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Pondering Pascal’s Wager 179
word is an embattled experience, it is not an uncertain one. God does
not cause people to be born again with new eyes, only to let them die
and go blind for eternity. He “will sustain you to the end. . . . God is
faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus
Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:8–9). “He who began a good work in you
will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). “Who
shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Rom. 8:35).
Authentic Faith Is Not a Wager
We have now moved into the subject matter of the next chapter,
namely, the new birth and its relationship to the work of God in giving
us a well-grounded confidence in the Bible as the word of God. What
we have seen here, with the help of Pascal’s Wager, is that there is no
authentic faith—no saving faith that honors God—based on a guess.
Embracing the reality of God in Christ, revealed in Scripture, is not a
wager. The only kind of trust that honors the one who is trusted is a
well-grounded trust.
The experience of Tokishi Ichii illustrated that a person may come
to that kind of well-grounded trust even if one lacks sufficient words
to describe it. And the experience of Billy Graham illustrated that a
genuine sight of the divine truth of Scripture is an embattled sight. In
the end, the victory of the believer in that battle is the work of God, not
man. That is the truth that lies behind the historic teaching about the
“internal testimony of the Holy Spirit,” which is what we turn to now.