Certainly within the vast region of secular pursuits there is an equivalent gap between where people are and where they would like to get to.
This reality is what motivates people to pursue a college degree, advance in their careers, save up money for a European vacation or their future retirement, explore the natural world through scientific investigation, and search for the cure for cancer.
This curious space…this interval…this gap…in time and in outcomes…insightfully observed and brilliantly described in Hebrews 11:1…is the underlying, fundamental reason for the creation of this physical universe…having the temporal aspects of time, space, orderliness, and intelligibility.
If we are looking for a reason for why our physical world is the way it is…and why we are here…this curious space…this interval…this gap…in time and in space to create the context for a Hebrews 11:1 adventure of biblical faith to actualize…this may be the answer (Heb. 11:6).
A thesis of this book is that the reality of the universal existence of this space…this gap…between where we are and where we want to go…is a necessary condition for the variableness in degrees of faith to exist…to match the unique variableness of the challenges of our individual callings.
Without this space or gap…as universal and as real as anything we observe and experience…on the vertical continuum scale of good and evil…with absolute good at the very top…the free-will choice to exercise faith in God that defines and differentiates variable degrees of righteousness…cannot exist (Heb. 11:1).
For righteousness to be eternally sustainable for created, non-divine human beings having the moral reasoning capacity for free-will choice…a broad understanding of good and evil…spread-out along this vertical continuum scale of reality…must be fully in-play in our daily experiences in this world environment.
It is also a theme of this book that the exercise of biblical faith…that of enlisting God’s help and participation in closing this space or gap in some particular scenario of circumstances…whatever that may be…is singularly unique in all of human thought and experience.
In my opinion, this is an intellectually plausible and heart-satisfying answer to the universal question of why we are here…in combination with the fact that we are not robots…but instead possess the mental faculties to process and evaluate the deepest of theoretical and philosophical issues (1 Cor. 2:6-12)…such as we are doing in this book.
In my opinion, this is the logical, rational, and reasonable place where we end up after drilling down into the reasons why the world is a rough-and-tumble reality of life for most people.
This curious dynamic of the interaction of faith between the living God and people…in mutually working together through an adventure of faith journey to close the gaps from where we are to where we want or need to go…falls so far outside of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…so far above self-sovereignty and autonomous self-reliance…that this requires an adequate and satisfactory explanation for believers and unbelievers alike.
This explanation is found within the biblical narrative stories of faith…and nowhere else.
Finally, in this question of the existence and the importance of the role of faith in our Christian lives…we can find a powerful answer by borrowing a concept and the terminology from the modern science of Information Theory.
The biblical narrative stories of faith provide the maximum amount of information about God…by purposeful design…because their storylines contain what are called indeterminism and contingency.
These are long words that mean that the biblical narrative stories of faith do not contain repetition and redundancy…that generate little information.
A book having the phrase “I love you” repeated on every line on every page throughout the book…contains very little information content…compared to a murder mystery fiction novel, or a biography, or a book written about some historical event…having non-repeating words, sentences, and paragraphs conveying uniquely specific information on every page.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible provide the maximum revelation about the nature and character of God…because they are based upon the unique contingency and the indeterminism of faith…that we “walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Cor. 5:7).
God does not give us all of the information upfront in our life-mission callings.
“The just shall live by faith” (Gal. 3:11) because this is the optimum vehicle for God to reveal Himself to us through the indeterminate and contingent higher ways and thoughts of God.
Indeterminate…because God cannot give us the whole story of our callings in advance…because then our walk of faith could degenerate into a paint-by-the-numbers, solitary effort on our part based upon our ability to perform according to the script…rather than building a personal relationship with God achieved through a shared experience.
Contingent…because every biblical narrative story of faith is contingent upon the God-created talents and abilities we possess…and the larger, long-range plans of God in the redemptive history of mankind.
Certainly the Bible contains religious rituals…such as the Jewish festivals, the Passover, water baptism, and the Lord’s Supper communion.
But the concept of God-composed life-scripts having well-defined events and circumstances designed to provide the maximum information about God…while at the same time accomplishing phenomenal benefits for mankind…is itself a compelling evidence for the existence of God and the divine origin of the biblical narrative stories of faith.
The Cross in the Christian Life 