Clough Hebrews Lesson 62

More Models of Faith – Hebrews 11:34-40

 

In Hebrews 11 we want to finish tonight the section that deals with the illustration of the faith technique and this is one of the great exhortations to believe.  Every bad news counseling situation involves, among 500 other things, involves a violation of the faith technique somewhere along the line, due to some reason.  And it’s not always easy to find out what the exact reason is, but again we have to go back to the elements of the faith and how it works.  So I’m going to go through the doctrine of faith and this time I’m going to show some of these areas that are quite common, some of the common violations. 

 

One of the areas of the doctrine of faith that we have learned is that to use the faith technique you need in your soul a basic trust in the divine viewpoint foundation; that is, creation, the fall, these have to be more than words; they have to be more than notes, they have to be something that you actively believe, that the universe really is the way the Bible says it is, not some other way.  And along with that first point remember that we have to have verbal revelation, we have to have some known promise of God.  Now the violations that are common in this particular area to undermine our stand for Christ, that destabilize us as believers, is that since we live in a naturalistic world, a human viewpoint world, daily we are besieged with all sorts of heresy is what it amounts to, that works to undercut this thing. 

 

And how this shows up in practice is a lack of continuing prayer.  Paul tells us to pray without ceasing.  Now that doesn’t mean to go around blah, blah, blah, blah, blah in a monotone all day but it does mean that you should have a prayerful mental attitude.  And at times you just spontaneously think of God as being there in the situation with you, and it should become an automatic habit.  But you constantly have to build the habit because it’s like walking around with a bucket with a hole in it, the water keeps leaking out of it and you have to constantly grab hold of your soul and make it face the truth of Genesis because it’s constantly receiving anti-truth, it’s constantly receiving the lie that the universe is a machine, that the evolutionary process is the god of all things.  And so where this shows up is in a lack of prayerful attitude, a lack of thanksgiving for different circumstances and situations, and also there’s a failure to study and memorize the Word.  These failures constitute the practical ramifications of the violation.

 

The second thing is that faith is indirectly observed.  It cannot be directly observed and common violations that are seen among believers in this area is thinking of faith as an inner feeling.  Whenever you think of faith as something, some substantive thing inside you, you’re already wiped out at this point because faith is nothing, it’s not a substance, it’s not a juice that flows in your veins; faith is an attitude toward the God of the universe and it’s just an attitude; it’s not something in itself and the moment we start thinking this way that has all sorts of very, very serious problems with it.  We start looking at our emotions, we start becoming introspective, do I feel right today, do I feel spiritual today, do I have faith, thinking of it as 500 milligrams or something that I have today, this kind of thing.  You want to steer away from that stuff because faith isn’t something in itself; that was the error that the Catholics made at the Council of Trent and the anti-Reformation theology, and it’s the area the charismatics follow today because they follow in the Catholic tradition here.  So the Protestants have always held, and rightly so, that faith is nothing, absolutely nothing but an attitude. 

It is not a feeling, it is not a substance, you don’t see it, you don’t feel it, you don’t sense it.  Another area where this is seen, a violation is sitting around waiting for God to give you a desire to do something.  For about, about 3 or 4 years we’ve had a prayer petition, inside the bulletin for men to usher.  And not long ago I talked to one and they said I’m waiting for a feeling.  Now would you please tell me what kind of a feeling you need to volunteer to usher.  I haven’t figured that out, but this goes on.  And I said in prayer meeting, that petition as far as I’m concerned the next two weeks, voluntarily or involuntarily, but we will have ushers.

 

Resting and doing, now this is an area, again in the doctrine of faith where we see violations.  All of us have this to a degree in our souls, no one is exempt.  The violations that you see here in resting and doing is simply the tendency to go extreme passivity on one hand or extreme activity on the other hand, rocking back and forth between one extreme and the other.  This is a common violation.  In one sense there’s a passivity over your responsibility, having a spiritual gift, God ha given you at least one spiritual gift at the moment of regeneration; God has invested something in your life, and this means that since God is the perfect businessman, and since God never makes an investment that’s going to go bad, and if he has invested in you and you are the elect, then it must stand to reason that you are going to have to produce something in history.  God doesn’t invest in bad deals.  And so the doctrine of election confirms the fact that if you truly have been the recipient of part of God’s investment, the corollary must be that production has to occur.  And therefore to sit back and say well, I don’t know what my gift is, I don’t care what my gift is, I don’t care what the Lord’s will is, this is passivity and it’s asking for a bruise spiritually.  On the other hand, we can go to activity and this is an impatient, I want to be sanctified completely today, prefereably this morning, and this manifests a life of patience. 

 

Then there’s orientation to grace, the last step.  Now these are all elements that we’ve gone over and you may sit and say I know that, I know that, others have sat where you have sat and said I know that and I know that and they wound up crashed and they found out they didn’t know that, they knew the words, but they didn’t know the concepts.  Orientation to grace.  One of the mistakes that is observed here is often thinking in terms of myself rather then God-centeredness.  Man-centered thought rather than God-centered thought violates this point. 

