God Gives Everyone Faith, How Can Anyone Ever Be in Unbelief? Isn’t Unbelief the Absence of Faith?
Given that God HAS given to every man the measure of faith (Romans 12:3), most people can’t be in unbelief in the sense of being unable to believe because they have no faith. If someone were UNABLE TO BELIEVE, it would be unjust for God to sentence that person to hell. That is why aborted and miscarried babies, young children and the mentally incompetent get free passes to heaven. Paul was “alive once” (as such people are) before he knew what sin was. But once he knew what sin was and he did it anyway, that was the point at which sin killed him (Romans 7:9). People who were never capable of knowing what sin was (see the categories above) are in heaven because sin never killed them. However, a person who is NOW an imbecile but who USED to understand what sin is will go to everlasting punishment if he did not receive Jesus while he had the chance, unless he gets healed based on someone else’s faith and then receives Jesus.
However, the instances where we see unbelief in the Bible are cases where people did not exercise their faith. So I think a better working definition of unbelief is failure to exercise faith as opposed to the absence of faith. Not knowing the Word is ignorance. Knowing the Word but not acting on it is unbelief.
When Jesus talked about faith, he meant active faith – the type that is always accompanied by action, as opposed to dead faith – faith without works (James 2:14-26). The people He encountered had all been given the measure of faith, but some exercised their faith and were made whole, while others did not exercise their faith and received nothing. When He was looking for faith, it was evidence of faith that was precious to Him. For example, the centurion trusted that if Jesus would only speak a word, his servant would be healed without a personal visit from Jesus. That was faith in action.
On the contrary, unbelief is dead faith – faith with no action. It is CHOOSING not to exercise the faith that you have.
If unbelief were simply the absence of any faith, and thus the ability to exercise it, Jesus would have had compassion on the disciples instead of scolding them for their unbelief:
Mark 16:14:
Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.
So it wasn’t that the disciples COULD NOT believe because of a lack of ability to believe, it was that they COULD believe but CHOSE NOT TO believe.
Thus, you can have faith but be in unbelief. Unbelief cannot simply mean that you have never heard a promise from God that you can believe. This is proved below in the case of Abraham:
Romans 4:20:
He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God;
It would not have been possible for Abraham to stagger through unbelief if he had not yet heard a promise to unbelieve. It was possible for him to stagger through unbelief after he heard the promise. We know that faith (for specific things) comes from hearing God’s Word (Romans 10:17). Abraham had God’s word on the matter. He had all that he needed to exercise faith. If he staggered through unbelief, it would have been due to a willful choice to NOT BELIEVE what God said, not IGNORANCE of the fact that God had said anything. So again, we see that biblical unbelief is about CHOOSING not to believe rather than being UNABLE to believe.
As believers, we certainly have proven our ability to believe, yet the author of Hebrews warns us not to allow an “evil heart of unbelief” in departing from the living God (Hebrews 3:12). That means avoiding a conscious choice NOT TO BELIEVE on our part.
For many more illustrations of what unbelief is from a biblical perspective, see What Is the Difference Between Unbelief and Doubt?.