Some seasons of following God ask you to move before you can see where you are going. You sense Him leading, but the outcome is invisible, the timeline is unclear, and everyone around you seems to be asking how you can be so sure. Learning how to trust God when you can't see what He is doing is not a lesson reserved for spiritual professionals. It is the ordinary work of faith, and Scripture hands us an ordinary man to show us how it is done. In Hebrews 11:7, the writer holds up Noah: "By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen." Those first two words, "by faith," echo through the entire chapter for a reason worth understanding. What Does It Mean to Have Faith? At its root, faith is implicit trust in the character and nature of God. That phrase repeats over and over in Hebrews 11, and the repetition is deliberate. The writer is speaking to the early church, a suffering and struggling people, and he is working to build their faith. To trust God's character is to trust two things about Him: His goodness and His power. We trust that God is genuinely good, exactly the way He explains Himself, and that He is powerful enough to do what He said He would do. How do we know He is good? The cross. It is the most powerful demonstration of love, kindness, and goodness in the history of the world. How do we know He is powerful? The empty tomb, because He is the only One who has ever defeated sin and death like that. He is good because of the cross. He is powerful because of the empty tomb. If you hold onto nothing else, hold onto that. Faith Is Believing God Will Do What He Said Essentially, faith is believing that God will do what He said He will do. When you read "by faith" stamped over Noah's life, you are reading a man saying, "I believe God will do what He said He will do." I have an uncle who was a pastor, and one year he served as my camp counselor. I was around fifteen, and he taught a series of devotionals I have never forgotten. That very line came straight from him: faith is believing that God will do what He said He will do. Then he added a second step. Faith is also believing that God is good, and that He will do what He said He will do for you. It is not merely a broad, blanket statement for everyone. It is true of you, individually. That still builds my faith today. When God's Character Is Hard to Understand God warns Noah that something is coming. In Genesis 6:13, He says, "The end of humanity has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence," and He instructs Noah to build an ark of gopher wood. Yet in the same warning, He makes a promise, telling Noah in Genesis 6:18, "I will establish my covenant with you." This is where some of us have to wrestle honestly. We serve a loving God who looks at humanity, sees it overcome with violence, and chooses to end all but one family and start over. That is a difficult thing to sit with. Some have looked at God and called Him a murderer, even accused Him of genocide. If that makes you uncomfortable, the discomfort is worth facing rather than smoothing over. Why should it feel good to learn that humankind had become so corrupt that violence was an everyday practice everywhere you looked? What it really meant was that the iron rule was in effect. Whoever was most powerful took whatever they wanted from whoever they could, all the time and everywhere. The Golden Rule was being practiced nowhere. People were not doing to others as they would have others do to them. So what part of God's character do we see here? We see God as a judge. In our culture, when a judge sentences someone to prison, we do not call the judge an abuser. When a judge hands down even the hardest sentence, we generally understand the judgment as fitting the crime. God, our Creator and the Judge of all things, is saying the punishment fits the crime, and we have to trust Him with that even when it is hard to see. He will judge every one of us; He will judge the nations, and His judgment is perfect and right. That same judgment is also what spares Noah and his family. Faith in Things Not Yet Seen Here is where the story becomes genuinely interesting. Hebrews 11:7 says Noah was warned "about things not yet seen." In Genesis 6:17, God declares, "I myself am bringing the flood of water upon the earth." There had never been a worldwide event like this. Noah is being warned about something he has no concept of. He does not fully understand it; he does not even know how it will happen; he simply knows it is coming because God has told him. The writer of Hebrews includes Noah to remind us of one thing: our faith is not in what we see; it is in who we know. Noah is a wonderful example of an ordinary person who put his faith in an extraordinary God. His posture was simple. "I can't fully understand what is going to happen, I can't see it, I have never experienced it before, but if You said it, I believe it. I'll take You at Your word." That is exactly how the chapter opens. Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is the certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen." To be a follower of Jesus, to be His disciple, means believing not only in the supernatural but in the invisible. That is difficult for our culture, and for skeptics to accept. How to Trust God When You Can't See Him Working Every day I pray to the Lord whom I cannot see. I surrender my life again; I lay it down before Him, and I pick up the cross He has given me in order to follow Jesus, a man I have never met. I see God's activity around my life. I believe I have a personal relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit, and that He speaks to me. But these are invisible things. It is by faith that we read the Word, by faith that we pray, and by faith that we trust the Holy Spirit is speaking to us and through us. Living that kind of life is awesome. You will find yourself saying things to other people and wondering whether the Holy Spirit just spoke through you, because you know you are not that smart or that good on your own. You will hold faith in moments when others cannot understand how you have any peace at all. The reason is simple. Something invisible is at work inside you. They cannot see it, but you can feel it, understand it, and know it. It is all an act of faith. Paul says the same thing while writing about death. In 2 Corinthians 5:6-8, he writes that we are "always of good courage," that "we walk by faith, not by sight," and that he would prefer to be absent from the body and at home with the Lord. Think of Enoch, a man who walked with God and then was simply with God, with no record that he ever died. Do you think that took courage? I have to imagine it took real faith. It is hard to picture the conversation where God says, in effect, "Enoch, your time is done, why not come spend time with Me here, since we already spend so much time together," and Enoch simply answers, "Okay." Most of us would freeze at "right now." But Enoch trusted God, even in the face of death. Faith in Who You Know Noah had faith in things he could not see. So did Enoch. So can you. The invitation of Hebrews 11 is not to manufacture certainty about outcomes you can predict and control. It is to anchor your trust in the character of the God who is speaking to you. He is good, proven at the cross. He is powerful, proven at the empty tomb. And He is good to you, individually, not just to everyone in general. When you cannot see what God is doing, remember that your faith was never meant to rest on what you can see. It rests on who you know. That is what turned an ordinary man like Noah into such a beautiful picture of faith, and it is what can steady you the next time God asks you to trust Him before the outcome is ever in view.
