Clough Hebrews Lesson 54
Doctrine of Faith – Hebrews 11:1-3
Last time we finished the 10th chapter of Hebrews, so that the section that ran from Hebrews 10:19-39, the fourth warning passage, is now complete and we begin chapter 11 tonight. Chapter 11 is not too difficult at all to understand, it’s one of the easiest chapters to understand so we don’t want to deceive ourselves that we really know what’s going on by just going ahead and saying well, I know chapter 11, and so that’s great. What you want to do is take chapter 11 in context.
Now before you start reading about anything in Hebrews 11 understand what the problem was when we left chapter 10. What was the problem in Hebrews 10? If you were to summarize where we got left at the end of chapter 10 so we can start in chapter 11? [someone answers] All right, weak faith and in every day Christian experience what were these believers being tempted to do? They were tempted to go back to Judaism. Why Judaism? [someone answers] Remember they were tempted to drop out of the Hebrew Christian movement and go back to Judaism which was more familiar to them; it was the faith of the fathers, so to speak.
Now you’re going to watch a very interesting argument take place in chapter 11 because he’s going to go back to the faith of the fathers. See, that’s why in chapter 11 we have a reversion back to all the early believers of the Bible. You wonder, well why does he start trotting out all these people from Abel to Moses. Well because, hadn’t the problem been with these new believers, actually they were older believers, that they were going to flake out and the idea of flaking out was they would be more comfortable with what they thought was the faith of their fathers. So he’s going to do two things in this passage, he’s going to take them back to show them the true faith of their fathers and show them that, in fact, Christianity is but an extension of the faith of the fathers and that Judaism actually has nothing to do with the faith of their fathers.
Now when we start with chapter 11 this involves us with certain means of motivation. Every believer faces a problem at one time or another of motivation. These people faced the problem of motivation, you face the problem of motivation, I face the problem of motivation, we all do, and the Bible seems to go at this motivation business in several ways. Remember when we dealt with the exhortation, the method of exhortation in Hebrews 10:22-25 we saw one of the modes of exhortation which was to go back to one’s position in Christ. Now that’s a usual New Testament prod to the believer. Paul says in Romans 12, “I beseech you by the mercies of Christ,” so this is always one of the things to contemplate when you don’t feel motivated, just forget the immediate situation, go back to your place in the overall plan of God. That’s one way.
But the Bible doesn’t have just one way. One could argue well, yeah, position in Christ, to God be the glory and so on and that’s one motivation but it’s interesting that God Himself apparently doesn’t consider this a sufficient motivation because God uses another motivation, which we will see in this chapter and that is he uses one very familiar to every school teacher. The concept or reward and punishment. Now this is seen in Adam. In Adam there was a concept of punishment, if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like I told you not to do, you’re going to get punished. So God holds punishment up as motivation. One also sees reward in Genesis 4, He says if you do well, Cain, you know everything will turn out okay, I’ll reward you for that. So reward and punishment is a second means of motivation in Scripture.
Let’s think about this for a minute before we go into the text. I wonder why it is that God uses rewards and punishment to motivate us when you would think the high and lofty way that we would be motivated would be just simply to consider the glory of God.
Now why is it, do you suppose God does employ, in fact, throughout the Scriptures, in every era of history the concept of reward and punishment, in the immediate sense, I don’t mean in the long term, the immediate? All right, we’re finite creatures and there’s nothing inherently sinful about our need to have rewards and punishments because if you argue that way, you face a problem that Adam faced a reward/punishment type situation before he fell. So rewards and punishment aren’t necessarily indications of one’s sinfulness; they’re just simply indications of one’s responsiveness before God. And in any training program rewards and punishment are bona fide. However, at this point we want to carefully distinguish something from a modern heresy that’s crept in here.
In modern learning theory and in education courses this is often associated with something called behavior modification. That is not Scriptural. Now what’s the difference between Scriptural reward and punishment and the reward and punishment that you get in these behavior motivation theories. The difference is that when God rewards and punishes He is looking at the long range and though He may give immediate rewards and punishments, these are only but reflections of eternal rewards and eternal punishments. So that the Biblical concept of reward and punishment is long term; the Skinnerian behavior modification techniques taught in many education circles today are all short term, exclusively short term, and the Christian argument against behavior mod is simply one that behavior mod converts pupils into animals because it basically teaches them to respond amorally to immediate goals. It teaches children not what is right and what is wrong because after all, what is right and what is wrong may not immediately be apparent. One may not immediately be rewarded for being good in a fallen world. In fact, one may immediately be punished for obeying God in a fallen world. And so if you’re going to teach students habitually to respond to short term goals, without any pointing to the bigger picture, and remember, Skinner, who is in back of all the behavioral modification is a materialist and he doesn’t have any eternal picture to point to.
