Is it selfish for God to ask for faith?
Some people think that God's demand for us to believe in Him is selfish. It's not.
Why would God create the universe in such a way that you have to believe in His existence to get into heaven? Why make belief in him a requirement? Isn’t that selfish?
America fought off one of the greatest military powers in the world for one reason: they ceased to believe in the authority of Great Britain. Once the identity of “colonial subject” went out of fashion and the settlers of the thirteen colonies realized they will never be first-class citizens of the Crown, they declared it as such. Their identify was founded in their belief on whether or not they continued to believe and accept the authority of King George.
It is in a similar, more extensive way, that we can view the relationship between man and [[Jesus Christ]]. Most people and all other religions have the belief that God is concerned with our works and in our doing them well. Out of this assumption, most people think they ought to be able to enter heaven because they are a “good person”. This makes them subjugated by their own ability to earn God’s grace and His salvation. And because of that, the idea of having to place their faith in one God, Jesus Christ, is unnecessary. We must start here. Why faith?
God created mankind in His Image and built a relationship with them in the Garden of Eden. Once mankind fell through the original sin of Adam, we became separated from God. God attempted to rebuild His people time and time again through the patriarchs and through the prophets. Eventually, to bring His final revelation and set all of mankind, Jew or Gentile, free from the deserved justice of their transgressions, He sent His Son to die on a cross and bear the punishment of all of their sins. In this sacrifice, Jesus delivered salvation through God’s grace. To accept the free gift of salvation, Jesus asks us to take off our old identity of those subjugated by the world and to put on His righteousness instead.
To do this one must start by believing in that sacrifice and to believe in that sacrifice, one must believe that [[Jesus Christ]] is who He said He was: the incarnation of God.
The answer to the original question can be found with this, that God is not concerned with works more than He is concerned with communion, and for man to commune with God, he must believe that God. Once we see that the law won’t save us, faith becomes the only path and why it is not selfish to require it. Lastly, we’ll walk through why an alternative “ticket of entry” would not work.
The Law Won’t Save You
Salvation is not found in The Law
Jesus points out a flaw in the thinking of the Jewish priests in His time; they were searching the Scriptures as if the Law followed through delivered them into eternal life. What they didn’t realize then, was that all of the Law and all of the prophets were testifying of the [[Jesus Christ|Word of God]] Himself. Even if theoretically one could follow the Law to a tee, they would still not have secured the promise of salvation. They would be mistaking their works for God’s grace, falsely believing that their works would earn their seat in Heaven while completely missing the point of God’s mission: relationship.
[[John 5]]:38-41
[!bible]+ John 5:38-41 - NKJV 38 But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe. 39 You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. 40 But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life. 41 “I do not receive honor from men.
Sin warrants justice
While God is gracious and forgiving, He must also be just, because of His disdain for evil. A good God would not be able to be good if He did not hate evil. Out of this hatred for evil and subsequent requirement for justice, God delivers punishment. All sin warrants punishment, from the whitest lie to mass genocide. Even if you attempted to keep all of the commandments of God without accepting His forgiveness, falling short in any place would warrant justice. If you choose not to allow Jesus to pay that price, it would be upon you to take it.
[!bible]+ James 2:10 - NKJV 10 For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.
God cares not of works but of communion
The primary intent that God has with Jesus’ sacrifice is not that all of His followers would suddenly become perfect doers of the Law, but rather that they would be reconciled to Him. No matter how hard we try, we will never be perfect as long as we are in flesh that is tainted with the marks of sin. God knows this and offered endless forgiveness so that we would be able to commune with Him here on earth and fully in Heaven. This relationship is what God desires and it is why He withstood our punishment on the cross.
Love cannot exist without free will
Many have argued that if God hated evil so much, why didn’t He just make us to be perfect from the start? Why create a world where we could (and do) fall short? If He was just concerned with right works, why not just make that the only option? The reason is because He wants us to have a relationship with Him, born out of love and that would not be possible if we had no opportunity of not loving Him. This is why God gave Adam only one restriction in the Garden of Evil: not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If He never gave Adam the opportunity to sin, Adam could not have chosen to not sin.
