Question 1: Is God Pleased With Just Any Faith?

In the very successful Alcoholics Anonymous program, subjects must put their faith in a “higher power” to properly advance through the 12 steps.  Is this level of belief in anything higher than ourselves acceptable to God?  Is He pleased that we simply believe in anything and are sincere about it?  The Israelites might have been sincere in their worship of the false god Baal or even of the golden calves in their temples, but God rejects that worship as wrong.  The people have known what was right, but had willfully chosen what God called wicked.

Many today confess that they “believe in God.”  Is this all we must do to be pleasing to the Lord?  Just believe that He isn’t imaginary?  Is this amorphous type of faith enough?  The problem with this type of confession is that it says nothing about the characteristics of the God one believes in.  When I say that I believe in God, I might mean that I believe in a benevolent grandfather who is ignorant of our sin but loves to grant our prayers and help us out of all our problems… or an angry overlord who enjoys inflicting pain and punishment above all else…  or a magical unicorn that created the universe with rainbow power.  None of these would be a true picture of who God is.  If I speak of my friend John Smith, you might say, “I know John Smith.  He’s very tall and is a news broadcaster in Indianapolis.”  I would then correct you and say, “No, the John Smith I know is a short, husky guy who is a construction worker in Alabama.”  Just because we use the same name doesn’t mean we’re talking about the same person.  And just because someone says, “I believe in God,” doesn’t mean they believe in the God of the Bible as He has presented Himself through Jesus Christ.  If we say we believe in God and then ascribe a different set of attributes to that name, then we must necessarily be talking about a different god than the Bible shows us.  A god who does everything I want and demands nothing sacrificial of me is not God at all.  He is a fantasy – no more real than a magical unicorn, but much more dangerous because of his tempting appeal.

Many religions rely on writings that describe God very differently than the Bible does.  They attribute unbiblical qualities to God and discount the work or divinity of Christ.  Some of these sects go so far as to say that they worship the same God as presented in the Bible.  But we’ve established that this can’t be so.  God cannot possess opposing purposes or attributes.  By description, we can determine that we must necessarily be talking about two different gods.  No matter how sincerely we might believe it, God simply cannot be as described in the Bible and also as He is conversely described in other religious writings.  Why would God want to present Himself oppositely to different groups of people?  We consider it dishonest and hypocritical to present ourselves in such ways.  Why would we want to attribute such a despicable quality to the God we purport as holy and who demands better of us?

So, belief in the mere existence of God, or faith in some nameless and formless higher power is not what God desires. The Bible tells us that the demons believe God is real and that He is powerful, and they tremble at the thought (James 2:19); but they are not a part of God’s family-kingdom. If we are to claim a biblical faith in God, we can only approach Him in the way He has provided for sinful human beings; that is, through faith in Jesus Christ as Lord through faith in His resurrection and authority. This is a faith that accounts for God’s reality, honesty, justice, love, and mercy.