So therefore the very technique of behavior modification has been grounded in an amoral framework to begin with, and for that reason no Christian who thinks biblically can agree with it. Nevertheless, there are some truths, it’s a dim reflection, behavior mod, it’s a dim reflection of the divine viewpoint of true behavior modification by rewards and punishments. But rewards and punishments on a long term scale, pointing to long, eternal goals in mind and you’ll see this in chapter 11. The author is clearly pointing out that God does motivate believers by reward and punishment. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as you fit it in the right framework again. But just going out to modify behavior without reference to any eternal goals is nothing but sheer manipulation; that’s what it is.
Now there’s a third method in Scripture of motivating, that God uses throughout history to motivate, besides the glory principle of our position in Christ, and besides the reward and punishment, a third way is what we’ll call modeling, and that is just simply looking at other believers who are successful. If they did it, you can do it. It’s that simple; modeling, and that’s the motivation of chapter 11: modeling.
And you want to notice this, particularly those of you who think you’ve got the gift of exhortation, you’re gift is very sorely needed, in many parts of the body of Christ, and you have a very precious gift and you ought never to think of your gift, the gift of exhortation, as something less than the pastor-teacher, or the teacher, or somebody else that you might think of more. It’s not at all that. That gift of exhortation is vitally needed in the body of Christ and just as the gift of pastor-teacher has to be trained, have to go to seminary, have to learn languages, have to learn basic theology, have to learn apologetics, just because you’ve got the gift doesn’t mean God gives you the training; He just gives you the potential and you have to train it.
So if you have the gift of exhortation, God isn’t going to give you your training free; you do that and you do that by paying attention. Always come to the Scriptures with a question? What does God do in this passage of Scripture to encourage believers? How does God encourage believers here? How does He encourage them there? How does He encourage them in this chapter? How does He encourage them in that situation? That’s the way you want to read Scripture and you’ll discover a lot of things if you do this. And then to a lesser degree all of us ought to be, at times, engaged in exhortation as we all ought, at times, to be engaged in evangelism. Just because some have the gift doesn’t mean others don’t do the function. Evangelism is the function of every believer, so is exhortation. So as we go through here pay attention to these things and watch how God accomplishes these things.
Now Hebrews 11 is going to concentrate on this, though you will see, if you look carefully, elements of the other two systems of motivation in chapter 11, but primarily chapter 11 is modeling. The argument—that if these Old Testament saints could do it, you can do it. Moreover the argument is even more potent than that because these Old Testament saints did not have what that the New Testament saints have? Why is this modeling argument quite potent? [someone answers] They didn’t have the indwelling Holy Spirit but can you point to something objective in history? What didn’t these Old Testament saints that made it, they didn’t have something that every person who read this book did? [someone answers] No Old Testament saint ever really saw how God would solve the sin problem. No Old Testament saint ever really did figure out who the Messiah was and how it would all work out. Can someone kind of pull it together, what basic quantity did the New Testament Hebrew Christians have that the Old Testament believers didn’t have, and therefore these people ought to have been stronger. [someone answers]
Can we generalize what that is. What have we got here, these New Testament saints had available to them what. The person of Christ, agreed, but the person of Christ occurred in history, didn’t He. So who had the most data on how God kept His promises? The Old Testament saints or the New Testament saints? The New Testament saints. So therefore the argument is going to be, and particularly if you’ll look at the people he selected, and keeping this in mind… what I want to do tonight is just survey the overall argument. Who do you notice him picking out as examples of great believers? What is particular, beginning at verse 4, going all the way to verse 32, that’s the section, 4-32, what do you notice in particular about the kind of believers he’s picking? For example? All right, all had blatant imperfections which is going to be critical for another point I haven’t mentioned yet and that is that when this writer is talking about faith he is not talking about perfectionism. If he were talking about perfectionism he wouldn’t be picking these jewels. He’s talking about something else that ought to encourage us. He’s picking out people that, well again, to cite what one of the seminary professors said when God a picture, He paints a picture warts and all. And these people are painted by the Holy Spirit with all their imperfections hanging out so you can see them. And that’s to encourage us that God isn’t asking something impossible.