[!bible]+ Genesis 2:16-17 - NKJV 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
If we were perfect creatures free from the choice of evil, we could not choose Him. This highlights the characteristic of God’s desire, that we not be perfectly right-doing creatures, but rather in perfect communion with Him.
Belief is a commandment
To fully follow the Law expressed through both the Old and New covenant, one would be commanded to place their faith in Him. I point this out to illuminate that no one would be able to actually live out the full law of God if He did not believe in the lawgiver to begin with. It would be a contradiction to say one could follow the Law without following all of the commandments.
Evil cannot co-exist with Holiness
Let us picture a place like Heaven. What exactly would make it different from what we have here on earth? I’d argue the most basic characteristic separating [[Heaven]] from earth would be the in-existence of evil. It would follow then that only a being such as God would be able to exist in Heaven as He himself would be free of evil. But we are not and as such, for us to go to Heaven in our current state would mean one thing: extinguishment.
[[Exodus 33]]:18-21 records [[Moses]] coming almost face to face with God in His full glory. God for Moses' sake does not show Him because he would not live. Just like darkness ceases to exist in the presence of light, so too would we in the state we’re in cease to exist in Heaven.
[!bible]+ Exodus 33:18-21 - NKJV 18 And he said, “Please, show me Your glory.” 19 Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” 20 But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” 21 And the LORD said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock.
Christ’s sacrifice solved this problem by giving us the choice to choose to be renewed or not. God does not force it upon us, just as He does not force us to have a relationship with Him. And so, the choice to be renewed in the spirit of God so that we may be perfected and cleaned of all sin is given to us. [[John 1]]:12-13 states that is in the receiving of Jesus that we become born again in God and not in our own works or will.
[!bible]+ John 1:12-13 - NKJV 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
Asking for faith is not selfish
The challenge with this question is that it ignores the way we operate in almost all things. Do we not listen to a certain news channel because we believe it is being truthful? Or, go to a certain university because we believe in it’s ability to enlighten us? Do we not pick our leaders at the ballot box because we believe in their promises?
We could conclude that the news channel, university, and candidate are all being selfish when they asked for trust, but it would ignore the fact that all the decisions we make presuppose a degree of trust in those decisions. Very rarely, if at all, do we do things we are completely unsure of.
Given that our salvation is found in the sacrifice of Christ for our sins through His free grace, faith would be a reasonable requirement; that to partake in that grace we believe it exists in the first place. And if we believed that the grace does exist, wouldn’t we have to believe in whoever administered that grace? How could we accept something that we think doesn’t exist?
If your friend told you that there was a gift waiting for you in the other room, would you not have to first believe that your friend is being truthful and then to believe, based on his honest character, that his gift really is in that other room? Is it selfish that your friend is asking you to believe?
Now, let’s say that you get up and you started walking down the hall and there’s another door next to it. You begin to turn the handle, but your friend shouts, “Don’t open that one, there’s a bear waiting to tear whoever walks in, go through the door I told you,” would that be selfish or would your friend be doing what any loving friend would? And if you went through the door he warned you of, would it not be because you didn’t trust him? Would that distrust not stem from not believing in his honesty?
What propels you to get up and walk into the right room would be your belief in your friend’s honest character and doing anything except what he instructed would reveal your own distrust in that character. Asking for faith would not be selfish, rather it would be faith in your friend’s character that would be the foundation for you to follow his instructions.
Can God be selfish in the first place?
The question of whether asking for faith is selfish, pre-supposes that God the Creator of the Universe has the possibility to be selfish. Because God is timeless and faithful, we know His nature doesn’t change, which means that if He were to be selfish, it would be a part of His nature.
Could a God that made the universe actually be selfish? To be selfish, one has to be able to act in their self-interest at the expense of others. This would mean that selfishness cannot exist without an opportunity to gain something. The God of the Bible does not need anything from us; our faith does not sustain Him, our sacrifices do not feed Him, and our hands do not worship Him. Paul says this clearly in [[Acts 17]]:21-25:
[!bible]+ Acts 17:21-25 - NKJV 21 For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. 22 Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; 23 for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: 24 “God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. 25 Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.
