Dear friends,
Two words commonly misunderstood today are ‘faith’ and ‘Satan’. In this week’s episode, Peter and I pursue our understanding of faith and Satan’s contribution in undermining it.
Once again, can we encourage you to mention the weekly podcast to friends, colleagues, and neighbours? I hope you will enjoy this episode.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Welcome to Two Ways News. This is Phillip Jensen speaking, and my brother is with me. Peter, how are you today?
Peter Jensen: I remain well as far as I know. Thank you for asking.
Phillip: Well, we want to know the truth.
Peter: I can't tell you the truth because I don't know the truth. I may have some terrible illness, which might take me off to heaven tomorrow.
Phillip: That is possible. But, in John 14, Jesus claimed to be the truth in terms of getting to heaven. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” It is slightly strange to call yourself the truth. ‘Truth’ is a funny word. But you see the opposite of the truth in Genesis 3 with Satan, who is the opposite of the truth.
Peter: Genesis 3:1-5
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Phillip: It’s the opposite of truth when God says, ‘You will die,’ and Satan says, ‘You will not die.’ It’s not that simple, because he says, ‘Your eyes will be open, and you'll be like God.’ That's half true.
Peter: Indeed, it fits with something God says later, that their eyes have been opened.
Phillip: At the end of the chapter: “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.” Let's come back to this idea of truth. Truth in the Bible, in the Old Testament especially, is the same as faith. But that seems a bit strange.
Peter: It does. Can you explain it more?
Phillip: It's one and the same word, and translators have to keep deciding whether to use the word 'truth' or the word ‘faith’. What we mean by the word ‘faith’ today seems to be a long way from ‘truth'. What do you perceive as the world's view of ‘faith’?
Peter: The world usually thinks of it as Mark Twain's quote: “Faith is believing what you know ain't true.”1 I love that. It's so penetrating a critique of Christianity because Christianity is based on faith. Mark Twain is saying it's not true, and therefore what you've got is faith. But that's strange considering the comments you've made about faith and truth in the Old Testament. So, what is faith?
Phillip: Faith is trust. One of our problems is that the word ‘faith’ itself has become a religious word and a word that is almost definitionally not just uncertain but superstitious. It's a concept of that which you cannot know, that which you do not know, or, in Twain's eyes, that which you know is not true. But it's the alternative to truth and knowledge. That’s not what the Bible means at all by its use of the word. It's a little difficult for us to suggest such a thing, but a modern Bible translation in 21st century English needs to get rid of the word ‘faith'. For those of us who believe in justification by faith alone as foundational to our reformed faith, there’s the word again; it’s a bit shocking to say that. But we have other good words like ‘trust’, ‘rely’, ‘depend’, ‘reliable’, ‘dependable’, and ‘trustworthy', that capture the idea of faith and faithfulness better than the modern English word 'faith’.
Peter: Going further back, before the Enlightenment, faith was regarded in more Catholic circles as an intellectual belief. They would say, ‘I believe certain things are true’, and that is why to say that you're justified by faith seems like a crazy notion, because it doesn't contain that relational element. Hence, if I understand Catholic theology correctly, faith and love are co-joined as the ways in which we are justified: faith and love. Faith and love are connected in the New Testament, but not in that way. Hence the importance of saying ‘faith means trust’. It's a relational word. It has epistemological things to do with it, because you have trust in a real person, for example, but it is inherently relational.
Phillip: It’s interesting because in the New Testament, it's not different from the word ‘believe’. The Greek words, again, sometimes translate ‘believe’ as ‘believe’, whilst other times they translate it as ‘faith’. The translators create a problem for us in that there's no verb in English for the word 'faith’. But there is the verb ‘believe’ and the noun 'belief'. There's no verb for faith in the New Testament.
It is interesting that just as ‘faith’ and ‘truth’ are linked together in the Old Testament Hebrew, in the New Testament Greek, faith is also belief. Modern English translators have a problem because there's no verb for faith. ‘I faith’ and ‘you faith’ don't work. In modern English, there is the noun ‘belief’ and the verb ‘to believe’, so every time the verb occurs in the Greek text, they have to translate it ‘believe’. It sounds like something different from faith, and again, it's partly because in English, ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ are slightly different: belief is a rational response to information, whereas faith is the response to no information or the irrational rejection of information. So we are easily confused about these words, as if we're talking about something quite different when we say, ‘I believe something, but you only have faith in something’, when that can't be the case in the New Testament because it's the same Greek word.
