“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him
shall not perish but have everlasting life”—John 3:16
What does it mean to Believe?
The word, believe in the New Testament is used as a condition for salvation. In Acts 16:31, The Apostle Paul said to the Philippian jailer, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.” And in Romans 10:9, the Bible says, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
The Biblical meaning of belief is related to faith. In fact, you cannot have one without the other. Believing faith is the very basis for our redemption. The way in which we are justified by God is through believing faith–Romans 4:3b “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
Ever since the Protestant Reformation, Biblical scholars have grappled with a definition of saving faith and they were able to isolate three distinctive aspects of what it means “to believe” . . .
1. First is an intellectual awareness. You must believe the data or the information. In other words, “You can’t have faith in nothing; there has to be content to the faith” (R.C. Sproul). Have you ever heard someone say, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, just as long as you are sincere.” That’s not what the Bible says. It does matter profoundly what God says and what He reveals about Himself in His Word. Sproul writes, “What if I believed that the devil was God? That wouldn’t save me. I must believe the right information.”
- Second aspect of believing faith is an intellectual assent. That is, that I am persuaded of the truthfulness of the Bible; that I am convinced intellectually that the data and the content of all that God says about Himself is true. It is true that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died on the cross for my sins, and that He rose from the dead. But even with that being said, James warns us that even the devil himself knows the truth of Christ, but he doesn’t have saving faith (James 2:19).
- The third aspect of saving faith is that of personal trust. It is that faith by which I put my life in the lap of Jesus and trust Him alone for my salvation. R.C. Sproul writes, “That is the crucial element of belief and it includes the intellectual and the mental. But it goes beyond it to the heart and to the will so that the whole person is caught up in this experience we call faith.”