On the choice of believing or not believing in the grace of Jesus Christ, it is we who stand to gain everything, not Him. We inherit the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom that was always His. We are adopted into the family of God, a family that was always His. We have life and life abundantly, abundant life that flows from Him. God is sovereign over all of creation and everything we have has been given to us, so whatever we could give Him was His to begin with.
Can Jealousy exist without Selfishness?
Imagine you built a car from scratch, sourcing all the pieces and spending countless hours putting it all together. Finally the day comes when you turn the it on and hear the engine roar. You drive it around and eventually stop at a gas station to fuel up. You go inside the convenience store to pick up a snack and when you come out you see someone driving off with your car.
Would it be selfish then to desire or even demand that you get your car back? I would say no. That car was yours, someone else took it, they committed the wrongdoing of taking what is rightly yours and it is well within your bounds to want it back. Would it be envious to want what belongs to you? No.
Likewise, worship is something that rightly belongs to God as the true Creator of the Universe. So when God declares that He is a jealous God in [[Exodus 20]]:4-5:
[!bible]+ Exodus 20:4-5 - NKJV 4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me,
He is rightly demanding that we not give to idols what was His to begin with. This would not be selfish nor would this be envious. Going to the Hebrew, the word for Jealous is transliterated to ‘qanna’ which is derived from the root word “qanah” which means to be “zealous” or “to be jealous.”. The same word qanah can be used to describe both a fervent devotion and negative envy. [[Ancient Israel]] used this same word for both ideas, unlike today where jealousy has a strictly negative connotation. Just as a husband would be jealous when His wife flirts with another man, so too is God jealous when we, His Bride and His People, flirt with other Gods. What else would we want God, or that Husband, to do? Would we not want them to be filled with a passionate desire for their bride to come back to them? What do we call this emotion? Anger? Sure, we could call it anger, but then you would have to ask, why are they angry? The word the Israelites used to describe that exact emotion, anger derived from the violation of a consensual covenant, was “jealousy”. We must separate Jealousy from Envy; Jealousy could lead to Envy but it doesn’t have to. Envy would be taking negative actions as a result of unresolved jealousy. In Exodus 20, God is not displaying a negative envy, but rather a deep and zealous desire for His people who chose to have a covenantal relationship with Him stay faithful.
An alternate universe
Given that the law is not sufficient for salvation and that belief is the basis of making any decision, would there be a possibility of a different universe in where God doesn’t ask us to believe in Him in order to have communion with Him?
The universe in which this would be possible, would be one where God does not care to know us and thus would not make that ask of us. But for this to be, He would have to be impersonal. If He were impersonal, why would He then allow us into Heaven where we would be with Him for eternity? Why would an impersonal, creator who doesn’t care to know us or have us know Him for the 70 or so years we have on earth, then care to spend the rest of eternity with us? And if He doesn’t care to know us, why would He care what we do? Would there be a reason for Him to be concerned with our actions?
Let’s grant that He is somehow both impersonal and yet, cares about our actions. Would it not be the right thing for Him to tell us about those “right actions” and punish those that do the “wrong actions”? If He doesn’t tell us about them, how could we be responsible for our actions? We’d be acting out of ignorance like a foreigner who commits a crime because he is unaware of the laws of that land. It would be unfair of God to judge and punish us for actions we didn’t even know were wrong.
And if He did tell us about these right or wrong actions, why would we trust Him? Would He not have to first reveal to us that He is indeed the creator of the universe, the one who made us,´é and the one who holds the rulebook on right and wrong?
Now, let’s grant that this God is impersonal, doesn’t ask us to believe in Him, but is concerned with our actions, and He does find a way to reveal to us that He is God and that He has the rulebook. His next step would probably be to tell us to abide by that playbook. What then? Can we follow that rulebook without first trusting that this God is actually who He says He is?
Even if we try to make a universe with an impersonal being at the helm of creation, and we still grant that this impersonal being cares for our actions, which in it of itself would contradict His impersonality, it would not logically follow that humans would at no point have to believe in this being if at any point He tells us what the actions he wants of us are.
An impersonal being would not care about our actions and would not care about being with us for eternity. Other religions have setup this as their system of divine governance (i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism), it just isn’t possible with a personal God.