Peter: To illustrate, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. Does ‘believes’ here mean ‘believes that he exists’ or ‘believes that he rose from the dead’? What is the impact of the word ‘believes'?
Phillip: Yes, it's the word 'relationship' at this point. You can't say ‘faith’ because we don't have that English word; it's whoever trusts him. ‘Trust’ is a verb, which is what ‘believe’ is. It has an intellectual and a relational content to it.
Peter: You wouldn't trust him unless you believed that he exists. He was a real person; he rose from the dead. That is the content. There is an occasional use in the New Testament of ‘the faith’, meaning ‘the content of the faith’. So ‘the faith’ has content. But the content is what you must presuppose if you were to have the relationship. Is that a better way of putting it?
Phillip: Yes, I'm happy about that because it's got to do with fact and reality.
That is, when you look up the dictionary, it states that ‘true' is an adjective that means “in accordance with fact or reality”.2 But fact and reality are not the same thing. The dictionary's definition of ‘fact’ is a thing that is known to be true, whereas ‘reality’ is “the state of things as they actually exist.” So, reality is ‘what is’. Fact is ‘what we know is’.
Peter: Or perhaps it means ‘what we believe we know is’, because there have been times when an indisputable fact...
Phillip: Turns out to be disputed by reality. So, what is true can mean different things. It can mean ‘exact’ or ‘accurate’, but I notice that in the definitions the dictionary had, it can also mean ‘loyal’ or ‘faithful’. That is, ‘He was a true friend, someone that you can trust, someone that is trustworthy.’ Truth is sometimes referring to what actually is, though it is often referring to what we believe is. What we know to be, what we trust to be. It's sometimes about reality; it's sometimes about our knowledge of reality. You used the word epistemology, Peter; that's the study of knowledge. But I've always got to hold and question what I know. It's part of discussion and talking things through with each other that we discover the frailties of our knowledge. But what I can trust is the truth, because without trust, I can't know anything much.
Peter: There's another interesting element to trust or faith: it has to do with the future. For example, in the wedding service, people make promises to each other, and the other person trusts the promises for life. So the trust we express in the promises we receive is a way of going into the future with some degree of confidence in the other person, and that's why we have these public exchange of promises. So although I'm not talking about the whole of faith here, I am saying that faith is an extraordinarily indispensable element of what it is to be human. We all exercise faith all the time, particularly faith in the future, because we can't control the future; therefore, faith gives us some assurance of what the future may bring.
Phillip: Faith as trust is also essential for knowledge. So yes, it points to the future, but it's also part of the past. I trusted the school teachers who taught me things about life. You don't experiment on every element of life. You don't have to read every document. We live in a world of trust, where our information is.
Peter: We do, and that's one of the funny things about people who pretend to be scientists, scorning faith, as though faith is somehow, as Mark Twain said, “believing what you know is not true.” Some folk say, ‘Oh, you Christians have faith; we rely upon the proven facts.’ Then they've used the word ‘rely’, which means faith. So the whole scientific and intellectual enterprise depends on faith, because you are depending on the results of previous investigations, which are indispensable to any intellectual discipline.
Phillip: It's a little bit confronting to ponder it, but you also rely on yourself. At some point in the progress of some dreadful diseases where you move into dementia, your capacity to remember, know, and understand what you see diminishes. I'm relying upon the fact that it hasn't happened to me yet. So I've got to rely upon my own ability to perceive, to rationalise, and to think. I have to rely upon the people who have come before me. You can't really operate in life without trust.
Peter: That leads to the next important question. Who or what destroys faith?
Phillip: Here we have Satan, the snake who's described as crafty. It's a funny word that's used to describe him. It's a slightly negative overtone to the word crafty. But on the other hand, craft is not necessarily a bad thing because it's an ability. Satan has the ability of craftiness, which is the negative usage because he comes firstly with a question: “Did God say?” It's posed as a question, which is not really a question. He doesn't want the answer; he wants you to be rattled by the question. Then he comes with the lie, ‘God didn't say that.’ But then comes the really clever half-truth. Half-truths are always the most difficult lies to deal with. He says, ‘Your eyes will be opened, and you'll become like God, but God actually doesn't want you to become like him.’ Of course, the crazy part was, they were created like him in the first place. When God puts any restriction on our life, it's for our good, not our ill. This restriction was clearly for our good, not our ill.
