Reality and Proof in a World of Illusion and Skepticism
Living in the kind of world we live in requires the biblical view of faith as reality and proof.
AI videos are everywhere, and they’re driving me crazy. I will see something wild pop up on Instagram or Twitter, and think, “This can’t be real.” And it isn’t.
I want to talk about how we navigate a world full of illusions and skepticism. Marketing and salesmanship have cultivated a skeptical culture, because there always seems to be a catch. Someone is always selling something. Now, video evidence isn’t evidence anymore, because people can prompt ChatGPT or Claude or Grok to create a video of Elvis having tea with the Queen, providing zero proof of life in a world shadowed by death.
Illusions are things that we think are real, that actually aren’t real. Illusions yield skepticism. Fooled once, or twice, we approach everything with suspicion. In this kind of world, we can approach everything with delusion, and pretend things are fine, yielding ourselves to the metaverse or whatever else. Or we can push back with radical cynicism, unplugging our lives and hearts from the time and place of our habitation.
But God called us for now and here. We don’t have the option to opt out of the world, just as we don’t have the option to surrender to it. Instead, we need to walk in the tension of the life of following Jesus. In other words, living in the kind of world we live in requires faith. Specifically, life in our world requires the biblical view of faith as reality and proof. “Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen” (Heb. 11:1).
Faith is having what we don’t have (yet)
The “reality” in “the reality of what we hope for” is the Greek word hypostasis, which means substance or subsistence. Jesus is the hypostasis of God (Heb. 1:3). Christians must “hold firmly until the end the hypostasis that we had at the start” (Heb. 3:14).
In terms of the definition of faith, the word means, as theologian John Owen said, that God’s promises aren’t just words. God’s words are actually action. “To receive a promise, is to receive the things promised,” he says. We experience as reality the thing we don’t yet experience. We have what we don’t yet have.
When the early Christians dug into the Greek dictionary, looking for words to describe how God is both one and three, they landed on hypostasis as the word for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is one nature and three hypostases. That might be all Greek to you, because you’ve probably heard the Latin word person when talking about the Trinity. Both words, person and hypostasis, grasp at what we can’t describe: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal triune life.
The Greek theologians picked the word hypostasis because, in part, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the unshakable reality of God. The Son is the hypostasis of God. Faith is the hypostasis of hope. In faith in Christ we have the full reality of God himself, and all that God promises to us. Though we hope for God, we also have God.
Faith is seeing what we don’t see (yet)
Faith is also proof. Proof is verification or evidence. When we’re told “faith is…the proof of what is not seen,” we learn that we have evidence beyond the evidence of sight. The Bible talks about this all the time. God is spirit (John 4:24). “We do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).
As John Owen says, again, we don’t see certain things for several reasons. We don’t see things that are spiritual, we don’t see things far away in distance or far away in time. Our sight limits us. I can’t see to Japan from my house. I can’t even see to the other side of town. I can’t see a different time than I’m in right now. I can’t see small things or spiritual things.
The Bible also talks about the “eyes of the heart” (Eph. 1:18). We literally, physically can’t see the good things God promises to us. After all, “hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24).
When we say that we can’t see what God’s doing, we should realize we’re in a very normal place, and even a healthy place. But more deeply than the things we can’t see, we have proof beyond the experience of the moment. Living in faith means we know something more deeply than the things sitting in front of our eyes. We see things that we can’t see, yet.
The Advent season is exactly this kind of moment, a moment of reality and proof. We already have Jesus, but we don’t have him yet. We have already seen the Messiah, but we haven’t seen him yet. This already-not yet tension is strung through this season and through our lives like strings inside a piano. When the tension is right, the notes are right too. And if you let the master play the thing, you will hear beautiful music while you wait.