But what else do you notice about all these believers. What do you notice them, just look down the list. Start off with Abel, wind up with Rahab. [someone says something] He’s latched on here, someone take it a little further. He has observed that everyone of these people were basically loners, not because they were isolationists but because they literally didn’t have any other believers to have fellowship with. They faced the greatest trials in their life all alone. What does that lead to you? [someone answers] All right, they were all using the faith technique, now what can we [can’t understand word] , go a little further. [someone answers] What didn’t any of these men, none, of these people not see; what didn’t they see? They did not see certain things, which if he had picked other believers out of the Old Testament, this argument wouldn’t have worked so powerfully. But the argument of chapter 11 works quite powerfully when you realize who it is he’s picking here for believers. [someone says something] All right, when was the big push in history, when God’s promises started becoming more and more visible? What era of history, when it became more public to the world what God was doing in history. [someone answers] What happened after Rahab? All right, there you go.
All these believers that are picked out
here are believers who never saw, with the exception possibly of Rahab, they
never saw the fruits of the conquest.
None of them; he deliberately picked them, and all of them, there’s nine
examples and seven of them are out of the book of Genesis. So you see what this guy does? He goes back and picks up the first believers
of history, the believers who were all alone, who had minimum what compared to
the Hebrews Christians? They had minimum
historic revelation of God’s character, didn’t they. Think of it, none of these people saw
In other words, this is a very powerful modeling type motivation. If these people could d it, all alone, with as little revelation as they had, for crying out loud, why can’t you people do it when you’ve got the completed canon of Scripture, you’ve got all the Pentateuch finished which none of these people had, plus all the other 61 books. You’ve got the finished work of Christ, you’ve go the New Testament church, you’ve got the spiritual gifts functioning among yourselves, you’re no longer lone rangers, you’re in communities, you’ve got all these things added to what these people had. If these people could do it, you can do it; that’s the argument.
Now let’s go into the details. Let’s look at Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. [2] For by it the elders obtained a good report. [3] Through faith we understand that the ages were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen are were not made of things which do appear.”
Now when we’re working with the doctrine of faith, think back. Go back to our divine viewpoint framework. The doctrine of faith is connected with the call of Abraham, isn’t it. The doctrine of faith depends on prior revelation. Faith occurred before Abraham’s day, of course, but faith became very clear in Abraham’s day. And I want you to notice that in the doctrine of faith as we have taught it, going over those points of faith, the four points of faith…
The first point is that faith is dependent on the divine viewpoint foundation of creation and fall. Faith is dependent upon creation. Now isn’t it interesting, what do the first three verses of chapter 11 teach? You see, this author starts out the same way as we set up our divine viewpoint framework, exactly the same way. It’s foolish to go talking about I believe this, I believe that, I don’t believe this or something, if you do not operate in the universe as the Bible pictures the universe to be. If you’re going to operate in a materialistic determinist universe, faith is impossible. That’s what’s so foolish about people trying to mix evolution and creation. You’ve cut the umbilical cord of faith at the very start. Faith presupposes the divine viewpoint view of the universe.
The second thing we said was that faith can only be observed by the behavior modification that occurs, the true behavior modification. We can’t observe so many grams of faith in a cc, there’s no such measure of faith in that sense. So how do you measure faith? By the way it affects people’s lives. So guess what, how is this author going to approach Hebrews 11? He’s going to cite how faith changed lives.
And then the third thing we noticed about faith was that it has a resting side and it has a doing side. An sure enough, we’re going to see how each of these people, each of these examples he cites, involves a resting element and it involves a doing element.
And then finally the fourth thing, we said that faith is orientation to grace and by that we mean that as a creature I’m naturally dependent on the Creator, I’m built to be dependent on the Creator, and now as a fallen creature I am doubly dependent on my Creator. I’m dependent upon my Creator by virtue of my creation but I’m also dependent upon the Creator by virtue of His grace because He’s shown grace toward me now as a fallen creature. So faith is orientation to grace; though I know I do not earn it, I do not deserve the blessing that God gives me, nevertheless, I recognize that God is gracious. I also recognize that I cannot in good faith, good conscience, function in the Christian life if there’s something bothering my relationship with God morally. If there’s some thing that God the Holy Spirit is making a point of, conviction of some particular sin or some particular sin pattern, I find I can’t believe, I find I intellectually know that God is there, I know that He’s capable of solving my problem but somehow when I face a problem every time I don’t really believe He wants to solve the problem for me. And when I have that kind of a problem I’ve got a spiritual problem, I’ve got a moral problem, an impediment of some sort that’s got to be dealt with, that’s freezing my faith up so it can’t function.
So faith is all these things and we’re going to see this doctrine of faith over and over and over and over and over; this will b a good review time for this one doctrinal area in chapter 11; over and over this man makes the point.
