? After all, faith requires risk, risk requires courage, and God calls us to surrender and submit everything to Him in complete trust and confidence. Hard work, even with the leading of the Holy Spirit! Isn’t it easier to just ‘believe’ and call it ‘faith’? Good question. See my next post for more examples.

Grace and peace through Jesus Christ,

John