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From the time I received my first paycheck at thirteen years old, I worked throughout my teenage and college years in various vocations, from cleaning and repairing pools to serving food to the entertainment industry. Everywhere I worked, I encountered skeptics of the Christian faith. Most of those skeptics were people who had been raised in the church and had left it. Many had been taught the basics of Christianity but had never been properly grounded in the foundations of the faith. They had a surface-level knowledge but didn’t know the theology of Scripture and thus had no answers to the world’s questions about the Christian faith.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is how many skeptics of the faith use some of the same critical clichés to attack Christianity and defend their doubts. Perhaps the most frequent statement is that “faith is just a leap into the dark,” as if Christians have jumped blindly off a cliff into an unknown abyss. While faith is indeed believing the promises of God, some of which have yet to be fulfilled, faith is not a blind leap; it is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Heb. 11:1). It is the skeptics of Christianity, on the contrary, who are wandering about in a deep abyss of darkness and who are in desperate need of being born from above by the Spirit of God. We too, in our natural state before God, were in this position, dead in our sins and trespasses. If God had not granted us the gift of faith, we would still be wandering in darkness.
Nevertheless, though Christianity is a faith involving belief, it is not a faith without reason. It is a reasonable faith precisely because it does not originate with us but comes to us from God. It is God who created us, it is God who revealed Himself to us in creation and in Scripture, and it is God who gave us the ability to believe what He has revealed to us. There is no more sure place to stand than on the revelation of our Creator and Redeemer. That is why the Christian faith is by no means a leap into the dark but rather is a falling back into the arms of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and resting in His perfect love and sacrifice for us. Knowing this enables us to give answers with meekness and gentleness to those who ask us about the hope within us. As we do so, we point to the God who changes hearts and leads His people to faith and repentance so that we might worship God, coram Deo, before His face now and forever.