In Hebrews 11:1, “Faith,” the word “faith” is pistis, it comes from pisteuo which is the verb used in verse 30. Verse 1 ought to be a continuation, it’s too bad the chapter break is there; chapter breaks weren’t in the original. Don’t get snowed by the chapter break. The word “faith” is just the noun version of the verb in verse 39 and should tell you, then, what, about faith? Because this word, “faith,” occurs again and again and again and again and again and again in this passage. This tells you what he means by verse 39. Back in verses 39 it said, “We are not of them who draw back unto perdition but of them that,” you could translate it, “have faith to the saving of the soul,” perseverance of the saints. In other words, the faith principle is a life dominating habit of believers, true believers. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect because all the examples of chapter 11 are going to show you men who weren’t perfect in their faith, but it’s going to show you what he had on his mind by the faith concept. And it’s going to show you once and for all he’s not talking about when somebody sins they’ve lost their salvation. It would refute the argument to pick the characters he picked in chapter 11 if this man was really teaching that once you sin you lose your salvation; why pick these people? If I wanted to build a case on that I wouldn’t pick these people. I’d pick somebody that the Bible didn’t point to very carefully. I’d use them for my argument but I wouldn’t use these people for my argument to support that once I sinned I’ve lost my salvation.
So eternal security is all through this thing; the faith that he’s talking about is just so we can identify true faith that’s functioning in a regenerate soul. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Now with the word “substance” we have a word that we have seen before, hypostasis, that looks familiar about a certain doctrine about Jesus Christ? The hypostatic union, and what is particular about the doctrine of the hypostatic union. What does that doctrine emphasize, just so you’ll catch what the word hypostasis means. In the hypostatic union what are we basically talking about? [someone answers] All right, so the doctrine is about what? Activity or being? Being. So hypostasis has to do with being or the nature of being. And as such it has two uses, two uses in this epistle. Let’s see what those two uses are and then we will try to interpret how it’s used here.
The first way it’s used is in Hebrews 1:3; back in 1:3 we read, “The Son of God, being the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person, upholding all things by the Word of His power,” dot, dot, dot, dot. Where you see the expression, “the express image of His person,” it is the “express image of his hypostasis,” Jesus Christ is the exact replica of God’s being. And so this is the objective use of hypostasis, hypostasis being used here for something that exists, the objective empathy, God; Jesus Christ is the exact replica of God’s objective being. That’s one way it’s used. A second way it is used, however, is found in Hebrews 3:4, where we read, “For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our hypostasis steadfast unto the end.” Now there it isn’t the objective use it is the subjective and the subjective use of hypostasis means that I have solidarity in my daily experience, which we call confidence, a rock stability.
Now of these two uses of the word, which one do you think ought to be found in Hebrews 11:1? The objective or the subjective use of hypostasis, that “faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for.” Now we can theologically nitpick and this is one of those things where it’s shaved, but still you can make a decision on interpreting. To make sure we understand what the issue is, what would it mean if hypostasis was used objectively in verse 1, that “faith is the being of things hoped for,” faith is the real thing, more real than the things hoped for. Now if it was used subjectively it would be “faith is the confidence of things hoped for.” Now which one seems to fit better with the context? The second one. So that’s why, instead of translating it “substance,” such as the King James does, many of your modern translations have changed the translation so it reads, “now faith is the confidence,” or various synonyms thereof. “Faith is the confidence of things hoped for.”
Now remember when we went through the doctrine of faith, one of the first points in that doctrine, we went through our four points of faith and the first point was that it’s dependent upon the divine viewpoint foundation, and we also said plus a promise of God. See, you can believe that God’s there, you can believe that the universe is created the way the Bible says it was created, but you need more to just believe than that; you need a personal promise directed toward you. Those of you who have become Christians recently enough so you can remember all the colorful details, what was it that had to happen before you became a Christian. You knew about God before you became a Christian; what happened just before you became a Christian; what had to occur to you.
You might even have been raised to believe that Jesus was the Christ and He died for the sins of the world, but still what had to happen to you before you made that final step of becoming a Christian. [someone answers] But what usually happened in your experience before you believed? How did God the Holy Spirit work in your experience prior to the time, just prior to the time you became a Christian. [someone answers] All right, showing that Christ was your savior, right, not just your neighbor’s, or the world’s, but Christ’s work was a promise to you, personally, and it was the conviction born by the Holy Spirit that you had the confidence Christ died for you, He is your Savior, He is your Lord, not just Joe Snodgrass’s but yours. And when you came to that conviction that Jesus Christ was your Savior, not the church organization, not the pastor, not somebody else, but Jesus Christ was… when you came to that point, then you became a Christian. If you never go to that point there’s serious doubt whether you are a Christian.
