Ever hear the phrase "just believe?" I've heard a lot of Christians say to one another and even to unbelievers, "just believe." This seems to be the easy way out of a difficult question that we may be confronted with. I want to challenge you this morning on why I believe that a blind leap of faith is wrong. See when Jesus said, "...if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified,..." he did not mean believe in me just because I tell you to. See if I (Jon) told you to believe in me I certainly hope you wouldn't because there is a major difference between me and Jesus. What is that difference? Well lets see, I will probably fail you and Jesus is guaranteed to NEVER fail you. If you "just believe" then really you can believe in anything. This is called blind faith and as a Christian this is wrong. Francis Shaeffer says, "'Keep quiet and just believe' may later lead to spiritual weakness, even if the person does become a Christian, for it will leave crucial questions unanswered." We can have a rational faith in Jesus because he has proven himself to be God. We know through the scripture that Jesus was who he claimed to be. Through out the entire Bible we see that God has always been faithful to his people, he loves us with a love greater then all else and he has promised to be by our side each and every day. Would I have enough faith in you to submit my life to you if you told me that, no and you shouldn't do the same with me either. But with God we know that he is God and we know that he is the only way to life and that he will never fail us.
If we look at Abraham and Isaac (Genesis : ) many people might think Abraham took a blind leap in sacrificing his son because they was no apparent reason for doing so except that God told him too. However, before Abraham was ever asked to sacrifice Isaac (which God did not allow to be consummated), he had seen God. God had remain faithful to Abraham. He knew that God existed and was trustworthy. Abraham's faith faith was based on rationality. See a "blind leap of faith" is totally separated from rationality.
Now there are obviously questions out there that we will never no the answer to but we don't walk away from God because we will never know whether calvinism or arminianism is right. We can have rational faith that God is still God even though there is some knowledge he has withheld from us in his word.
I challenge you if you don't know something don't just believe it blindly, research it, ask God to reveal it to you as there are some things especially the Salvation that you cannot afford to believe blindly. However, there are some thing that really don't matter a whole lot and don't change our relationship with God. These things we can simply trust God who has always been faithful that he has withheld certain knowledge from us for good reason.
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