 

So you often hear people in trouble, believers in trouble, saying I’ve got a problem with my, whatever it is, my this, my that, and if you sat down with a counter, I’ve often been tempted to so this, with a clock and a counter and just say okay, in the next 60 seconds as you talk I’m going to press this button every time a personal pronoun about you is used.  And just see how many times per minute that we pick up a personal-centered vocabulary versus a God-centered vocabulary.  You might try doing this statistical check on your own thought pattern; in 60 seconds how many times do pronouns like my, I, mine, these kind of things flow through, versus what Jesus Christ is doing at the Father’s right hand, what the Father’s plan is, what the Holy Spirit is doing, that kind of thing.  You can automatically tell what your soul is habituated to do.  We are naturally by our sin nature to be man-centered and not God-centered.  So that’s a violation of orientation to grace.  And one simple test is the vocabulary test. 

 

Now we left off last week in verse 33; we had six men, choice characters, particularly the first four, two flunkies, a bastard and a goon.  And these were picked out as heroes of the faith, and they were picked out because God knew, as He looked forward many centuries, with His excellent sense of humor, look at all the flunkies that would be in the Church in 1975 and so forth, so because of that and because I see all these future flunkies I’m going to encourage them with one of their own, so I’ll pick up Barak, pick up Gideon and use them as models so they’ll be encouraged.  And it’s meant to be slightly humorous, verse 32, but also very encouraging, that these men showed very little production until the last days of their life. And the last days of their life they managed to make a big breakthrough and do something.  So there’s always hope while we’re breathing. 

 

Now in verse 33, remember also verse 32 ended  with the word “prophets,” notice this please, just six men are listed by name, but then there’s that general noun “prophets” at the end of verse 32.  Now beginning at verse 33 we have a series of descriptions of these men, and again this is to help us visualize what the faith technique looks like in practice. What does it look like in practice, how can you spot faith in action?  That’s what all this Hebrews 11 is about, how to make it.

 

Hebrews 11:33, “Who, through faith,” and there again the faith technique, “subdued kingdoms,” and notice verse 33 and down to verse 34, almost every one of those verbs describes combat, it describes pressure, it describes a militant attitude.  It doesn’t describe very passivity and slowly sweet thoughts, it describes the blood and the gore of living in a fallen world.  So “Who, through faith, subdued kingdoms,” would refer to men like Barak that subdued the Canaanites, men like Samson who started a war with the Philistines, men like Gideon who completely removed the Midianite menace, men like David who destroyed the Philistines, all of these men exercised the faith technique in clobbering the enemies of God.  Remember it’s not just any war, it’s a holy war. These men were involved in Old Testament holy war and when it says they’ve “subdued kingdoms” it means they have smashed the powers of darkness, they have crushed Satan and his forces, they’ve driven them back.  There has been an advance of the kingdom of light against the kingdom of darkness, so there’s an aggressiveness involved in the faith technique.  And where you see the faith technique properly exercised in history you will find the kingdom of darkness being rolled back. There’s always an advance being made.

 

“Who …wrought righteousness,” or who performed righteousness, this is the Romans 12:1 concept, that these men were willing to do the will of God, whatever the cost, they were willing, through their own lives, to have God’s righteousness shine into history and if it meant personal loss to them, then so what.  Their first objective was to bring into existence righteousness.   “Who … obtained promises,” and the word “obtained promises” is plural, not “the promise” because we’re going to see they never did obtain “the promise,” but they obtained promises, plural, many promises.  Now in the Old Testament what sort of promises do you think they attained.  Obviously they didn’t attain yet because the author of Hebrews whole point is they didn’t obtain Christ, but they obtained promises. 

 

Now on Wednesday night we like to have a little participating here, what would be some ways you can look at this first, before we think of specifics let’s back off a minute.  When I use the prhase, when the author uses the phrase, “obtain promises,” there are at least two things I can think of he might mean do you see.  [someone answers] All right, but that’s a specific, before we can even talk about what the content of a promise is there are two things here that can be happening.  [someone answers] All right, maybe I misled on this first point.  The first point is that we want to analyze in interpreting this passage is that you can obtain a promise, Scripturally, by being given a new promise as of that point in history.  That’s one way of obtaining it.  Or you can obtain a promise in that you obtain that which was promised.  So there are two possibilities for this phrase,  you can obtain the promise of something yet future, or you can obtain that which is the content of the promise. 

 

Now seeing that this phraseology can be used both ways, and there’s no way, incidentally, we can tell except by context, let’s just think, in the Old Testament who were men to obtained not what was promised, but attained promises?  [someone answers] Okay, Abraham received promises, he got a promise that nobody else had, he hadn’t got the result of it right then but he got the promise.  Who else in the Old Testament obtained promises?  David, there are a few others along down in history, not quite as famous as this but they did obtain promises.  What about Abraham’s son, not the elect son.  Ishmael obtained promises.  Or the sons of Jacob obtained promises.  So men in the Old Testament did obtain promises, like that.  But then they also obtained that which was promised, and here we go to the land, they obtained part of the land, they didn’t obtain it all but they obtained part of it, they obtained personal deliverance, pointed out in the Psalms.  So they obtained some of these promises.