Only a personal God would care for holiness, for the poor, and for bringing justice to propagators of evil. Only a personal God would leave His throne to be hated, spit on, and crucified so that creation may be set free from their own wrongdoings. Only a personal God would weep for His creation falling into death. We cannot have a relationship with someone we do not know and we cannot know someone unless we at least believe they exist. Thus, we must believe in Christ to know Him, and through knowing Him, be saved. Asking for us to believe in Him would not be selfish, follows logically, and allows us to enter into a place of perfection as imperfect creatures.
Notes
Belief is trust, trust is obedience. God is looking for obedience, for us to heed His call, that requires trust, and thus requires belief.
The coloniols no longer believed in the authority of Great Britain, they revolted. As long as they had belief in their authority, they followed their rules and were considered “subjects of Great Britain”. For us to be “subjects of God’s Kingdom”, it must start with belief in that authority.
If the law of gravity could talk, it would most likely tell you that in order to understand physics you will have to accept that itself first. If the law of gravity is truth, you have to believe in that before you can build the rest of your physical knowledge. Likewise, God, being Truth, lays out a rather logical claim: to know the Truth you must know me. To know me is to believe in me. If you come to find me to be the Truth and then do not accept me, you are willingly deceiving yourself. If you come to find me to be the Truth and accept me, you have no placed your faith in me. Actually to even “find Jesus to be the Truth” would be to believe in Him.
For Elijah’s question - god is not just concerned with good works but with communion. How can you achieve communion if you don’t even know of that God? And if you know of Him but don’t trust him through faith, how are you aligned?
The goal is perfect communion. Sin stops you from communion, but so does unbelief. Unbelief is a sin. I’d argue it’s the first step towards communion. How could it be an optional doctrine? (John 17:21-23)
Luke 23-42 - the confession of Jesus as Lord is what saved Him. Baptism cannot be the saving thing, it is shown in Scripture that it is the faith. When the Roman centurion believed in Jesus, it was his faith that made Him well. Not water baptism. Water baptism is indeed important.
There is a difference between envy and jealousy
God cannot be tempted with evil, so Jesus was never tempted by the Devil - James 1:13. “But if He cannot possibly be tempted, then what point is tempting Him and showing His ability to stay pure worth?”
James 1:22 - be doers of the word and not only hearers. If the Word asks for Belief, doing the belief itself is commanded.
John 1:12-13 - placing faith in Jesus is the restorative process that makes us reborn. God cannot force us to be restored and renewed, that would violate our free will, so instead He says you can freely choose to be renewed and remade… okay but how does one choose? You choose my placing faith in Him and declaring Him the Lord of your life, giving God the permission to do in you what you cannot do yourself. This is why there is a difference between just “being a good person” and believing in God. And let’s not forget that everyone worships something, it just might not be an explicit God.
John 3:18-21 - if someone is doing the Truth would inevitably come to the Light, and to come to the Light would be to believe in that Light. You cannot act out truth without first believing in it.
John 3:36 consecrates that belief in Christ is the saving grace. Therefore, no amount of works will get you to Heaven if God is concerned with communion. The example C.S. Lewis gives is like a toy solider being transformed into a real human soldier, if he does not choose that process, would He not be perplexed and feel violated if suddenly his plastic turned to skin?
John 3:33 - to receive the testimony of Jesus is to certify that God is true. Faith in God = believing in Jesus.
John 4:23 - the Father is looking for those who worship in both spirit and Truth. He is not concerned with good works, but rather with genuine worship.
John 5:38-41 - the Scripture don’t have the key to everlasting life. Doing the works that the Bible says is not the key to life itself, life that goes on and on forever, abundant life. That is found in Christ who gives it to us as He Wills. He says that it is up to us to come to Him to have that life.
John 5:42 - believing Jesus is to receive Him. It is us choosing to be with Him and let Him enter the home of our hearts. If we don’t do this and he drags us into Heaven for a full communion with Him forever, that’s like an eternal bondage and kidnapping.
John 6:28-29 - to do all that the Bible says, to do what God wants is to believe in Him
