Clough Hebrews Lesson 60

Models of Faith: Joseph/Joshua/Rahab – Hebrews 11:27-31

Turn to Hebrews 11, the section on Moses. To get some review and to again go back a bit and see the argument of Hebrews, we’re always in danger of losing the forest for the trees, Hebrews 11 is a portrait by historic example of what faith looks like when it’s functioning. And the argument of the author of Hebrews is not something like Paul where he’s gotten a new revelation. The Holy Spirit’s revealing through him but indirectly through the Old Testament. And the passage that’s central is actually found in Hebrews 10:37-38 because this is a quotation from Habakkuk, a quotation which, by the way, Paul uses again and again in the Scriptures as to the reasons why justification is by faith and by faith alone, not by works. That quotation comes from Habakkuk and if you’ll turn to Habakkuk I want to show you the preceding part of that and we’ll understand why he’s selected the example he has in chapter 11.

Turn to Habakkuk 1:12 and you’ll be right about in that point in the argument that led to this famous quotation. “Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD, my God, “Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? We shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.” Habakkuk’s problem is when the nation Israel goes into the fifth cycle of discipline Habakkuk faces the obvious situation of tremendous suffering, suffering that apparently goes on unalleviated, suffering that raises the question, how can a good, loving, moral God allow His people to suffer so severely without respite. And therefore he raises the question, “Are You not from everlasting, O LORD my God? We shall not die,” it’s more of a pitiful question that he’s raising here.

Habakkuk 1:13, “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore look thou upon them that deal treacherously, and hold thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?” His complaint is that the Jews are more righteous than the Gentile persecutors and therefore God is unrighteous to allow the less righteous people to persecute the more righteous people. So it’s an argument questioning God’s character. And this is the whole argument of Habakkuk. So when you get to Habakkuk 2:1, he says, “I will stand upon my watch, and set myself upon the tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto me,” in other words, he has asked God for a defense of His strategy in history, “and what I shall answer when I am reproved,” he says. And verse 2 gives the Lord’s answer, “And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets, that he may run that reads it,” in other words, put it on billboards with large enough letters so you can go by fast and still see the message. [3] For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie; though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come, it will not tarry. [4] Behold, his soul that is lifted up is not upright in him; but the just shall live by his faith.”

That quotation, then, “the just shall live,” “the just” refers to those people that Habakkuk was saying were just. Habakkuk’s argument is that the just are being persecuted by the unjust; what shall the just do in such a situation, isn’t God unfair. And God’s answer is I am postponing my rescue and until such time “the just will live by his faith.” And that’s the answer that God gives, the just will survive because of his faith. And it’s important that the New Testament writers cite this because the just people are going to be put into captivity where obeying the Law and all its details is the impossibility. See, these people that are addressed as “the just” after 586 BC and after 721 BC will be deported, they will be placed in a citation where keeping the Law literally is impossible. So therefore, if keeping the Law is the means of sanctification and salvation, what are the just going to do while they’re in captivity; they couldn’t be saved that way. So God is saying that during the period of captivity when it becomes impossible to keep the Mosaic Law, then “the just shall live by faith,” which exposes and brings to the surface a principle that had been there all the time, but had never been seen quite so clearly before and that was that the just, in fact, lived by his faith at every point in history. All right, that’s the background, that the just survive wholly because he’s relying upon God’s character.

Now turning back to Hebrews 11 does is cite one illustration after another of this point, and we left off last time with the section on Moses that began with Hebrews 11:23. Verses 23-26 Moses breaks with Egypt, and again to focus our minds on what kind of a man Moses was, we read a section from Joseph, the Antiquities, Book II, chapter 9. “Now Moses’ understanding became superior to his age, nay, far beyond that standard; and when he was taught, he discovered greater quickness of apprehension than was usual at his age, and his actions at that time promised greater, when he should come to the age of a man. God did also give him that tallness, when he was but three years old, as was wonderful. And as for his beauty, there was nobody so unpolite as, when they saw Moses, they were not greatly surprised at the beauty of his countenance; nay, it happened frequently, that those that met him as he was carried along the road, were obliged to turn again upon seeing the child; that they left what they were about, and stood still a great while to look on him;” and it goes on to describe Moses’ talent and skill in all the various areas of life. In fact, Philo listed his proficiency in arithmetic, geometry, poetry, music and philosophy.

Moses was not a moron, Moses was one of the greatest geniuses of all time who founded a nation. Moses is a tremendous individual. Moses may have been the man who invented the alphabet. So therefore he is a man who has tremendous capabilities in history and for a man to make the momentous decision that he did shows you ultimately he was a man that was oriented to grace. Why? Because in these verses, verses 23-26, the main verb, “By faith, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. That’s the main verb. He refused to identify himself with the royal house of Egypt. The royal house of Egypt, if we are to revised chronologies, was the 12^th or 13^th dynasty, not the 18^th, and therefore this was a time when there was great building in the delta area, with bricks and so on.

And Moses had a position of power. From the human point of view Moses could have very, very easily reasoned, all I have to do is play the Egyptian ball game and then I can release my people. It would have been very easy for him to do this, but if Moses had, in fact, tried to release his people from Egypt, it would have been a works operation, and not by grace. So Moses separated, Moses came to the point in his life when he separated from the people and when he left, he made a clear distinction between the short term and long range pleasure.

Verses 25-26 give you the two participles attached to the main verb. Both of these emphasize that he would choose the long-term benefits rather than the short-term benefits, and that’s one of the characteristics of orientation to grace. Orientation to grace means I am oriented to God’s whole plan that goes from eternity to eternity; I have a big range in view, not a small range. And therefore I am going to act differently from the person who is present centered. I am a future centered individual and therefore I do not look at the present; the present doesn’t sway, the future sways. God’s eternal plans sway, they are more real than whatever is present. So we have, then, these two points of contention and they’re the same two things that we all face, whether we’re going to trade off short term pleasure for long term pleasure. Moses chose long term.

And keep in mind, when verses 24-26 were actually historically going on in history Moses had no idea that he would become such a famous man. He was risking, from his human point of view, total oblivion… total oblivion, and he gain, of course, afterwards, but when he made the decision he didn’t know he was going to be a famous man for making it. Now this is why, particularly in the 25^th verse where it says, “Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures,” literally singular, “of sin for a season.” It’s not talking about fleshly lusts and so on that some evangelists climb into; nothing to do with that.

Verse 25 talks about political power, that’s what the sin is, not that all political power is sinful but for Moses it would have been sinful. That is “the pleasure of sin,” the enjoyment of political power and that is why “the pleasures of sin” in that verse is the opposite of affliction. One is exultation, politically; the other is affliction, being in the minority politically. So there’s an antonymic structure to verse 25. It’d make no sense whatsoever to put pleasures of sin as far as what is usually put in by some evangelists that don’t bother to read the Bible. So verse 25 gives a clear cut distinction between political power, being in control, trying to influence the situation and letting the kingdom of God come about by grace.

Now there’s some applications and it doesn’t directly apply to most of you who are here tonight but we’ll just say it anyway, and that is that we have in Lubbock a large number of people that bleed Bible churches dry of their resources, the moochers I call them, that run around town dipping here and dipping there and coming over and getting tapes and using our publications and so forth, and never identify with the local church so that the source of all these supposedly wonderful materials can help other people. And what we have, we need less chiselers and less moochers in the Christian camp is what we need; we need some people that will respond to the Word and will do something with it, instead of sitting around like Moses did not in Egypt, trying to say that because I have a position of influence, because I am so great in my little club that I have such a nice social status in the city of Lubbock that we don’t want to pull out because we might lose opportunities to witness. You hear that argument all over the city and the people are as phony as Moses would have been had he stayed in Egypt. So when you hear that argument you’re listening to phonies, religious phonies.

Now in premillennialism we have something that Moses had and that is we have perspective on political power. What is the role of the Christian? We live between the time Jesus Christ died until the time He comes to set up His thousand year kingdom. What does the Christian do in this interim, when he faces, as a participating citizen, political power. He has an opportunity to use it, what does he do with it; does he shirk away from it? No! During this time period, premillennialism would argue that the Christian has opportunity to influence the area in his immediate environment as much as he can, so that within this immediate sphere of influence several things happen. One, the gospel of Christ becomes relevant; it’s no longer excused off as some sort of a private subjective thing, sort of a religious trip. Now this is what’s happening, and why, for example, in the city of Lubbock you can have more churches per square mile than most communities and yet this city has one of the highest crime rates on the high plains.

Obviously you can draw the conclusion the churches don’t have much influence and there’s a reason because the churches are not preaching the whole counsel of God because the people, by and large, resist the teaching of the whole counsel of God. They would rather have an evangelistic service where everybody can trip down the aisle or something like this and they’d rather be fed pabulum than strong meat. And this is why we have such little influence in this city.

But I’ve been rubbing shoulders with people in city government now for over a year and the opportunity is ripe for influence, these people are just looking all over the place for answers. And if there’s someone there with the answer they have the wide open door of opportunity and yet we have people that just have no visibility whatsoever to responsible leaders. It’s a crying shame; Christians in this city ought to be ashamed of themselves. We have, for example, the textbook situation; in the textbook situation 29 people in the city of Lubbock out of 160,000 took the time to go down and look at the textbooks. Of those 29, 25 came from Lubbock Bible Church, so that shows you what a great job all the rest of this stuff is doing in the city. It’s spinning their wheels and we are not making visibility.

So, Moses did not take advantage of political power but we want to be careful, don’t draw the conclusion because Moses left Egypt that we must copout as citizens; let’s keep balance. God would have us influence areas where we can to the extent you can. That means spelling it out, voting intelligently, getting together like some of the Christians do here before an election and researching candidates, researching their positions and so forth. That means participation in the school system, either PTA level, school board level or talking with administrators and so on. It means participation in city government. How many active Christians do you know in city government? Do you know where most of them come from? From the most liberal churches, the greatest participants in the government in this city have come all from the liberal churches, all of them. And it’s a crying shame, but the Christians aren’t doing anything about it, they’re just sitting around. So again we find this copout attitude and it’s wrong, totally wrong.

We, as premillennialists would argue that we can influence the area in our immediate environment and within this area we can build things that will perpetuate into the eternal kingdom; we can build concepts, we can build structures, we can be creative, we can further the creativity of men. Bach in music, and the great men of literature, they’re not going to be forgotten in the millennial kingdom; their works are going to go into the kingdom and they’re going to be used in the kingdom. Humanity doesn’t start all over when the kingdom begins. So don’t use these verses as copouts, we just have to balance it off. Moses did choose, but at his point he had the option of the beginning of the kingdom of God, we don’t, we’re not here to build a kingdom, we’re just here as members of the body of Christ to influence to the degree we can.

Hebrews 11:27, this is new material on Moses. We have a problem immediately with verse 27; does anyone who knows the Old Testament see what the problem is? You read verse 27, what’s wrong with it, apparently. Think back in Exodus, what’s going on back there? [someone answers] Yeah, it looks like Moses is scared to death of Pharaoh, doesn’t it, in the Old Testament. That’s why he took off and yet here it distinctly says he did not fear Pharaoh, he did not fear “the wrath of the king.” So that makes us, when we think there’s a conflict we’d better go back and make sure we’ve understood Exodus.

So turn to Exodus 2:15, Moses killed an Egyptian, what he said in Exodus 2:14 was, “…Surely this thing is known.” “Surely this thing is known,” he says. [15] “Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses. And,” not but, “And Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh,” now an interesting thing, if you read that carefully Moses did not flee immediately. He didn’t flee until Pharaoh started to seek him out. There could have been a time gap between verses 14 and 15, so Moses just did not take off. Moses took off when it became apparent that Pharaoh was going to prosecute him for the crime.

Now at this point you want to notice an issue that develops. Why did Moses flee? If we are to believe the revelation that we have in Hebrews 11 it can’t be fear, so it must be something else that caused Moses to flee. Moses, according to extra-Biblical tradition, was at least the rank of General in Pharaoh’s army. Now, had Moses wanted to stay he probably could have. He could have cause a revolt internal to the Egyptian army; since he was of the royal family he would have carried prestige. Moses could have made a scene in Egypt, but apparently the real reason why he fled was that, again, he was committed to the fact that if there was to be an answer to the problem it had to be God-initiated, not man-initiated. So Moses fled, then, from Egypt, not just to avoid Pharaoh but to avoid Pharaoh because had no other option that would be grace oriented. He could have tired to stay in the land and slug it out, or he could have fled and decided to trust the Lord to work it out. And he chose to flee and let the Lord work it out, so the act of fleeing by Moses was not an act of fear, it was an act of trust. He couldn’t do anything so he had to rest, he had to get to a place where he could rest, so the only thing to do is get out of the way, that’s all, leave, take off.

So Hebrews 11 gives added insight and doesn’t directly conflict with the text of Exodus 2 if you read it carefully. But there’s also another point about Hebrews 11:27, the verb to forsake Egypt is an aorist tense, “forsake.” The verb includes, apparently, not just the action of Moses taking off after the killing but includes all action from that break in his life all the way down to the time that he led the nation out. All this action is wrapped up at a point in time with the aorist. The aorist summarizes a large sphere of action, contracts it down to a point and describes it. That’s the way the aorist operates.

All right, so this aorist of forsaking Egypt can refer to many things, not just one thing, and the reason we say the verb refers to more than just one thing is by the way it is explained in the end of verse 27, “By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king,” “not fearing” is a participle, the action of the aorist participle precedes, logically or chronologically the action of the main verb. So “having not feared the wrath of the king he forsook Egypt by faith.” You see, if he had feared the wrath of the king he couldn’t have used the faith technique. See, the “by faith” in there is a faith in God. So the very fact that his removing himself from Egypt is an act of faith proves it can’t be of fear. People who trust the Lord in faith do not fear men.

So we have this, then, “He forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king, by faith.” But there is an explanation tacked on to the end of verse 27 and that tells us a lot more than the first part of the verse. It says, “for he endured,” again, aorist tense, he endured over a long time period, all that wrapped up in one time, and the word “endure” carries a linearity about it anyway, so its endured for some time. What time did he endure? He endured for a period of time which was from his exodus to the Exodus, from the exodus of Moses to the Exodus of the nation, forty years. So he endured for forty years having left Egypt. He made a decision and he stuck with it for forty years. And there’s a participle in the present tense here, “as seeing Him who is invisible,” that was the secret of his endurance, and verse 27 therefore shows orientation to grace. “…seeing Him who is invisible,” means that Moses, all during this forty year time period, sought the Lord face to face. What is the title, if you remember from the Old Testament, that distinguishes Moses from all the other prophets? [someone answers] All right, no other prophet talked with God face to face, Moses only. So when you see this little phrase in here, “as seeing Him who is invisible, it’s a reference to this intimacy that Moses had with Jehovah.

Now when God revealed Himself to Moses, He revealed Himself by the Tetragrammaton; YHWH, spelled this way, not Jehovah. Don’t tell the Jehovah’s Witnesses this but Jehovah is the only way this name could never have been pronounced. They took the consonants, YHWH, then the took the vowels from Adonai, this “o” here, and the “ai” comes out as an “e” and this is how we get Jehovah. Now this “a” comes off as an “e” sometimes, there’s phonetic problems, but those vowels in there are totally artificial; they were not in the original language. So Jehovah’s name is nonexistent. The word “Jehovah” is a fiction, it never existed in history. That is only something put in by the English, people that spoke the English language. Even the Jew, when he reads it, doesn’t read Jehovah, he reads it Adonai. When an orthodox Jew comes to the Tetragrammaton he never pronounces it. In fact if you heard [can’t understand name], if you were alert and you heard him when he was blessing God there, he didn’t say Yahweh, barak Adonai he said, well in the text it reads barak Yahweh, blessed be the Lord, but you notice how he read it: barak Adonai because this word kept it’s pronunciation; they lost the pronunciation of that one, so the best guess about the Tetragrammaton is that it’s Yahweh, and that it is related to the verb to be.

Now Jehovah’s name was revealed; in the family training we covered this, why does God reveal Himself as Jehovah in Moses’ generation and not before? What’s the issue in Moses’ generation that causes this new revelation of God? “By My name, Jehovah, I was not known to your fathers,” God says, I show Myself to you now. Now you’d better be sharp because somebody is going to pin your ears back some day and say aha, therefore God has many names in the Bible, so be prepared, how are you going to handle this kind of a thing? [someone answers] All right, what is He going to do in the Exodus that shows the nation that He is with them? [more said] There are going to be public miracles that were never done before. Remember in Deuteronomy 4 it says has this ever happened in history that God chose to talk face to face with a nation, show and deliver them by such wondrous signs. It is a unique sphere in history; that’s why the historian always wants to be racist, so he can protect his naturalism. If he can just suppress this unique data then he can be insulated and secure in his own apostasy. So you’ll find hostility to these unique events of Scripture in all the texts that you’ll study about in school and the newspaper and so on.

So “By faith,” then, “Moses forsook Egypt,” and the secret was he kept looking at the essence of God. See this theme that comes up again and again here in Hebrews 11, over and over, what is the occupation of the faith technique, the character of God Himself, the essence of God. This is why in the family training program we have required people to memorize the attributes of God. Now you can’t imagine the static I’m getting from certain quarters that the family training program is too hard and that this is too much for children to memorize this and so forth. Now I’m getting also a lot of encouragement from parents who are, what I consider mature. And the mature parents are staying with it and their kids are getting it and so on. You see, what’s happened is that when I forced the family training program issue I have exposed something; I’ve exposed the kind of attitudes that have been prevalent in fundamentalism, and what’s happened is that the people that are now griping are the people who have always sat, unidentified before, and when I put the heat on it came out very clear who was with and who wasn’t. And one of the things that we have insisted is that everyone will know the attributes of God. Now why have I insisted, is that cruel to require kids to know the attributes of God. Listen, we have a set of paintings in my office, a set of drawings done by the mentally retarded out at the state school, and our two boys have gone out there and taught these kids doctrine, they even got a doctrinal notebook for the boys and girls out there, some of these kids can’t even speak or write correctly, and they’re learning the doctrine. Now if the mental retarded kids in the state schools can learn the doctrine, what is wrong with the clods in this congregation. It’s ridiculous people fussing about how difficult it is when the mentally retarded kids can do it. You see what’s happened, it shows you we have retarded, spiritually retarded people, right here in this congregation.

Hebrews 11:28, here’s what Moses did, and this verse is a proof text of why everyone who left in the Exodus generation was a believer; people say how do you know that the people in the Exodus generation are believers? And why is that important? Because they died in the desert and never got into the land and they committed the sin unto death; you had an entire generation of retarded believers. “Through faith he kept the Passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the first-born should touch them.” “Through faith,” again it’s “By faith,” no difference, instrumental of pistis, “Through faith he kept,” perfect tense. Now what’s wrong with this verb? Again there’s something unusual, let’s stop here and see what’s going on. All the rest of them are aorists, recording something that happened in the past, he did this, he did this, he did this, he did this, he did this, but “he has kept Passover.”

Now why this shift from aorist to perfect? What’s the shift? Can anybody grasp this. This is something that’s hard to struggle over, it’s not an easy question here, but this author, as we have seen, is precise in his grammar. There’s a reason for this. [someone answers] Well, what you say is true, he kept the Passover before the Exodus and then after the Exodus he kept it, but that wouldn’t fit with the last part of verse 28 where it’s a negative purpose, “in order to avoid the destroyer,” see. [someone else] All right, at least it emphasizes there’s something about this one time that is very, very critical. This is something that comes into it.

[more said] All right, in this immediate context the perfect tense usually has reference to something that continues as a result. In other words, if it wasn’t that, why the perfect tense. That’s what you have to ask yourself. Those of you taking Greek notice this; don’t just flutter through, learn to parse your verbs as you go and when you hear a series of aorist verbs and all of a sudden you come to a perfect, there’s got to be a reason for that. Sometimes it’s no more than that particular stem or verb just doesn’t occur in the aorist, but that’s not the case here. This verb does occur in the aorist, and Moses could have just easily “had he kept,” but the fact that he shifts the verb tense from an aorist to a perfect indicates he wants to direct attention to something, a lasting effect of the act.

And so we have it right in the context, “By faith he kept the Passover,” now we can’t translate it as a perfect. The next time somebody tells you that English is just as good as Greek, that’s true in one sense in that you can always expand the content of the language with enough sentences, but word for word translation won’t work here and here’s a beautiful example of it because there’s no way I can translate verse 28 to get the point across without giving you a footnote of explanation. Now it’s true, the meaning can come across in the English, grant it a footnote to explain it, but it come across in a translation. Not one translation is going to bring this point out. So here’s where you have to have access to the Greek or the pastor should know the Greek if he teaches. “By faith he kept, with results, the Passover, and the sprinkling of blood,” part of it, “lest the destroyer of the first-born touch them.” “Them” is the first-born, because the verb of verse 28 the main verb, singular subject, so it’s not the people’s faith that’s the mention of in verse 28, it’s Moses’ faith, so therefore the “them” at the end of “touch” can’t refer back to the subject. The “them” has to refer to some other noun that’s plural in the sentence and the only other noun that’s plural in the sentence is the first-born. So, “By faith he kept the Passover, … lest the destroyer of the first-born touch them,” that is, touch the first-born. So the results, then, of this is the survival of the first-born and the destruction of the first-born of Egypt. It had a lasting result, “he kept the Passover.”

Now there may have been another reason to bring this out. You could also argue, if you’re going to go this nitpicky way, you could have put some of those other verbs in the perfect tense, but I think there’s another reason why he put this in the perfect tense here. What was the tendency of all these Hebrew Christians toward Jewish ritual? What was their natural tendency that they were having a problem with at this time in history? They were lauding this ritual, the ritual became everything, didn’t it. All right, the Passover meal, which was annually celebrated, became something in itself, but by subtlety moving the verb from an aorist to a perfect what does he do? He points to the uniqueness of the first Passover, that that, no matter how many other Passovers you have you’ll never have a Passover like the first one. So by shifting the verb tense from aorist to perfect, he makes unique the first Passover. All the other Passovers that the Hebrews exalt so are just but memorials.

That’s the difference in the Protestants and the Catholic when it comes to communion, same thing we’re fighting, same thing. The Catholic wants to make the mass the big thing, he wants to re-crucify Christ in front of the congregation and everybody has to participate and so we resacrifice, through the priest Christ is resacrificed again. And you have the mass itself become something more than just a memorial. Whereas the Zwingli and Protestant position is that the communion is notating but a memorial; it’s an important thing, yes, but it in itself is nothing; it points back to a point act of history.

[someone says something] Well, the reason when you have an ecumenical gathering, by the very fact that you’ve got an ecumenical gathering means that people have chosen doctrinal points in order to gather. So right away the rules of that particular ballgame that you’re watching was that we don’t have rules. [more said] Sure, but they’re not reciting it as truth, they’re reciting it as church tradition. This is no more different than you’d go into a church and you listen carefully, oftentimes the clergy or whoever is conducting the service will say: and let us recite the creed of our fathers, and any liberal can say that, the creed of our fathers, it’s historic fact, they believe that, so let’s go back and get a titillating experience by reciting the Nicene Creed. See, the whole idea behind an ecumenical service is to emphasize the present experience, not the truthfulness of what you’re doing. That’s why the charismatic movement is so satanic, it’s blending right in with this, you can have an n^th dimension experience in the middle of a mass and Protestant and Catholics can hold hands because they’ve had a similar present experience. But all ecumenical ignores orthodoxy and the while issue of doctrine, so don’t try to figure it out.

[more said] Oh, it’s a good question, this is a good question, what it is, you wouldn’t consider it an orthodox Catholic service either if you have this participation in it. But the Catholics now, since Vatican II do consider it a Catholic service because their present position is that they’re going to absorb us. Don’t kid yourself, the Catholics have never given up their concept of world conquest. [more said] Oh yeah, the Protestants will be absorbed. And they will, be, Catholic scholarship in many areas beats the Protestants. This town is going to be absorbed by the Catholics, the people that are putting the most pressure on the city council are the Catholic priests. The Protestants you never see down at city all, not a voice. All these loudmouths all over town but not a voice down there. When there’s an issue in this city you know who’s sitting there, Sister Regina and the convent, and if she can’t get her way she gets on the phone and calls one of the Bishops in Amarillo and he’s down here within an hour. So the Catholics are basically taking over this town and this town doesn’t even realize they’ve been had. This is why I’ve been stinky and say everything I can against the Catholics in the services here, just to irritate, to cause the difference to be seen, to become visible.

Hebrews 11:29, “By faith they,” now here you have a shift, this is the end of Moses’ faith now. In verse 29 the shift goes to the people, “By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land, which the Egyptians assayed to do,” or tried to do and “were drowned.” Now there are some points in here but turn to Exodus 14 for the promise that you can use as a believer by application but that these people used once and for all by interpretation. Exodus 14:13, one of the great promises of the Bible and one of the promises that you ought to memorize, commit to memory. “Moses,” remember the case, this is the famous crossing of the Red Sea, we don’t know where but some place they were trapped, Pharaoh’s chariot fore was attacking them, they had no place to go, their backs to the sea. “And Moses said unto the people, Fear not, stand still and see the salvation of the LORD which He will show you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you shall them again no more forever. [14] The LORD shall fight for you, and you will hold your peace.”

Now that is a tremendous promise of resting, when the faith technique has a doing side and a resting side there is an example of a promise that you can claim when you can’t do anything, when you’re in the middle of a resting situation, “Fear ye not, stand still,” notice. You see, if they didn’t stand still they’d miss out. Suppose they scattered along the shore, they’d been killed. Or, they tried to swim across they’d drown, they couldn’t do anything. Anything they do would bring destruction upon themselves and so the one thing to do is don’t do anything, stand still. Now sometimes you’ll find yourself in exactly that situation, where you have your back to the wall and can’t do anything, “Stand still,” remember that, lodge it away in your subconscious so that the Holy Spirit has it there. Go home tonight, read it through 25 times until you’ve memorized it. Get it into your soul so this will come to the surface someday when you need it in a crisis and you’ll be able to respond to the crisis: “Stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD, which He will show you today.

Now it tells about how the Egyptians go in so on and were drowned, but nowhere in Exodus 14 or 15 does it give us the detail of theology that Hebrews 11 gives us, so back to Hebrews 11 and this author gives us something else to chew on; tremendous insight into the Old Testament text. “By faith they passed through the Red Sea,” they’re doing something now, they stopped, so here’s your doing and your resting. You see how faith operates in both ways; first they have to rest, stand there, do nothing, just stand there; face the enemy and just stand there, back to the sea, and then wait, and wait, and wait, and wait some more until God parts the Red Sea. Then you do a 180 and move. So first rest, then do. Faith is involved in both sides. One isn’t any less faith than the other. It took a lot of faith to walk down through those two walls of water, both sides. And there was a miracle with that because in here you have the bottom of that land which would have been covered with slime and ooze, dry. So there was a miracle with the Exodus, it wasn’t [tape turns] just secondary means such as an east wind. It included the east wind but there was also a miraculous drying of the sea base, bottom; all the muck and all the rest of it was somehow hardened, hard enough to bear the weight of these people with their animals. So you figure out that there was miracles involved.

Now it says something else, “which the Egyptians,” in the King James it’s kind of fouled up here, this is the way it literally reads, “of which,” relative pronoun, feminine, which refers back to the sea, “of which the Egyptians making trial drowned.” Now what’s this verse getting at? What’s the point? Well, if we think back a minute, the whole theme of Hebrews 11 has been the faith technique, so what do you think the point it? I’ll give you a hint; the word “trial” means to test something. Can you see what’s happening, what that means. The overall theme is faith, the Israelis, see, the faith, they go through. The Egyptians, making tests, drowned. Now what’s the point? Can someone see what’s happening here.

[someone answers] All right, it’s most interesting how this operates and this is very critical because this whole thing is a little footnote on this whole concept of how God judges people. The reason that the waters come in, normally you would read the Exodus this way, this is the way we all learned to read it. Okay, here the people are, God opens the path for them, the Jews come through, they get through, then here comes Pharaoh, usually we visualize it, having seen the thing, as Yul Brenner, and here comes Pharaoh riding through and God waits until they get in the middle and then boom. Now that’s true as far as it goes, but the author of this text is bringing something else out to the fore. He’s saying when the Egyptians went through they did not trust Jehovah to keep the walls open for them.

This may seem like a fine point but I’m going to show you how important it is after we look at it a minute. They looked at the walls of water and they tested, now that may indicate that they had a delay, they may have sent some scouts out, for example, Pharaoh may have kept his main body back here and sent a reconnaissance force out there to test, see if the thing would hold up under the horses and so on, but they made a test of it. In other words, they were trying to operate as though this were a naturalistic type of system and they were just simply experimenting with it but they weren’t trusting God to keep those walls back. The only trust they had was in their reconnaissance force; the only trust they had was in the empirical evidence directly at hand. They had no trust whatsoever beyond the data immediately present. And so they made a test of the situation, using data strictly from the present; excluded God’s character, excluded any trust in His character and His control over the environment. That was all just thrown out the window and they tried to rely solely on the empirical evidence of the moment, and thus God rewarded them.

Now what’s the point? Here’s the point and it’s going to come up when we get into Revelation sometime on doctrine of judgment. People wind up being judged by God for their lack of trust in His character; that is the central focal point of all judgment. The issue is not sins; the issue is whether or not I trust in God’s character, whether I am trusting and working as a creature, orientation to grace again, the creature must orient to his finiteness and he must rely upon the Creator. A fallen creature has to do more; in addition to relying upon the Creator he has to be relying upon the Creator’s grace. So, faith is orientation to grace, to God’s character. God is omnipotent, God is sovereign, and God is gracious and with that I can orient and He becomes the object of my faith.

Now if someone winds up in hell and someone is judged they are judged, always on the basis of faith or lack thereof, that is the issue. That is always the issue, always has, always will be the issue. The sins are important only insofar as they are an outworking of lack of trust. Pharaoh’s forces were drowned, according to this text, not because they were more sinful than the Jews; they were drowned because they didn’t trust, that’s why. And that’s why people wind up in hell, they simply don’t trust. And why don’t they trust? One reason; guilty conscience. When you’re out of sorts with the Lord you can’t trust Him; it’s not an intellectual problem, it’s a moral problem. Because I know that I am in deep rebellion against God, therefore I know He is not pleased with me at the deepest level of my being, and therefore I can’t trust because I have to trust Him from the deepest level of my being and if the deepest level of my being is guilty then I can’t trust Him.

So you see now why trust and the faith technique is always first and why this is always the issue, and you have to hit this about 5500 times more than the other things, the little specific things that people usually substitute. It’s always faith. Now there’s obviously a connection between the two. There’s a connection between faith and works, but watch it, for example, when you get with the Campbellites, in Acts 2:38, and [can’t understand word] tithes and all the rest of it, just remember that faith can show up, here’s the spectrum of good works, all the way from A to Z. Now faith can show up in person number one here; person number two, his faith might show up over here, person number three, his faith might show up over here.

In other words, given different people their faith manifests itself in different areas and doesn’t manifest itself in other areas, but what the Campbellites try to do is say there is one place on this scale of good works, that is the act of baptism, in a Church of Christ facility of course, but there’s this one place, and if your faith doesn’t happen to pop up in that one area, you’re not saved. That’s bologna. Your faith can be bona fide and show up in any number of points and never show up in that area. We could be hard-nosed and say you’re not saved unless your faith shows up at the point of joining the local church. We’d be right in the sense that joining a local church and identifying with it is God’s will, but it’s not a test of salvation. And they are wrong when they do this, and don’t you be hoodwinked into trying to forecast where somebody’s faith has got to show up and if it isn’t there, brother, they’re not saved. See, you have just said that there’s somewhere along this scale from A to Z and you’ve picked out your little spectrum and you’ve said boy, if I don’t see improvement in that area, then they’re all out of it. No, because they might showing improvement in this area and you’re not even looking there. So faith can show up at any number of points and that’s another thing to remember.

Now Hebrews 11:30, in verse 30 we have a forty year gap. Notice there are no events between verse 29 and 30, between the Exodus and the conquest. Forty years of rebellion. Turn back to Hebrews 4:1, he’s already covered this period of time. “Let us, therefore, fear lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it. [2] For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them; but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.” Now there is a principle that he uses here; he is going to argue from something that happened to save people to something that happens to unsaved people. The principle is simply use or lack of faith. In the Exodus you have a saved generation, the Exodus generation. The Exodus generation is all saved and they go out here and they are sentenced to death; they are excluded from the rest, because here the rest equals the land, the occupancy of the land in their generation. And these people were excluded from it because of negative volition toward God because they refused to trust God.

Now he takes that as an example, that unsaved people who may be in Israel in 70 AD, these people are going to be permanently excluded by the second death and permanently excluded from God’s eternal rest because of the same principle, they have refused to trust the Lord. And that’s why he says, “Let us fear, lest a promise being left us of entering into His rest any of us should seem to come short of it.” It’s a warning passage directed toward professing believers. And that’s why verse 9-10 referring to the future eternal rest, there is that rest yet remaining.

[someone says something] Okay, there’s an analogy, or analogous way of arguing. You see, by the way, another illustration of this in John 3, Jesus is using the saved people of the Exodus looking up to the cross with a snake on it and He says all those that looked up were saved and those who didn’t were bitten by the snake and they died, physically. And so he’s simply saying there is a concrete illustration of faith at work. But then Jesus, in John 3, very clearly applies it to His own cross and those who fail to trust in Him and His cross are going to die and go to hell. These people didn’t go to hell, they were already saved. He is arguing from an experience with saved people to an experience with unsaved people, using the same analogous principle. These saved people failed to use faith and died; the unsaved people failed to use faith and they go to hell.

All right, now we have a similar thing between Hebrews 4 and the Exodus generation. He used the saved Exodus generation, then the unsaved generation in 70 AD and he’s arguing that just as the Exodus generation did not enter the literal land because of their negative volition, so these unsaved people if they don’t get with the Messiah, Jesus, they’re not going to enter the eternal rest. And the principle is that God excludes from blessing all those who fail to trust Him, that the means of blessing always is faith, whether it’s a believer appropriating a blessing, the unbeliever appropriating salvation, it doesn’t make any difference, it all boils down to trust in God’s character. That’s why this epistle is so God-centered. It’s always, and by the way, have you noticed, in all of this that’s gone on here, the orientation has always been upward, never inward. The orientation of Hebrews is fantastic for our generation, because it’s always God, it’s always Theocentric, not anthropocentric. Never, nowhere in this epistle do you have how believers feel. Not their personal experience.

[someone says something] Well, you just have to know Old Testament history; if you’re going to argue that these saved people were lost you’re going to have to be consistent and argue that Moses lost his salvation because Moses was also excluded from the land and yet we know from the last chapter of Deuteronomy that he was very accepted with God. So the other interpretation breaks down in its consistency against the details of Old Testament history. So all I can say is you just have to be familiar with your Old Testament history. The people that bring that argument, by the way, are people who… I have never met one of them who knew what was really going on in the Old Testament. And they are usually Arminian type people and in this particular part of the country they’re usually Church of Christ type people or Methodists. And neither of those groups are known for their scholarship in the Old Testament. And all you have to do is go into the book stores and see that they just have nothing on the Old Testament, they never studied the Old Testament. And it’s just a case of familiarity with the text, that you can prove that these people are saved back here and you can show that there were some godly people that were excluded from the land, and it was a form of physical discipline upon them. So it’s just the details, knowing the Word.

Let’s go back to Hebrews 11:30 and finish up with the walls of Jericho. This last incident comes forty years after, when a new generation came on the scene, and these people were gung-ho believers. Notice again, “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.” It wasn’t that the faith inside these people caused the walls to fall down but God caused the walls to fall down because of their trust. Notice that the people had to do something; their faith did have to be expressed. They did have to do that silly thing of walking around the walls. Now can you imagine how an army must have felt after they’ve trained, sword drills, spear drills, forced marches, all this other kind of thing, surprise ambush tactics, and then Joshua reports down from the C.O, hey, I’ve got a set of orders here, it reads kind of funny. We’re supposed to go around the wall. Oh, you mean throw spears at them? No, just walk around the wall? Walk around the wall? Right, just walk around the walls. And they had to do that, and here’s where the exercising the faith technique did become linked to an activity. If they didn’t do it those walls would not have fallen down; but if they did, and they did something that was quite, from the human point of view, just asinine to do.