Now that’s the promise, now notice how it dovetails so beautifully with what we read in verse 1, “Faith is the confidence of things constantly being hoped for,” and you can’t hope for something biblically unless you’ve been told to hope for them. So obviously faith involves a certain presupposition, namely that the Holy Spirit has impressed Himself upon your heart; the Holy Spirit has taken the Word of God and He has moved the Word of God down to you, not just somebody else but you and He’s made the Word of God personal to you so that now God has addressed you, not just all men but you personally. And because God has addressed you personally, therefore you have something to hope for. So, “Faith is the confidence of those things hoped for.”
Now what is the implication if you have to
hope for something; besides the fact that God’s promised it to you, what do you
also know if you’re still hoping for it?
That you haven’t got it yet. So therefore what is a characteristic of
faith? A person who’s soul is strong in
faith will be present or future oriented?
He will be a future oriented person.
That’s why our generation is largely a faithless generation; faithless
generations in history are always characterized by people obsessed with the
present. And you see some
characteristics in
And here’s a test that you can kind of run in your life; when it comes to the nitty-gritty of making a decision, what sways you the most? The short term or the long term. And by answering the question that way and dealing with the question that way you can start working with this concept of faith a little bit more solidly. Is that if faith is functioning, the implication here of things constantly being hoped for, is that it is a future orientation, that the man who is using the faith technique will know he’s using the faith technique when he finds himself meeting the emergencies and catastrophes and crises of life looking at the long term, always the long term. It doesn’t mean he ignores the short term, don’t get me wrong, it’s not either/or, it’s both/and. But the present centered American doesn’t bother with the long term. You see it in your daily paper, we want to solve the economic problem so what are we going to do, we’re going to try all the wonderful solutions that started in 1932, all over again, so we can go through another forty years of the same dilemma, we need more controls, this kind of stuff. Instead of just sweating it out for the long term.
So “faith is the confidence of things hoped for,” the man of faith will be a future oriented man. He will always be looking to the future. That’s an answer to one of the feed back cards I got, what about when your boss, when you start preparing for future crises, food, economics and so on, your boss ridicules you and says it’s a cop out. My response to that would be that the boss who does is the cop out. Is it a cop out for Noah to build an ark? Well, yeah, he’s coping out in the sense he’s getting out of the way; is Noah showing lack of faith because he builds his ark? No, he’s showing great faith because he believes that God is going to destroy and judge. That’s the point; the present centered American can’t stand a God who judges in history so he can’t conceive of the fact that God might economically judge and since God doesn’t economically judge, God just sits up in a rocking chair with his long beard and pats everybody on the head and says you’ll be all right; that’s the god of the 20th century present centered American. And so it is inconceivable to him that a Christian in faith is going to take precautions for the future, because he doesn’t think like Joseph, he doesn’t think like Noah. He just thinks more like Satan.
Now the last part of verse 1, “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for,” (comma), apposition, the thing is amplified, stated again so we make sure we understand it, “the evidences of things not seen.” Now the word for “things” is a word pragma, and if you look up this word, make a long story short, it occurs in this epistle for the acts of God; it’s very interesting, this means the acts of God, of course that’s what we’re hoping for, the acts of God, because His Word is the words of God about the future acts of God, and so paying particular attention to vocabulary, verse 1, now we understand, this is not just a magical definition of faith, this is a description of true Biblical faith technique here, that it is the evidence, and the word isn’t even evidence, that’s a bad translation, the word there is conviction, it was used in a law court when someone was convicted of a point of law.
So obviously the word “evidence,” meaning conviction, implies a rational, a rationally perceived truth. It’s not just oh, I’ve got a feeling concept. It’s rather that I thought this thing through, it makes sense to me, I don’t have to park my brains in the closet, but I can function with my head screwed on, that’s the glory of true Biblical faith. I don’t stick my head in the closet, it’s exactly to this, it’s exactly opposite to the Oriental eastern religions, where you have to have a frontal lobotomy to get to nirvana. It’s nothing like this; in Christianity you function as a whole person, including you mind; it’s rational, you can think it through, you can arrive at a solid conviction.
So now we know the solid conviction of the
acts of God that are not yet seen. Now
let’s name a few acts of God that are forecast in Biblical prophecy that are
not yet seen. What are some not yet seen today?
Let’s get some specifics.
[someone answers] Second Advent of Christ, yeah, what are some specifics
that we can point to. You’d better
figure out some specifics, how do you know when it happens? [someone answers] All right, by Ezekiel 38
and 39 God, associated with
So what I’m trying to get away from in verse 1 is this idea, you know, faith, it’s the substance of things now seen, that concept; it’s rather the idea of these future acts of God in history that are identifiable, that are clearly predicted, when they come to pass you’re going to understand and see them. That’s what he’s talking about.
