Many people say that faith is not a quantifiable, testable, observable thing. That everyone has their own measure of faith. People who believe in the miracle of Yeshua the Messiah’s virgin birth, sinless life, sacrificial death, and defeat of death, many times say that the disciples were rebuked time and again for not having faith, so what is their own faith?
Along the same lines, unbelievers cite faith as a predisposition to attributing natural events to “god,” like wet sidewalks bring rain, or a sacrifice to the Corn King brings good crops. When the prayer is answered, God is pleased; when not, God is angry, so it’s not “god,” but the superstition of man.
I submit that these are testable hypotheses. I believe faith is not only a real thing, but also that it is observable, and measurable. If this was not so, why would Yeshua have spent so much time, recorded in the New Testament, explaining how a “little” faith, the size of a mustard seed, can move mountains, or asking the disciples “where is your faith?” If faith was an ethereal thing, why would Christ have told the blind man in Luke 18:35-43, “Receive your sight; your faith has healed you”? Yeshua had never met the man, yet he could see and measure the man’s faith.
The Message translation defines faith in Hebrews 11:1-2 thus: “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.” Faith is a fact of existence, and existence can be observed and measured. I won’t get into metaphysics here, or alternate conceptions of reality. If the world is real (and I challenge you to construct a testable hypothesis to prove it’s not), then faith is a quantifiable, measurable thing.
Trust in God is like trust in gravity. When we drop something, we know it will fall. We can measure how it will fall in various mediums, like air, or a vacuum; we can measure how it will fall on Earth, or on the Moon, or on Mars. We can know the relationship between mass and gravitational effects. We can begin to identify physical elements and particles that are predicted by both classical and quantum physics, though the nature and properties of those predictions vary depending on who has done the theoretical work behind them.
Sometimes experiments in science take years, or decades, or even centuries to manifest. The Weak Equivalence Principle predicted by Einstein was only tested in the vacuum of space between 2016 and 2018; gravitational waves were first detected in 2015, yet predicted nearly 100 years earlier. The Classical Unified Field Theories are still in many ways untested. The existence of Einstein-Rosen bridges (“wormholes”) is still theoretically predicted yet undiscovered in our reality. Many scientists, along with lay people, believe that wormholes exist—they are included in movies and television series all the time. They have faith in the theories and the math behind the predictions.
Therefore, Christians who have faith in God trust the Bible as the reality behind the things faith does. These things are predictable (perhaps better to say “predicted”) and measurable.
The first and biggest prediction is that if Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead, then He is alive. The Bible says this is experimentally testable upon His return. If Christ died and rose, then He will return at a time only the Father in Heaven knows. Anyone claiming anything else is proffering a different theory; some denominations have had their own predictions of events or even specific dates of this event. They have all been wrong. The Bible gives us some general conditions for the culmination of human history—the return of the Creator: humanity will be steeped in godlessness, delusion, and self-gratification.
The New Testament records Yeshua asking in John 4:35, “Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.” The “fields” is a euphemism for the world, and the harvest is those who place their trust in the Son of God, and declare Him Lord of their lives, trusting Him to follow all His commandments.
The act of trusting Yeshua is also testable and observable. Those who do so see “signs and wonders” and miracles follow them. But signs and wonders are also fakeable. The enemy of our souls is very good at deepfakes; the devil’s been using AI for millennia. Or, to unbelievers, the difference between real miracles, signs and wonders, and their fake equivalents, or delusions and ruses, is nil. However, there are indeed miracles, and unexplained things.
People do get healed. People with catastrophic wounds, mortal conditions, get healed. Those who should die, live. Those whose minds have deteriorated to the point of total dementia somehow come back and speak rationally. Nobody knows why; well, nobody who doesn’t believe in the power of faith, and the reality of God’s power, don’t know why. Those who do, know. It’s like lunar eclipses. Those who don’t know about the moon and the sun and the orbital conditions of both would see an eclipse as an open, or a miracle, but we know they are perfectly predictable.
