Quote Originally Posted by God-free View Post
More often than not, when I ask someone to tell me what faith is, I’m given the following biblical definition.


I'm trying to understand exactly what this means. Unless there's some special biblical meaning for the words 'substance' and 'evidence', the best I can come up with is:
Now faith is the essential import or significance of things hoped for, the substantiation of things not seen.

Is that about right? Also, to what "things not seen" is the verse referring?



Heb. 11 is a list of examples of people who had faith, so the writer of Heb. is telling us that faith is shown by what people do with it. That def. in v. 1 is simply saying that we live in obedience to God because we believe Him, since the "not seen" is God and eternal life, and the "seen" (our faith) is what people see in how we live. But Biblical faith is really much simpler than that, since the term "trust" is very often used in place of "belief", as in verses like "whoever trusts in Him will not be disappointed," and some translations say "whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed." If you read the NT enough times you will start to see that the terms faith, belief, and trust are very interchangeable and like terms as they are used by the NT writers. So to say "I believe in Christ" (from a NT viewpoint) is the same as saying "I trust in Christ." And of course, if we trust in Him, then we will trust His words and commands as being trustworthy to obey, as we understand He wants the best for us.
TD