Hebrews 11:2, “By this the elders retained a good report.” The “elders,” the presbuteros, these are the great saints he is going to start enumerating one by one but the important point is the “good report,” it’s an aorist, it means that these men, the word means they were approved; aorist meaning that’s all over, completed, they were approved. Now look at this; when we go back and we read about men like Noah, and we’re going to read about his lapse of faith, we’re going to study that, we’ll deal with Abraham, with Sarah, her lapse of faith, by the way, notice, he didn’t leave the women out, he included them, marvelous examples of Sarah and Rahab, and then he also brought in some of the others later on, Moses, we’re going to study all these people and see their lapses, but what is it that caused them to be approved by God? Not their good works… not their good works.
In particular, apart from Rahab and Moses, if we eliminate those two from the list, what did the other examples here not have so they couldn’t even produce good works? They didn’t have the Law, they didn’t have any directions on God’s will in all the details of life so they obviously couldn’t have produced a lot of good works in the normal everyday sense of the word good works. These men functioned with very, very little of the will of God known. But what they did know of the will of God they held on with a fantastic tenacity, they persevered and it controlled their life. Not 100% but it controlled their life basically.
Now this is the model of the faith technique being used by believers. Hebrews 11 is your standard reference. This ought to be the place you go when you have doubts, am I really with it or am I out of it. Go back to Hebrews 11, compare your life, compare your lifestyle with these men.
Let’s look further, verse 3, “By faith,” now this is a refrain used 18 times and if you have a Bible that you consider not so sacrosanct that you can’t underline in pencil or something, this time let’s do a little exercise and I will show you every… [tape turns] … “by faith” is used in here and just underline it to show yourself something, get the point across about the chapter and the importance of the faith technique. Look at verse 3, “By faith,” all of these are the same in Greek, it’s the instrumental case of pistis, so even though it may translate “through faith,” it’s the same thing.
“Through faith,” verse 3; that’s point 1. In verse 4, “by faith.” Verse 5, “by faith.” Verse 7, “by faith.” Verse 8, “by faith.” Verse 9, “by faith.” Verse 11, “through faith” or “by faith.” Verse 17, “by faith.” Verse 20, “by faith.” Verse 21, “by faith.” Verse 22, “by faith.” Verse 23, “by faith.” Verse 24, “by faith.” Verse 27, “by faith.” Verse 28, “through faith” or “by faith.” Verse 29, “by faith.” Verse 30, “by faith.” Verse 31, “by faith.” Do you kind of get the impression faith has something to do with this chapter. 18 times “by faith” occurs. Now the interesting thing about all this is what? What were these Hebrew Christians trying to do, the big long line that Satan was feeding them, come on back to the faith of your faith of your fathers, it’s more comfortable, and this man is going to totally blow that argument right out of the tub. The faith of your fathers is in Judaism, he’s going to argue, the faith of your fathers is the tenacity of latching onto the Word and holding with it in the face of all kinds of adversity.
So “by faith,” he starts off, “we understand,” it’s the word for intellectual perception which shows you, incidentally, that faith in this sense precedes the understanding; faith always involves under-standing and yet the faith is a disposition of the heart. When I taught Hosea, remember we thought of a predisposition and that controls your whole heart, and then in the area of the intellect the predisposition shows up as presupposition, presuppositions being basic thought. But the predisposition is the predisposition toward God as the whole man, and that naturally results in certain presuppositions in your intellectual life, in your emotional life, that affects the things that you appreciate in life. You may appreciate things that are just sheer vanity, according to Ecclesiastes, people who have no faith will always appreciate trivial things. People who have things will always appreciate the things that count. They will emote, the man of faith has emotions and he emotes but he emotes toward different objects than the man without faith. The man without faith emotes toward trivial things. The man with faith emotes toward the big things that count. They get excited, the man has emotions but his emotions respond and appreciate the better things of life.
So “by faith,” here he’s talking about the intellectual results, “by faith we understand,” now the word “world” is ages, “by faith we understand the ages have been,” perfect tense, “framed by the Word of God.” Now he includes creation here but more than just creation. See, God was an eyewitness; let’s see the moment of creation, what he’s trying to get across here. There’s no way around it but that you’ve got to be dependent on faith at this point, faith in God’s character. God’s character tells us what about creation? It gives us eyewitness data. Now when we come to Genesis 1 and we get God’s eyewitness data about what, in fact, did happen during the creation act we are forced into the position of having to say God didn’t know what He was seeing, He had dirty glasses or something, or He did know in fact what He was doing.