 

Now back off from this for a moment, don’t lose the forest for the trees, and let’s just back off from the specifics here and ask ourselves the question: What does this prove about God that was necessary that these men see in order that by the time Christ came this issue would have by that time been fully clarified in history.  There had to be this historical process going on in the Old Testament to build up and prepare the human race for Jesus Christ.  Now what was the preparation? [someone answers]  All right, now Jesus was the Messiah, who was God incarnate; God incarnate had to speak to a culture in words that could be understood, so the culture had to be developed.  But when God’s character was manifest, didn’t He have to be a particular kind of God, and how did the Jew often refer to his God?  Which is a different way, none of the other nations, all our forefathers, when they were running around the Ural Mountains or something in their loin cloths, never referred to their gods this way but a Jew did?  [someone answers] But they had personal gods.  He is a covenant-making and a covenant-keeping God.  And basically how did He show this?  By these promises.  See, that’s why there had to be a historic playing of this thing out.  God had to prove Himself historically.  So this is the “obtained promises” section. 

 

Now continuing with verse 33, they “stopped the mouths of lions,” now who is famous in the Old Testament for stopping the mouth of a lion?  Daniel.  The book of Daniel has stopped many lions, both figurative and literal.  “Stopped the mouth of lions,” but what’s the noun of the verb to stop?  And there’s a little point here about how the author has set this up, it shows us something neat about the faith technique in our life.  Let’s ask the question, the verb “stopped the mouths,” what’s the subject of the verb in this text?  [someone answers] The prophets.  But who stopped the mouth in the book of Daniel.  Did Daniel go over and stop the mouth?  Who is the author of the work when you read the text?  Who’s the subject of the verb back there.  God is.  Now; problem, why does the author take the verb that goes with God and pair the verb off with a man; what’s his point. Why does he mix the verb up with the subject here.  Daniel didn’t stop the mouths of the lions, God stopped the mouth.  [someone answers]   Okay, he’s linking the men who believed with the very power of God Himself, and that’s the neat thing about the faith technique, when we trust the Lord to do something, true, He does it, but we get the credit for it.  The rewards, the concept of rewards, those are works of divine good that are credited to our account, even though God is doing it.  And what this is saying, this is looking at the text from God’s point of view and saying Daniel stopped the mouth of that lion.  Now Daniel, what did he do to stop the mouth of the lion?  He just trusted.  And the act of trust pleased God so God stopped the mouth of the lion for Daniel. But God shares the credit with Daniel; the credit goes to the man who trusted God to do it. 

 

And this is very interesting, all these verbs that you see here, are verbs which, if you read the Old Testament text would be verbs linking God with the act, but then you read it here they are verbs that link the believer with the act.   Now it goes back to the creation ordinance and here is a little insight about the faith technique, because again, we always tend to think of faith in too passive terms, t-o-o, not t-w-o, we think of faith too passively.  Now what was the mandate that God gave man in Genesis?  Subdue the earth, which is work, something man had to accomplish in history.  Now it turns out that the means for accomplishing work is nothing else but the faith technique.  The lion’s mouths were stopped; lions are part of the earth and they were subdued in that den; Daniel subdued the lions.  And how did Daniel subdue the lions?  He subdued them in the only way a fallen creature could ever subdue them, trust the gracious deity that comes to his aid.  Even though Daniel didn’t deserve it and didn’t merit it, Daniel could do only one thing at that point and that time in his life, trust in the promises of God to protect him.  And when he did that, one point act of trusting God, God did the work, Daniel gets the credit. Daniel subdued the earth. 

 

So this side of the fall man subdues the earth by faith through grace, it’s faith in God alone.  There’s your orientation to grace.  So we are actively accomplishing something, we’re not passive, we’re not just sitting, we’re actively accomplishing something and we get the credit for it even though all we really are doing is trusting the Lord. 

 

Now this comes out again in Hebrews 11:34, they “Quenched the violence of fire,” who’s that?  [someone answers Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego] Okay, again from Daniel, Daniel 3.  Now did the boys get in the and blow the fire out?  They didn’t blow that fire out, those boys didn’t quench the fire. Who’s the subject of the verb “quench”?  The boys are.  The three boys quenched the first but when we read Daniel 2 it was that fourth figure that Nebuchadnezzar saw in those flames; it was the Son of God who quenched the fire, and it was the Son of God that did the doing and the three boys did the believing, so the three boys get the credit for doing it.  They didn’t earn it, they didn’t deserve it, and they had nothing to do basically with the actual physical quenching of the fire, but they get credit for it. 

 

Now you see the source of rewards of the believer; the source of rewards of the believer is his faith; that’s why the faith technique is the sine quo non in the Christian life.  You can’t have any Christian life apart from the faith technique.  Now people stumble on in the faith and use it but the point remains until you use the faith technique to a maximum you’re not producing.  You may have a lot of activity but you’re not producing.