Faith predicts miracles. Miracles, signs, and wonders, the Bible says, always glorify God, meaning they bring people into communion and relationship with Him. Therefore, signs and wonders will always lead people to faith; they don’t exist to be debunked or disbelieved—they don’t manifest unless the conditions of those witnessing them allow a decision for faith. Some claim that the grace of God is “irresistible.” But I say that it’s simply another measurable thing: miracles of grace are manifested in the conditions that allow for decisions, so the pavement is wet because the rain falls, not the other way around.
Muslims in the Middle East, and people in Iran, have dreams of Yeshua. They pick up a New Testament for the first time, banned books smuggled in at great personal risk by missionaries and evangelists, and they see the Yeshua they dreamt of. They believe. They gather in small groups, underground, and commit themselves to the teachings and commandments of God. They tell others, join in the smuggling, and sometimes pay the ultimate price with their lives. This is the faith described in Hebrews chapter 11. It is also measurable. Iran is currently the most fertile field in the world for new Christians.
China has long been a fertile field of harvest, though the government does its best to deny and suppress Christianity. The U.S., and Europe, however, have mostly unfettered access to churches and religious events. And in these geographic regions, Christianity is in decline. People don’t see miracles, signs, and wonders. This is as testable as any hypothesis. It is predicted that the reason for the dearth of power is the absence of faith.
Let’s look at the elements of faith and the predicted results. Christians with any measure of faith love God and love their neighbor. This is the greatest commandment that Yeshua spoke in Matthew 22:35-40. In any gathering or group of Christians, we should expect to observe love in operation. Without getting into ten thousand words on the definition of love, I’ll briefly review how we can measure it.
Love is not the absence of conflict. It’s not the absence of anger, or disappointment, or even, in some sense, betrayal. We all have expectations, of ourselves, of others, and of God. When things don’t go as we expect, that invites conflict. We might doubt faith, or doubt others, or experience disappointment, disillusion, or even anger. The Bible doesn’t say anger is a sin. Letting “the sun go down” on your anger is a sin. We are called to deal with disappointment and conflict directly. And we are called to forgive, and reevaluate with a heart of love.
The Apostle Paul had a major conflict with Barnabas regarding John Mark’s participation in the mission. This is recorded in Acts 13:13 and 15:36-41. However, Paul’s reconciliation occurred in Colossians 4:10, Philemon 1:24, and 2 Timothy 4:11 where Paul calls for John Mark to be brought to him, “because he is helpful to me in ministry.” This is evidence that Paul had forgiven John Mark and included him in his ministry after reflection. This is operating in love.
When we see churches split over seemingly inconsequential things, it’s evidence of unforgiveness, especially when these issues had been boiling for years. Christians operating in bitterness, unforgiveness, collecting injustices to be piled on the pastor, the deacon or elder board, or the denomination itself, is evidence of a lack of love, and therefore a lack of faith. No wonder miracles, signs, and wonders don’t appear in churches with these issues.
Some churches and congregations appear to operate well, filling seats, growing, and conducting ministry “business” at a high level, but under the surface, there’s great turmoil, a lack of love, marked by domination, bitterness, unforgiveness, and suppression of voices lacking political or ministry power. You don’t have to look very far to see many examples of this in American churches. From the smallest country church to the megachurch, the lack of love, and the lack of faith is a raging infection on the witness of American Christianity.
The hypothesis of faith predicts that a church without faith will operate with a lack of love, and therefore, disobedience to God’s commandments—if the greatest commandment is ignored, what is it to ignore the lesser commandments? A church operating in disobedience, without faith, will not attract new converts to the Kingdom of God. It might fill seats by offering worldly benefits like social status, financial reward, or assuaging the seared consciences of people living in delusion, darkness, and disobedience themselves. Such places are a stench in the nostrils of unbelievers, who see through the patina of “holiness” and see the rot. It goes without saying that this is also a stench in God’s nostrils.
Conversely, the church operating in faith, will operate in love, and will produce disciples. These disciples will serve, give, and teach their children to do likewise. They will produce missionaries, pastors, evangelists, and healers. The members of these congregations might be scientists, medical doctors, researchers, engineers, professors, lawyers, or politicians. The mark of their faith will be their love, their humility, their commitment to follow God no matter the cost. The wold will call them weird, and react with disbelief.
In Charleston, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered worshippers in cold blood, seeking to start a race war. The families and congregants of Mother Emanuel AME Church reacted with forgiveness. Nadine Collier, daughter of the murdered Ethel Lance, forgave Roof within days of the shootings. Victim Myra Thompson’s husband, Rev. Anthony Thompson, through his grief, reached out to offer forgiveness, and to encourage Roof to give his life to Christ. Felecia Sanders, the mother of victim Tywanza Sanders, invoked scripture to Roof, “may God have mercy on you.”
Unbelievers have a hard time processing such extreme forgiveness and grace. Such things are evidence of a measure of faith. Faith in the God of the Bible means the knowledge of Yeshua’s return, that He is not dead, and their loved ones killed by evil people are not gone forever, only a brief time before we see them again in Heaven. The evidence of faith is the hope of these unseen things made manifest by miracles, signs, and wonders in the world.
We can measure it. There are people who hear of such acts of grace, whose hearts or moved to study the Bible, and in that study, to discover the object of their faith, placing their trust in Yeshua, the Father, and gaining the power of the Holy Spirit to operate in faith and love. They too, can perform and witness miracles.
The biggest miracle is not the medical patient miraculously preserved in life. We are all going to die, unless we are alive when Yeshua returns. We cannot plan on that, so even faith points to death, but not a permanent death. Dying of a disease, or an accident, or at the hands of evil people is not a cause for fear; it is a call to plan. How is faith to be flung into the world for others to grab hold of? What acts of obedience, sacrifice, and love will propel faith, measurable in glorifying God, to others? It is not in our deaths, but in our lives that we transmit our faith. It was not in the deaths of those Charleston worshippers, but in the lives of devotion they lived that brought the miracle.
Churches with such faith exist. We don’t learn of them until we see the miracles, which, sadly, these days, tends to involve tragedy. The Kingdom of God grows in persecution, it is enlarged by trouble. In John 16:33, Yeshua said to His disciples, ““I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” Trouble is the business of the believer. Where you see a church suffering trouble, you have found one of two things: a church with internal conflict operating without faith, or a church operating in faith, expanding the Kingdom of God.
The former church is known by its internal conflict, its unforgiveness, its emphasis on temporal, fleshly reward, and its ultimate lack of faith. The latter church is known by its reliance on God to be with them in their trouble, and their overcoming by grace—they are known by their love. In John 13:35, Yeshua said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The church that on the surface operates with no conflict but also shows no love is the church where you scratch the surface and find rot, not faith.
The American church is infected with this rot. Pastors are resigning at record levels. Some are contemplating, or committing, suicide. Others are turning to sin, adultery, abuse, and addiction, just like those outside the faith. The church blessed by politics, power and government access is the church that isn’t operating in faith. There are too many to count in America. In China, there are more faith-filled believers than in the U.S. In Iran, it’s fair to say that every believer in Christ is faith-filled.
When Yeshua returns for “his bride,” the Church, will be find America to be victim to delusion, desire, and sin, with only a small remnant, or will we repent and turn? Unfortunately, the hypothesis predicts a small remnant. The lack of evidence of faith is actually evidence that faith is real. Therefore, it is evidence that Yeshua did indeed live sinlessly, die sacrificially, and rose to victory.
Test the hypothesis. Look at the evidence. Measure what you see. The ultimate experiment is to prove the existence of a creator God. One day, the experiment will end and the answer will be known by all. Then, it will be too late to repent and believe. Just like the heat death of the universe will ultimately end any debate of the laws of thermodynamics—entropy will be complete—the appearance of Yeshua will end any debate of faith. The only time to have faith is now.
Today is the day of salvation. Today is the day to test faith and find it trustworthy. The experiment can be satisfied by this test, for anyone and everyone. The Christian theory can be proven by trial. In fact, that is the only way to know.