Now that’s why Genesis 1 is such a divisive test. It’s divisive because there’s no way you can get around it without making an evaluation of the God who purports to say it happened this way. Either you doubt this God or you accept this God. There’s no way to go back and check to make sure creation exactly came out. There are certain small checks you can make but they don’t really prove that creation occurred exactly the way Genesis says. They fit together with what Genesis says but it doesn’t prove what Genesis says. We can test, for example, whether the fossil records have certain discontinuities in it, if it does, at least we’ve got something compatible with what the Scripture says and something that refutes the concept that nature is one nice smooth continuum as evolution insists. So we’ve got data that can help choose between one model and the other but ultimately we’re thrown back on the trustworthiness of God, eyewitness account.
So, “By faith we perceive that the ages have been framed,” now “have been framed” is better than “were framed” for this reason. If you translate it “were framed” it sounds like it’s an aorist tense in the Greek and it isn’t, it’s a perfect tense. The perfect tense is point action with continuing results and right now, in this case, those continuing results are very important. We’ve done battle throughout the congregation to try to get across the concept of election. And in doing so we’ve tried to be very, very careful to avoid determinism and fatalism, the idea that God has this whole thing up, kind of like a blueprint that He feeds into the computer and sits there for the rest of history letting it go on. The Bible doesn’t picture God as having contact with creation at creation and then saying ho-hum, hands off and letting creating function by itself. The picture the Bible gives you is that God created and then moment sustains it. God doesn’t take His hand off the driver’s wheel; He keeps both hands on the wheel at all times, so that God is as much in control of creation today as He was the second of creation.
To show where this is taught elsewhere, turn to Hebrews 1:3. Notice what Jesus Christ is doing; besides dealing with your sin and mine at the Father’s right hand He has some other duties and one of His other duties according to verse 3 is that He “upholds all things by the word of His power.” So tonight Jesus Christ is upholding the physical universe, as well as taking care of sin. So next time you think that you might have a possible sin problem that’s bigger than Christ can handle, just stop and think, you know, He’s holding every electron together tonight, every atom, every molecule, every compound basically functions in a grid supported by the person of Jesus Christ. See how big He is? See how powerful He is? See His power at work in front our eyes tonight? Now if He can hold everything together this way then I think He probably can handle your problem. You see the picture of God that is available in the Scripture? Not a deistic concept where God just wound the clock up and said here it is, wake me up in eternity and we’ll wind it up again. That’s not the concept. The concept is that God is constantly involved.
Now in Hebrews 11:3 we’ll conclude with the last part of verse 3. We’re going to see something very, very interesting and this will show you why we live in such a dangerous age as far as our faith is concerned, why so many Christians get tubed out and they can’t understand why they get tubed out until they’ve already been tubed out. “By faith we understand that the ages were have been framed by the Word of God,” now the Word of God here is a peculiar word; there’s two words in the Greek for “word,” logos, and rama; the word logos tends to emphasize the content of what is said; the word rama tends to emphasize the act of saying it. Now in 11:3, rama, not logos, is used which must indicate therefore what? “By faith we understand that the ages of history have been framed together by the spoken Word of God,” what picture is on this man’s mind. Think pictorially; remember Hebrew always thinks in pictures. What’s the picture he’s got in his head? Can you think of a place in Scripture that he’s thinking about? [someone answers] He could be thinking of Sinai but go back further. [someone else]
In Genesis 1 what do you read all the time? “And God said let there be” this and the was. “And God said let us make man in our image,” and God made man in His own image. “And God said be fruitful and multiply,” and God said this and God said that, always God said something. It’s the speaking, so the picture behind verse 3 is, and that’s why we’re taking it very slowly tonight because people read through this so fast they lose all the tremendous content. “Through faith we understand that the ages have been framed by the speaking of God,” that God speaks and history moves, that’s what he’s talking about. Look, he’s saying it’s not just the creation that God said, what did God say in Jeremiah? That the nations that rebel against Me I’ll treat them like the potter’s clay and I’ll turn them around. God is constantly, if you want to use the word, interfering in history, constantly interfering with the spoken word. We don’t hear it said but God is speaking into His creation, and says let that happen, let that happen, let the Assyrian come now, God says. It’s not the Assyrian had a computer program all programmed to come at that point, when the time got right God said—now! When God called Cyrus the Persian, He said Cyrus, My servant, I created you for—now! And when Herod, in the book of Acts got up, and he walked into the coliseum, and everybody worshipped Herod as king, and god-king, and god-king, god-king, god-king, and God says that’s enough, die—and Herod dropped dead in the middle of the coliseum in Acts.
So you have a tremendous interference in history. Now you see why this man is talking about the basis for faith here? If you’ve a God as big as the God of the Bible, constantly speaking into history you’ve got a big enough object for your faith to handle the problems of life; the problems of life get very, very small fast when compared to that kind of a God.
