Does God Use Faith?
Two verses are sometimes used to “prove” that God Himself uses faith, but I wouldn’t use either one for that purpose:
Hebrews 11:3:
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
The point here, based on the word order in both English and the original Greek, is that THROUGH FAITH we understand something – that God made everything that appears out of things that do not appear – words. Many faith teachers make it sound like the order is, “We understand that through faith the worlds were framed by the word of God.” But the verse doesn’t say that everything seen was framed by faith; it says explicitly that things which are seen were framed by the WORD of God, not the FAITH of God. WE are the ones who understand that fact through faith. Nothing in Hebrews 11 talks about what GOD did because of faith – it’s all about different PEOPLE who acted on THEIR faith. So in this verse, it is again PEOPLE exercising faith – to believe that the worlds were framed by the word of God.
I suppose you could say that God knows that His words will come to pass and that you could consider that to be faith, just as we can speak and believe that our words will come to pass, as long as we’re saying something that the Word authorizes. However, it would be tough for God to follow Mark 11:22 and have faith “in” Himself, though that verse is the second one used to “prove” that God has faith. The idea put forth in some circles is that Mark 11:22 teaches that we should have the same faith that God has with which He runs the universe (“the faith of God”). But the problem with the Greek genitive expression there is that if we are consistent in our interpretation of it, then “the fear of God” (expressed the same way in the Greek) would mean that we are supposed to have the same FEAR with which God runs the universe. The word for fear is actually phobos – the same word used in general for fear in many Scriptures (though NOT in 2 Timothy 1:7, where the word translated fear actually means timidity, not fright). Phobos is NOT some special word meaning “reverence” or “respect.”
You can look elsewhere in this book for a long discussion of what Mark 11:22 really means.
So neither “proof text” really proves the idea that God has faith and uses it. Linguistically, if Mark 11:22 proves that God has faith, then any verse about the fear “of God” proves that God has fear! Of whom would He have this fear? And for that matter, in whom would He have faith?
I was involved with the occult before I was saved. Occult books are happy to tell you to use “faith” to get what you want, and they even provide examples of people who “spoke in faith” or “used the law of attraction” and got things. So what’s the difference? Their faith had nothing to do with God. In fact, the occult teachers have you trust in what they tell you is “your” psychic ability and/or “your” mental ability, which they then declare to be a gift from God (in order to at least pay Him lip service, I suppose). But psychic “gifts” are from evil spirits, not God. (A book popular when I was young claimed that a well-known psychic had “a gift of prophecy,” but she actually had a demon, which was a “gift” from Satan!) Occult writers do NOT tell you to trust in God. I found it interesting when I read occult books that the writers uniformly denied the deity of Jesus, telling you instead to use “your” God-like power. You couldn’t find a single one that taught that Jesus was God manifested in the flesh. (After I got saved, 1 John 4:1-4 made it clear to me why that was!)
The Bible does not teach that you have innate psychic powers. The occultists are the people who try to preach faith as a force that can get you anything you want. But a man “believing” that a beautiful woman’s husband will die so that he can have her is operating in satanic principles because the Word will not back that kind of “faith.” God will only honor faith that is consistent with His stated will. Occultists sometimes try to use their demonic version of “faith” to cause something to happen to someone that is against that person’s will. Real faith cannot “make” anyone receive something that he doesn’t want.
Every man DOES have faith, though. It is possible to exercise faith correctly or to misapply it. You can believe that a disease will kill you or you can believe that you are healed of it by Jesus’ stripes. Whichever you believe and speak is what you will have.
God certainly uses WORDS – they were His means of creating everything, as Hebrews 11:3 shows. He commanded things to “be” and they were. If you want to call the use of words like that faith, I won’t get into World War 3 with you over it. However, no verse in particular proves the statements “God uses faith” or “God has faith.” The two “proof verses” above (Hebrews 11:3 and Mark 11:22) don’t prove these statements and there aren’t any other verses that do.
See also: