Big Healing Book - Faith Does Not Always Overcome

Objection: Faith Does Not Always Overcome – God Can Give Both OVERCOMING and ENDURING Faith

The objector is convinced that SOMETIMES God gives you faith to overcome a trial, but at other times He gives you faith to ENDURE a trial. He uses the passage below as his proof text; you can click here to see comments related to a similar objection.

Hebrews 11:32-39:
And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets:
Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:
And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:
They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented;
(Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:
God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

Before we come down too hard on this objector, we do have to admit that he is right to a degree based on Scripture – the issues are the proper application of the passage and his understanding of faith being “given.”

Some greats of faith wrought mighty victories and performed miracles through faith. However, Paul’s thorn in the flesh, which was NOT a sickness but rather an evil entity that stirred up persecution by mean religious people who seemed to be always out to do him bodily harm, was a case where God did NOT deliver Paul from the situation but granted him “grace sufficient for him” to endure it (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).

So this proves that the objector’s argument at face value is not too bad, though the idea that there are two kinds of faith itself (overcoming and enduring) is not something I can see spelled out in Scripture. If you’ll notice carefully, God did NOT give Paul faith to endure persecutions and beatings for the sake of the gospel. He gave Paul GRACE, not FAITH, which is actually a different matter. Faith overcomes things that you can change, but grace lets you endure things that you can’t change. You have authority over sickness in Jesus’ name, so you can change it. You do not have the authority to stop being persecuted for the sake of the gospel. If you did, and you used it, we’d all be seriously worried about you, because EVERYONE who wants to live godly in Christ Jesus WILL suffer persecution (2 Timothy 3:12) – so what would that say about you?

Our faith is the victory that overcomes the world (1 John 5:4), not something that lets us stay in defeat and put up with the problems that we face in this world. For problems that you can’t avoid, God gives grace. For anything the devil tries to do that is inconsistent with your covenant (such as making you sick), the shield of FAITH quenches all the fiery darts of the wicked one (Ephesians 6:16). The shield of faith does not give you “faith” to endure being struck with fiery darts!

The main problem here is that the objector is attempting to use this statement, even if you substitute grace for faith in the second part, as a rationale that when you get SICK, sometimes God gives you the faith to overcome the sickness and sometimes He gives you the faith (or grace) to endure it. But this flunks The SAVED Test – does God give some people the new birth and victory over sin, the flesh, the world and the devil, but give other people the grace to deal with being lost and hell-bound? NO! It also flunks The SAME Test – did Jesus EVER tell anyone, “In YOUR case, I will only give you faith to ENDURE your illness – I won’t heal you?” NO!

So we cannot believe that TODAY Jesus would ever leave anyone stuck with a disease but with the “enduring faith” to keep suffering from it. So you can file this objection in the “Religious Hogwash” folder along with many other similar objections!