 

“Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword,” now this requires a little history that we haven’t had, but one example of escaping the edge of the sword would be Elijah in 1 Kings 19, Elijah escaped and if you turn there for a minute you’ll see it wasn’t such a feather in his hat either.  All these events had a very interesting thing about them, not all of them but many of the events in Hebrews 11 are not played up at all in the Old Testament, in fact, they’re almost downplayed, like Barak, remember what he said to Deborah?  Well if you go with me and I’ll go, real brave man.  Well, that is downplayed in the Old Testament but it’s played up here.  Principle: God’s pleased if you believe any time. 

 

1 Kings 19:1-2, “And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done,” now here’s another one like Barak, Jezebel ran the show and Ahab followed, and Jezebel was one very brilliant woman, a very evil woman.  Jezebel was the daughter of a Tyrainian Baalite priest and of all the people for Ahab to marry he had to marry this one.  And they had a daughter who came down south and married into the royal line of the house of David and she almost did away with the house of David.  “Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had slain all the prophets with the sword.  [2] And Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying,” this is a threat, “So let the gods do to me, and more also if I make not your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time. [3] And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there.  [4] But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness,” and that’s where the angel of the Lord, in verse 5, “an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.  [6] And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baked on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and lay down again.” The angel, notice, ministered to believer’s physical needs here. 

 

1 Kings 9:15, “And the LORD said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus,” in other words, just bypass the northern kingdom.  Now Elijah, in 1 Kings 19 is not pictured as a very good example of faith.  1 Kings 19 is an illustration also of what happens when you let your body deteriorate, because in 1 Kings 19 Elijah has been under tremendous physical, physical, not spiritual but physical stress.  And he apparently went without sleep for a long time and he fell apart spiritually as a result.  So 1 Kings 19 has quite a lesson in it for believers, exhortation for believers to take care of your body.  It’s the only temple you’ve got and if you let it go it’s going to affect you spiritually.  So 1 Kings 19 Elijah escapes and he doesn’t escape, he really just runs, and yet apparently there was faith like a grain of mustard seed even in that act and it’s singled out in Hebrews. 

 

All right, besides “Quenching the violence of fire,” besides “escaping the edge of the sword,” notice these next three things, these should be very, very encouraging to believers.  “…out of weakness they were made strong,” the verb is dunamoo, it comes from the Greek word that has to do with strength in the sense of ability, skill, capacity to do something, and when you have an oo ending, it is generally causative in Greek.  So this means “who was caused to have skill, caused to have capacity,” or they were, these prophets.  How, well, verse 33 when it started this out said “Who, through faith,” and then tack on the verb, “Who, through faith, were made strong,” they acquired a capacity to deal and cope with the situation.  Now this is a tremendous promise and a tremendous fighting illustration of believers trusting in the Lord using the faith technique.  They “were made strong” and then notice the next one, the King James has “they waxed valiant in fight,” but literally it means “they turned into strong ones.”  It just follows on from the verb dunamoo, it means to become or turn into change of state, it means they changed from a state of weakness to a state of strength.  And how did they go from one to the other?   Application of the faith technique.  They “changed into strong ones in battle,” the word “fight” means battle. 

 

And to apply from the physical Old Testament to the spiritual New Testament this means that we, when we face the temptations and the pressures of the powers of darkness can do exactly what these men did; they became strong and they turned from weak people into strong people, the tougher the battle got, the tougher they got as believers.  So the enemies of sanctification, both in Old Testament and New Testament are almost being used, well they are, being used for their own destruction.  God allows Satan to become an exercise tool for believers and he will exercise you by stressing you, and the objective is to strengthen you, and the implication appears to be that these men wouldn’t have become strong believers if they hadn’t been placed in a place where they had to fight.  So all that pressure and why did this happen to me and how did I get myself in this jam and how am I going to get out of it, when you ask yourself these things, remember the doctrine of suffering and the reasons why believers suffer.  Go back to that, because of the fall, rebellion, association with the divine institutions, learning, identification with Christ in Satan’s world, and an example or a testimony.

 

Now, learning, the implication is that these believers became strong ones in battle.  If Gideon hadn’t have been forced to lead those armies Gideon probably would still be hiding behind the hill.  You see why God sometimes very cruelly, we think, pushes us out of the nest and shoves us into battle, yet He is the perfect coach who knows when to take you off the bench and to put you in the game, and you may feel like you’re going to drop the ball and you might the first couple of times but God is a perfect coach of the team and when He sees a player sitting on the bench so long He says okay, time to go, time for your play now, and usually He has to push and shove to get us off the bench, because we want to stay there, we don’t want that activity, but He’s going to do it, with the implication that this is the way we become strong believers.  This is the mentality you want to capture, it’ll prevent you from being a quitter, a quitter in marriage, a quitter in the family quitter in the local church.  Quitters are people who argue that the struggle weakens and it’s an anti-Christian philosophy.  The struggle strengthens according to this verse.