Let’s finish up in verse 3, “…so that,” here’s the purpose clause, purpose. Those of you who are Greek students, notice the construction, in 99 cases out of 100 that construction is purpose, not result, “we understand that the ages have been framed,” the ages of history have been organized if you want, or run, or administered “by God’s spoken Word, so that,” purpose. Why does God organize the ages of history by His speaking? Why does God do that? “So that things which are seen have come to be,” “so that things seen have come to pass,” because this is the word ginomai, notice, in the Greek, ginomai, the two words for being, eimi, meaning is, and ginomai means come to pass or become. Things “have come to pass,” now what are the things that have come to pass do you think? Just guess based on the context of chapter 11, what are these things seen that come to pass? What would be an example of some things seen that have come to pass? [someone answers] All right, seasons, but a little more spectacular; what are some other things seen.
Remember what I said, in verse 1, what were those things? [someone answers] Creation, but you know, get a little more….[someone answers] Exodus, call of Abraham, all those things, all the great historic events of the Old Testament he’s talking about, because who’s he going to talk about beginning in verse 4? Those things that are seen, the things that happened in history that were observed, “those things which are seen have come to pass out of that which doesn’t appear.” Now that is one of the most profound statements of cause/effect in history that you will ever see. Does anyone catch the implication of verse 3 as far as, say a modern political scientist or a sociologist goes and he wants to analyze and explain the rise of American given the sociological condition of the 17th and 18th century. [someone answers] All right, what it’s saying is that the modern political scientist or sociologist operates as though the creation is a closed system, that it’s causes are there and all he needs is a sophisticated enough set of tools and he’ll gradually root the causes down. And then when he gets the causes, then he can explain history.
But Hebrews 11:3 says that man will be perpetually frustrated because there’s always this outside interference. History can’t be totally analyzed. In my own field, for years and years there have been big philosophic discussions, going on in the field of meteorology for… oh, ever since the 20s, and it deals with the problem, if you had an infinite size computer, if you had a large enough computer and if you had a large enough observation network, would it be possible to predict the weather at any point in the earth’s surface at any time in the future. And the determinist will always argue yes, if you had enough data, you’ve got a good solid link ion the initial conditions, then I could predict the universe out dot, dot, dot, dot, so many times. But it turns out when you go to predict the atmosphere that your success in prediction comes out always like a curve, like this, and beyond, say 72 hours, no matter how much data you have, no matter how many physical laws you’ve got, you can never get answers. Now why is that? Why does it act that way? Because this is one case where the affects, apparently, are quite immediate; it’s a turbulent type phenomenon to begin with and there’s constant, if you want to put it that way, tampering going on.
So what verse 3 is saying is that history is wide open to God’s interference, at every point. We do not live in a closed universe. We live in one that is open to divine interference. [someone says something] That’s right, don’t you see… see, that’s a uniformitarian assumption. Now as Christians what can you see now, backing off from this and let’s just think of an application on what we’ve just learned, we come into class, we read a book or we see a program on TV or somebody talks to us and they got this idea that the universe has some sort of a constant in it. And there’s a craving to get down deeper into the scientific laws and deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, until we can finally get to that law that’s constant. And then when we get down there, then we’ll have it made. Now what is that a craving for in Christian terms. What is that man craving for? What attribute of God in particular? [someone answers] Yeah, he’s craving to be autonomous but he’s made in God’s image and that’s causing him to act that way. [someone else]
That’s right, when he’s looking for his constant in here, what is he really looking for? He’s looking for a God who is sovereign, a God who is immutable, particularly God who is immutable, won’t change, it’s an apostate religious impulse of the human heart that’s functioning here. When you hear a scientist talk like this, we’ve got to get down to the basic, basic, basic, basic, basic, basic laws, and when we finally get down there, then we’ll have it made. But the basic, basic, basic, basic, basic laws will never be found according to this verse. Things which happen, happen out of things which are unobservable. And this is why in Ecclesiastes 3:11 God puts that thing in our heart that causes us to want to get to the constant, the great constant, we want to get that constant but we’re always cut off; every time we think we’ve got a law, like Newton thought he had everything knocked, and look at quantum physics in the 20th century. And again it propels men on for a further search, they’re always looking for the great C, the great constant. We’ve got it, the constant is a person called Jesus Christ.
So the search comes out of the impulse of man’s God-shaped heart; the impulse comes because of the creature that can’t escape his creaturehood. But because he’s a bastard creature that is in rebellion against God his search becomes skewed, the train derails from the tracks and he searches for constant inside the creation instead of the Creator. All right, that has to be solved and next time we go to verse 4 we’ll realize that all these great saints functioned inside an open universe. None of these men could have done what they could with the faith technique had they thought like most 20th century people. They could never have believed.
Father, we thank you….