In Jesus’ teaching about Satan, he has wonderful statements that people remember half of. John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” They forget the second half: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus says in John 8:31, “The truth will set you free.” But the context in which he says it is, “If you abide in my word, you're truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” It's not just any kind of truth. It's his actual word that he calls on you to have faith in, to trust. The contemporaries of Jesus said, ‘We're not slaves; we're free people’, forgetting that they were slaves in Egypt and Babylon. But Jesus says, ‘No, you're not free because you're in the captivity of Satan.’ And Jesus said in John 8:34-36
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
They claimed Abraham was their father, but Jesus said if Abraham was their father, they would accept him. And he goes on to say in verses 42-45
“If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.”
Satan is the one who destroys faith and destroys trust because he is untrustworthy. He is unfaithful; in fact, faithless. He is the one who lies by his very nature.
Peter: You can't praise yourself for your faith and say, ‘Oh, look at me, I have faith.’ You might say, ‘Look at me. I'm full of love.’ You can't say the same for faith. Faith is a sort of empty thing. It's filled by the content, by what or who you have your faith in. The faith that moves mountains is faith in God and the word of God. But the same amount of faith may be in the lies of the devil, and it can destroy the world. You have to know that the devil is a liar. People tend to think of the devil’s works as possessing people and sending ghosts. The worst work of the devil is the work of creating lies. He has his servants in this world who will tell lies and bring destruction into human relationships.
Phillip: That's very helpful to put it that way, Peter. Faith is not a kind of object that you have. I remember having an argument with a school teacher, who, in his response to me, almost yelled and said, “I wish I had the faith that you have.” It struck me as rather strange at the time, but he saw faith as a content that I had. I had this other thing called faith that he didn't have, that he would have liked to have had. It's just the wrong use of faith. No, you actually trust the person.
Peter: Faith exalts that which you trust. So faith is the greatest worship you can give God. You trust him. When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”, you trust him. That is your initial and your great act of worship. But if you trust lies even more than you trust Jesus, your faith is not going to save you.
Phillip: That faith is going to enslave you, because the important thing about faith is what you have your faith in. If you have your faith in Satan and in lies, you'll be entangled in the lies of Satan. And that's what you need to be freed from by the Lord Jesus.
Peter: There's another element to this; we need to be careful not to become the slaves of Satan ourselves and to be his active servants in what we say.
In James 3:8-10 we are reminded
But no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.
Now, that's a very telling, penetrating part of God's word, because we are all guilty of the abuse of the tongue, and in so doing we are serving Satan. Often, we are creating all sorts of terrible consequences in the lives of others and ourselves.
Phillip: People think words are nothing, and given the amount we speak, you could understand that. One of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall not bear false witness.” False witness is a terrible thing, and lies are a terrible thing. You don't need armies to conquer people if you're able to get them to trust lies. The propaganda industry operates on the principle that if you keep saying that which is untrue in enough ways, in an attractive enough fashion, the population will believe what is being said. Goebbels persuaded the Germans with lies about Jews. Unfortunately, our media is very strong in repetition, and now, through the internet, it can gather together different communities who believe certain things, and in that belief bubble, people can be fed information regularly that reinforces their beliefs, which may not be true. The background of postmodern literature and literary analysis is that the words do not mean what they say.
What you're saying about James is so important, because he talks about the spark that sets off a whole forest fire and the little tongue that has huge impacts. The power of Satan is in his lies. Believing his lies and trusting his lies is giving him power over your life.
Peter: One of the clever things about Satan, as described in Genesis 3, is, as you've already pointed out, he doesn't deny. First of all, he asks a question, and the answer goes a little bit further than what God actually said. But then he goes on and raises the question of whether God is making this rule for God's own benefit. So he suggests that there is a hidden reason why God is not permitting them to do something. He raises an issue about the integrity of God. That's typical of Satan. Those who speak for Satan say, ‘The God you believe in, the God of the Bible, surely he is not… this, that, or the other.’ It's subtle and powerful, and we need to watch out for it.
Phillip: It comes in our community as people who do not trust God say things about God that are untrue. They say, ‘Oh, your God is full of anger and fury.’ Yes, God is angry with sin and is full of grace and mercy and generosity. They say, ‘Oh, well, your God, he'll forgive anybody anything.’ The answer is that our God sent his son to pay the penalty for sin. He doesn't ignore sin. There are so many untruths about God and his character, which undermine trust in him.
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (Charles L. Webster & Company, 1897)
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). True, adj., n., adv., int. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved July 31, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5803372586
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out these Queen's Birthday Conference 2009 talks on Spiritual Warfare.
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