 

What else, they “turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”  The “aliens” are the Gentiles and an analogy between the physical old and the spiritual new,  these would be the armies of the principalities of the power of darkness.  They “put to flight” is the Greek word to route, they completely defeated them.  And the examples of Barak and Gideon certainly prove the point even though Gideon and Barak were such oddities, flunkies, and yet when they finally got with it, and just believed a little bit, that’s all it took, and the Canaanites were wiped out, the Midianites were wiped out, well what happened to all these Jews all of a sudden?  Somebody believed for five minutes, that’s what happened.  See, just completely wiped them out with just a little bit of faith. That’s the picture and that’s the exhortation that this author is giving. 

 

Remember when we started Hebrews and I said for those of you think you’ve got the gift of exhortation, pay attention to how this man works around here; he’s got some powerfully motivating exhortation and notice how he picks his examples.  He knows his Bible so well and knows the people that he’s exhorting so well that he can design a verse like verse 32 for those kinds of people, he can go back into just the right places of the Scripture to pull out exactly the right illustration that would just prick to the heart these particular people because he knows their particular carnality, their particular mental attitude weakness and sin is in this area that they consider themselves flunkies and they’re not grace saints and so on, so obviously he goes easy with men like David and Samuel, but he lays it on with Barak.  Not one of these illustrations really pertain directly to David and Samuel.  They’re mentioned here but most of these pertain to other men. 

Okay, he goes on now in Hebrews 11:35 and just to cover the women in his audience, so the ERA crowd can’t get up and say you didn’t cover the women, you discriminate.  So verse 35 is dedicated to the women.  The women would argue that well, we didn’t lead armies, we weren’t out fighting, so what does he do?   He takes something very, very close to a woman’s heart her children, the area that would preoccupy a woman as much as a battle would preoccupy the man.  And so what does he do, “Women received their dead raised to life again,” do any of you remember incidents in the Old Testament where women received their dead children, the children died.  Elijah, 1 Kings 17, turn there.

 

And again the particular example that’s picked isn’t the picture of a great saint or a woman that just has tremendous spirituality.  1 Kings 17:17, see, it would have undercut his exhortation of the discouraged believer if he’d picked winners.  He doesn’t want to pick winners to encourage losers; you encourage losers by pointing to other losers that made it.  So he goes back to 1 Kings 17 and he deliberately picks this case.  “And it came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman,” this is a woman outside of Israel by the way, “the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick;” this is where Elijah was having a little vacation, “and his sickness was so severe that there was no breath left in him.  [18] And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God?  Art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?” 

 

Now when she said what she said in verse 18 she’s not showing much faith; in fact, she’s quite hostile, you brought it on, I gave you this room in this house and my son died, it’s all your fault Elijah.  And she’s blaming him, but apparently there’s a spark of faith because while she’s saying that she’s saying can you do something.  So she’s saying that along with the external.  This is what some of you guys have to learn, don’t take a woman’s words at face value, they play games with you and about 30% of what they say is exactly opposite to what they really want to say to you.  So just reverse part of it and you’ll be right most of the time.

 

So here this woman really wants Elijah to help, but she’s blaming him, see; she’s pushing him to see if he’s going to do something.  Verse 19, “And he said unto her, Give me your son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed.”  Notice he gets the son out into a place of peace and quiet, away from her, that’s the first thing, establish normalcy in the environment.  And then verse 20, when he had peace and quiet, then “he cried unto the LORD, and he said, O LORD, my God, has thou also brought evil upon the widows with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?  And he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD, my God, I pray thee, let this child’s nephesh come into him again. [22] And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah, and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.”  And so on. Well, that’s one of the instances and you wouldn’t say that woman had very fantastic faith there.  She just had a little, just a little, and she got her child back.  Now that’s the illustration he’s giving. There’s another illustration which we won’t have time to go into, it’s in 2 Kings 4, with Elisha, Elijah’s disciple. 

 

Turn back to Hebrews 11:35, “Women received their dead raised to life again,” now he’s got to deal with another problem, right here he’s going to meet an objection to the exhortation, but, but, but, but, the motor boat Christians began and they’re going to say well, look, see the problem is that all your examples that you picked out are examples where these guys got deliverance, a woman got her son back, but gee, look at so and so believers, they died in downtown Rome last week, they were beat up by some Romans, look at so and so, Mrs. So and So over there, she lost her son, she prayed and her son didn’t come back to life, so the counterargument that he’s heading off, and remember in exhortation you’re battling, if you are one with the spiritual gift of exhortation you are actually doing spiritual battle with spiritual power because when you go to exhort what you’re doing is exhorting the truth against resistance.  And the enemy is working in the soul of the person that you’re exhorting, so you’ve got to head off counterattacks, and the counterattack, he’s going to head off right here with the word “others” and from this point forward in the narrative all these people did not get delivered.  See, up until this point, women have received their dead, the fire has been quenched, they’ve escaped the sword, they routed the opponent, it was all victory, victory, victory, victory, victory.