Well, this God does occasionally and may do in your life, challenge you to do something that looks for all intents and purposes just ridiculous, and it’s just simply to remind you and to remind me that faith, after all, is the issue, it’s not the activity. The act of walking around didn’t jar lose the walls of Jericho, and the act of shouting didn’t set up a resonance frequency that broke the rocks, if it had it would have been the greatest secret weapon in the ancient world. But it wasn’t any human gimmick. That’s what I learned in my good liberal background, they shouted so hard it just hit the resonance frequency and the walls fell apart. [someone says something] Right, they should have done the same thing at Ai.

So this is a case of where God wants to separate the doing from His Doing, capital D. Our little doing is necessary because it’s the way we express our faith, but this doing is wholly insufficient to cause that. See, that’s the point. God wants us to function as a creature but our creature strength is so puny that He wants to set up these flagrant, spectacular situations just to say hey, you see that, that’s about as much force as you can apply to the situation. You know what, when I get through, that much force is applied to the situation, I solve the problem. So by asking us only to put that much into it, it’s a way we have of expressing. We can almost say something here as a principle, that the doing part of the faith doesn’t actually accomplish a thing directly; it doesn’t actually accomplish a thing directly. All it does is an expression of our faith. And that’s all it is, but it itself doesn’t accomplish; it’s what God does that accomplishes.

Then finally we conclude with Rahab, the prostitute. “By faith the prostitute, Rahab, perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.” Now Rahab is in the lineage of Jesus Christ. And everywhere the Bible speaks of Rahab it speaks of her as a prostitute, she was a prostitute and she wasn’t out of business when the spies came to her house. They came to here house precisely because it was a house of prostitution. We have a bunch of sticky Christians that can’t stand the sight of a prostitute. Frankly, they’re probably be a lot more relaxed and grace oriented than some of the people around here. So, she was a whore, harlot, let’s get it clear, she was in business, that was her profession. There is no evidence to say oh, she was a believer and she retired from her business. She didn’t retire from her business, if she’d retired from her business the spies wouldn’t have to her door. The reason the spies came to the prostitute’s house is that’s where you get the info, that’s where the plans are exchanged. It was the underworld center of Jericho. So Rahab was an underworld character, she had a tremendous business, she also had a business on the side of flax, so she had many businesses, an enterprising businesswoman.

She lied, and we’re going to cover that in the family training program, of why she lied, and why apparently it was right that she lie to the people. But the Bible singles her out as “by faith … she received the spies.” Can any of you remember enough of reading Joshua to remember what she said to the spies when they came to her door and she was finally tipped off to their identity. What did she respond by saying? [someone answers] Not only had she but who else? Everybody, everybody had heard about the spectacular things that had happened at the Exodus and they were just sitting there for forty years waiting to be conquered. And here the believers are, all fouled up out here as usual. For forty years, waiting to be conquered, and when she opens the door, the Scriptures say, here in verse 31, get a little sidelight on the text, “By faith the harlot, Rahab, perished not with them that believed not,” the word here is “obey” but it’s synonymous with belief.

Do you see again who this author points out that even at Jericho the reason those people died was a lack of faith. They had sufficient gospel information on which to be saved. If Rahab could be saved, everyone in Jericho could be saved. Rahab had heard about it and she says everybody in this city knows and when she says that, she knows it. She’s got connections all over town. [someone says something] Well, they had faith that something was going to happen but still they weren’t ready to trust, they weren’t ready to trust in God’s grace.

So again the author singles this out, these people are not innocently slaughtered at Jericho. They are slaughtered because in the final analysis they are creatures that have chose to defy the Creator and because they do they get their dose. [someone says something] No, as long as they bowed down to the God of Israel, the God Jehovah, they would be accepted. Like Ruth, same argument there, Ruth was a Gentile but she was accepted. By the way, an interesting sidelight, you know on of those two guys that showed up at the whorehouse with Rahab, and finally married her. She was his right woman. So he married her and that’s how she became in the line of Jesus Christ. It’s interesting what a neat sense of humor the Holy Spirit has. Because He must have realized that down through history there would be a lot of self-righteous believers reading the genealogies and the women that He has lined up in the genealogies, from the social point of view, are the most out of it people. Ruth, she’s a Moabitess, you know the people at Moab, the [can’t understand word], and then the prostitute Rahab, these are the people that are the grandmother of the Lord Jesus Christ. So it shows you again, grace.

In conclusion I want to take you to a promise if you haven’t seen it before and to memorize it; Psalm 37:3-4, and if you have the King James we’ll close by reading Psalm 37:3-4 together. This is another good promise; since we’re studying faith know some of these promises, use them. They don’t do any good stuck in your notes or just left in the Scriptures, you’ve got to get them in your soul. Verse 3, “Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.” Verse 4, “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” And then verse 5, “Commit thy way unto the LORD, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.

Father, we pray that…