 

But now he comes to the (quote) “apparent” failures.  “…and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.”  Now what is he doing here?  All right, the word “torture,” this tells us exactly what the incident is, etumpanizo, it is a verb that is made up from a word that has come to refer, actually to a musical instrument in an orchestra.  You go hear a good piece and see the guy beat the drums and the timpani, all right, tympanos is the Greek word for drum and the drum was a method of torture used a few centuries before Jesus Christ and they would stretch the person out on the drum and then beat them to death and they’d usually use small sticks and stretch the body as tight as they could and in this way they’d work them over real good and when your body is stretched out like this the muscles become very thin over the skeletal area and so the bones can be broken, and so they would smash the bones in the person while the person was still alive and this is the way they tortured people. 

 

Now we have an actual case of a 90 year old believer who was tortured this way; the story is found in the apocryphal book, 2 Maccabees 6:18, and whereas this is not the Word of God, 1 and 2 Maccabees present history pretty accurately and the stories of the Maccabees are just something fantastic, this is a very great book to read if you ever get a chance to read the apocrypha.  Let me just read you the story and this apparently is the kind of things that he had on his mind because the very word, tympanum is used here.  And by the way, the situation is this. Antiochus Epiphanies, [tape turns] … vicious Greek Syrian who has obtained control, the third kingdom of Daniel, over Palestine, has set up statues to himself in the Jewish temple.  He is the forerunner of antichrist in history.  And Antiochus Epiphanies is probably the most cruel, vicious person who ever lived in the Palestinian area, including Herod the Great.  Herod the Great just slaughtered infants one time, Antiochus Epiphanies slaughtered people by the dozens and hundreds of thousands time after time after time; he went down in history as a tremendously vicious person.  And by the way, you might have seen the program on Hanukah, it was presented around Christmas time, which has to do with the Maccabees, and it’s the same story. 

 

[18] “Eleazar, one of the scribes in high position, a man now advanced in age and of noble presence, was being forced to open his mouth and eat pig flesh.”  In other words, the Greek soldiers would come on and they’d take a stick in back of the head, push the head down, take another one in the forehead, push it up like this, and this way you can control it, and another soldier would come up and pull the jaw the open and they’d shove in some ham; they thought this was really funny for Jews.  And this is the way they’d torture and they’d pick out the priests, and the men who were considered clean and sacred and they’d force ham into their mouths.  And so they started doing this to Eleazar.   He “was being forced to open his mouth and eat swine’s flesh, But he, welcoming death with honor, rather than life with pollution, went up to the rack,” this is the tympanum, after they got through with that then they stretched him out and then they’d hit them with sticks and break all their bones, and then of course you’d die of internal injury while this was going on.  So, “welcoming death with honor, rather than life with pollution, he went up to the rack of his own accord, spitting out the flesh, as men ought to do who have the courage to refuse things it is not right to taste, even for the natural love of life.  Those who were in charge of that unlawful sacrifice took the man aside because of their long acquaintance with him, and they privately urged him to bring meat of his own providing, proper for him to use and pretend that he was eating the flesh of the sacrificial meal which had been commanded by the king, so that by doing this he might be saved from death and be treated kindly on account of his old friendship with them.  But making a high resolve worthy of his years and the dignity of his old age and the gray hairs which he had reached with distinction, and his excellent life, even from childhood, and moreover according to the holy God-given law, he declared himself quickly, telling them to send him to Hades.  Such pretense is not worthy of our time of life he said, lest many of the young men should suppose that Eleazar, in his 90th year has gone over to an alien religion and through my pretense for the sake of living a brief moment longer they should be led astray because of me when I defile and disgrace my old age.  For even if for the present I should avoid the punishment of men, yet whether I live or die I shall not escape the hands of the Almighty; therefore by manfully giving up my life now, I will show myself worthy of my old age and leave to the young a noble of how to die a good death, willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.  And with this, when he said this he went at once to the rack,” and then it describes the beating.  

 

So this probably is the illustration, it’s well know in Maccabees, and exactly fits the verse, verse 35, the last part.  “…others were tortured on the drum, not accepting deliverance,” see, he was offered deliverance and he refused it, “not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.  [36] And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment.”  And that would awake certain sympathies in the Jew.  Jeremiah, turn to Jeremiah, we often think of these prophets having an easy time; Jeremiah 20. 

 

Jeremiah ministered in the dying days of his country.  He had the unenviable task of seeing his country go down.  In Jeremiah 20:2, “Then Pashur,” who was a high official in the government, “smacked Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the LORD.”   In other words, they put him up to public ridicule because they could not stand Jeremiah’s teaching of the Word of God.  Certain human viewpoint faculty members do this to divine viewpoint people on the faculty in colleges, it’s a little game, except they don’t use literal stocks, they just use snotty language and vocabulary and ridicule in classes and classrooms.  We are about to witness a most interesting thing. Dr. Henry Morris and Duane Gish are going to be speaking in Lubbock on the 8th and 9th of February; tentatively there is  a debate scheduled in the Municipal auditorium and Gish and Morris will take on any comers that will be for evolution.  Now we will see what the loudmouths who are all for evolution, see if they have the courage of their conviction and see if they’re willing to defend their position in public. 

 

Verse 7, here’s Jeremiah complaining of the treatment he received, “O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; Thou art stronger than I, and has prevailed; I am in derision daily, every one mocks me.”  See, that’s Jeremiah, wonderful treatment he received.  Jeremiah 37:15, the story of his life, “Wherefore, the princes were angry with Jeremiah, and they smote him, and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan, the scribe, for they had made that the prison.”  And it goes on and how he describes him in the prison.  And then in Jeremiah 38:6, “Then they took Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchi-jah,” so he had quite a tour of all the dungeons. 

 

And then if this wasn’t enough by way of example, who else do you think the Hebrew Christian would have thought of?  Jeremiah and these men, who else?  Jesus, because if you turn back to Hebrews 11, what is the very subject coming up in chapter 12?  The very end of this chapter, and the man had it on his mind while he was teaching this, and I’m sure the listeners must have thought yes, and so was our Messiah, Jesus.  You see that in verse 2, “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame…. No artist has ever painted Jesus right on the cross.  There are always two things wrong with every picture of art I’ve ever seen depicting Christ, besides usually they picture Him as a very emaciated individual.  Christ was not emaciated, that’s been corrected on more of angelical art, but there are still two mistakes about the crucifixion that still aren’t portrayed.  One is that according to Isaiah 53 Jesus face was beat into the point where you couldn’t recognize it was a human face and no one has ever painted the cross that way, and the second thing is that Jesus had no clothes on, He was crucified naked, and therefore that was the shame, and you never see this done.  Now some of the great classic artists tried to show this a little bit, the naked part, but they never showed the face smashed.  So a legitimate picture of the crucifixion would show a face that you couldn’t recognize as a face and it would show Jesus Christ nude.

 

Hebrews 11:37, here are some other things of great saints from the past.  See, he’s building this thing up, he’s saved this stuff for the last because he knows had he started out with this it would have been too much for these people because these believers might one day have to do this.  Now so far they haven’t suffered death, that’s 12:4, he announces they haven’t yet been killed for their faith in Jesus Christ.  Apparently some of them had been beaten up, some of them put in jail, so they are about to get the same kind of treatment. 

 

Verse 37, “They were stoned,” and we have cases of that, what was one famous Christian who was stoned before this?  Stephen, “They were stoned and they were sawn asunder,” the tradition has it that Isaiah was sawed in half by Manasseh, with a wooden saw.  So you can figure out, they lined him up, the soldiers lined up with all his pupils and his students and they said we want to teach you students a lesson, you see this guy who’s your teacher, watch what’s going to happen to him.  And as they strapped Isaiah down and they were sawing him he yelled out to his students encouragement from the Word of God to go on and teach anyway.  Now those were the kind of men that were really great men, “they were tempted, they were slain with the sword;” see, that’s the opposite of verse 34, the people in verse 34 escaped the sword, in verse 37 they don’t escape, “they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented.”

 

Who were some, very, very close to the Christian era, one man in particular, John the Baptist, “being destitute, afflicted and tormented.”  And then he has a little sarcasm here, [38] “(Of whom the world was not worthy); and the word “world” has reference to man’s civilization.  And the irony of these men were cast out because the people said they’re not worthy of us.  Why were men like John the Baptist excluded from society?  Why were men like Jeremiah locked up and laughed at?  Because, why, these men, we just don’t associate with that low class element, and so from God’s point of view it’s completely reverse.  Society is not worthy of these men. 

“…they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.  [39] And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise,  [40] God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”  Now verse 39 and 40 are a very, very important summary of this whole chapter.  We want to take it slowly because there are some elements in here worth noting. 

 

Hebrews 11:39-40, first, what is the main structure of the sentence, let’s not get into the details, it’s a compound sentence, what is the first clause, the main verb of the first clause?  “These received not the promise,” not a promise, “the promise.”  Now what’s the second clause and what’s the connection; it’s a complex sentence. “That,” result, now what’s that last clause, what’s the verb, “that they should not be perfected.”  Now without getting into the details of the sentence, just back off and look at the main part of this sentence.  Just look what it’s saying, “These received not the promise,” the promise is Jesus Christ, and the perfection of the plan of salvation, “in order that they should not be perfected.”  Now look at the quality of great believers.  Think of how God felt for God does feel, when verse 34 was going on, when verse 35 was going on, when verse 37 was going on, how do you think God felt as He watched His loyal faithful Isaiah being sawed in half by this ass named Manasseh. 

 

Do you know why God had patience and He didn’t deliver?  He didn’t end history with Isaiah because He had something yet future in mind.  Us!  It’s going to come out again in Hebrews 12:2, “Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross,” see the tremendous powerful motivation here.  Jesus Christ endured all this for us, for you.  These men could have been delivered had God come back at that moment in history and God didn’t come back He let those men suffer and suffer and suffer; He let those women suffer because history had to run its course until Jesus Christ came.  So why did these people suffer, they suffered for many reasons, but one of the reasons these people suffered is because God’s plan wasn’t finished and God was going to allow them to suffer because He had us personally in mind. 

 

Let’s look at the details now.  “These all,” and in between the “all” and “received not the promise,” you see that clause stuck in there, that phrase that modifies, “having obtained a good report through faith,” what do you suppose is on his mind there.  If you were sitting in a congregation and Apollos or whoever it was that wrote this, preached this to you, what do you think he meant?  “These all, having obtained a good report.”  When did they obtain a good report?  What good report?  Remember what we said, this author pulls completely out of the Old Testament, completely out of the Old Testament. 

 

[someone answers] All right, when you read the Old Testament there are indicators, however mild and however innocuous, there are indications in the text that these men were accepted and pleased God.  Remember what the theme of this chapter was?  “Without faith it is impossible to please Him” and so there are these passages in the Old Testament where these men did please God.  And this is what he’s saying; he’s saying it can’t be that these men didn’t please God that they suffered, it couldn’t be because Isaiah didn’t please God, that was the reason he was being sawed in half, nice and slowly, that couldn’t be the idea, these men that were beaten, that were stretched out on the drums and they’d break their bones so they could die of internal injuries, that wasn’t because they had failed because all the indications of the text are that these believers pleased God.  So if they pleased God then what’s going on.

All right, “These all, having obtained good reports,” it means that they did believe, they were functioning, their suffering in this case was not related to rebellion, it was not personal discipline, “that they without us should not be perfect,” now parenthesis, “(God having provided,” now this is an interesting word, in the Greek it is problepo, pro means before, blepo means see, foreseen, “God having foreseen,” now this is not speaking of God in eternity past foreseeing in the Arminian sense, that’s not what it’s talking about.  This is one of those places where God is pictured in very vivid anthropocentric terms, just like a man, appearance like a man. The Jews pictured God with… very, very human way, with all of our emotions, angry, happy, joyful, and so on.  The Jewish God laughed, the Jewish God had a sense of humor, He wasn’t the platonic ideal blob that has plagued western thought ever since the Greeks.  But the Jews pictured their God as one of them.  When they have a feast and a festival to praise God, they’d picture the fact that they were pleasing God in being hospitable, serve the wine because when God’s around He likes a good time.  And this is the way they enjoyed their God as well as worshiping their God.

 

All right now, in this situation, when it uses the verb for see, the idea is that God sees Isaiah being shredded, God sees these great saints being beaten and the picture is that God is angry and He’s tempted to step in, but He foresees down through history something better, and so His hand of judgment is withdrawn because of something He sees in the distance.  Now that’s the anthropo-centric image behind this.  God wants to judge but He backs off because of something He sees.  God has foreseen a better thing for us.  And this is our position in Christ, “that without us they should not be perfect.” 

 

Now this is one of those verses that wraps up the many dispensations into one.  You have Israel in history functioning up until the time of the cross, you have the body of Christ function between the time of the cross till the rapture, then you have the tribulation, and the millennial kingdom.  But in eternity the body of Christ, Israel, the saved out of Israel in the other dispensations, and the Gentiles will all be unified in the New Jerusalem.  That’s Revelation 21 and 22.  They will be perfected, but their perfection is holding, standing by, waiting, constantly until the Church is complete.  Everything is being held in abeyance until the Church is finished.  The wheels of history cannot go anywhere until the Church is finished.  For 19 centuries the wheels of history have been shifting, it’s like you shift your car in neutral, the engine is running, the power is available but nothing moves; nothing is moving until the Church is finished and when the Church, Jesus’ bride is finished, then history moves and God shifts gears and He starts to move again. 

 

So this is the idea that these Old Testament saints are parked, they’re  like a parked care idling, waiting, waiting, in fact, on the other side of the grave for the Church to be finished, because the resurrection, the first people in history that will be resurrected will be believers in Jesus Christ.  First Jesus Christ is resurrected to perfection; that has already happened in 30 or 32 AD, depending on the chronology that you use, then will come the Church; believers will be raptured or the believers who have died before the rapture will receive their resurrection bodies and the second phase of the resurrection will have occurred. Then at the end of the tribulation you’ll have a third phase of Old Testament saints raised and then you’ll have a fourth phase at the end of the millennial kingdom, but the first group of humanity raised is the Church. 

 

Now that, you see, sets us up for chapter 12 and that should be adequate motivation for these believers to see how important they are from God’s point of view.  They’re not important from the Roman government’s point of view, or from society’s point of view, but they are so important from God’s point of view that all of these mockings, the beatings, the stonings, God sat and waited and endured until the Church could be finished, until this whole thing could be wrapped up. 

Next week we’re going to be on discipline and maybe have a little more discussion and catch up on questions, if you’ll think ahead on questions you might have dealing with the believer and discipline.  Of course, we expect that you’ll all ask questions about this other believer that you once knew that was disciplined.  Father, we thank  You…