Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Hebrews 11:1-6


11 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.

 

3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

 

4 By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.

 

5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.”[a] For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

 

 

Dig Deeper

Before I took up running as a bit of an amateur pastime, I was quite intimidated by the idea of ever running a marathon.  It seemed rather undoable and something that was nothing more than a bit of craziness that would cause me a great deal of pain.  After taking up running as a hobby and doing it for several years, my thoughts hadn’t changed that much on the topic of marathons.  But then I started to talk to people who had run them and learn from them and realize not only that it was possible for regular people to do but that there is a great deal of challenge, and yes, even fun involved in running a marathon.  So, I decided to try one and I haven’t quit running them since.  That little bit of motivation spurred me on to believe that I could achieve running a marathon and I have.  In the last few years, though, I’ve begun to look at some of the ultra-marathons that are out there, whether it be the 56-mile Comrades in Durban, South Africa or one of the 100-mile races closer to home; I’m intrigued.  But I was also a bit intimidated again.  The idea seemed daunting and somewhat impossible.  That is until I started to meet people who have completed one of those endurance races.  Their example and the tips that they have provided me along the way are just what I need to be able to complete one of them.  I haven’t run one yet, but I’m pretty sure I will one day, thanks in large part to their example and encouragement.

 

Chapter 11 of Hebrews is, of course, one of the most famous chapters in all of the New Testament.  It is often referred to as the “Hall of Fame of Faith,” and rightly so.  It is a chronological summary of many of the great examples from the Old Testament of people who lived incredible lives of faith based solely on the promises of God rather than on anything that they could tangibly see, or anything that they received in their lifetime.  And although there is much more in this chapter than just a bunch of good examples, it is chock full of encouraging examples of those who lived by faith.  It serves as a motivator and little slices of encouragement from those that have gone on ahead and completed the race and now stand in the stadium waiting for us to pick up and start the race and finish it ourselves.

 

First things must go first, however.  Before we can look at great and inspiring lives of faith it is necessary that we take a moment to consider what faith is.  If the righteous ones will live by faith, as our author has reminded us in the previous chapter, then we need to know what faith is.  It is, he says, “the confidence in what we hope for.”  But it is more than that.  It is also “the assurance about what we do not see.”  The definition leaves no room for some squishy self-defined concept of faith.  The word “rendered “confidence” can be translated in two directions: it either means “evidence” and “guarantee” or it means something like “title deed.”  Either way, the point is clear that faith is the thing that brings confidence to our hope and gives assurance despite the fact that we have not seen that for which we hope.

 

This is where we must be on guard against the modern tendency towards post-modernism (where my truth is truth) and defining concepts in a way that pleases us.  The “hope” here is not anything that we wish for and this is, quite frankly, missed by most commentators of this passage.  “Hope” in the book of Hebrews, and in fact, the New Testament as a whole, and the early Christian community virtually always referred to the coming resurrection age.  God had promised resurrection and those that believed those promises would have to live by faith in them.

 

It is this faith in God’s promises that turns hope from a vague wish into a reality to be lived out.  And a reality to be lived out is exactly what faith is.  In Romans 4:18-21, Paul defines Abraham’s faith as the action of him living as though God’s promises were true.  Faith, then, is not the act of deciding whatever we wish to hope for and then believing that God will come through for us.  Faith is holding to what God has promised and then living as though that promise were absolutely true, primarily in the case of the resurrection that he has promised for those in Christ.  This means that I can’t have biblical faith in getting a specific job, finding a spouse, or having a specific person come to conversion to Christ (although Philippians 4 certainly confirms that we can pray for those things) because God has not promised any of of those things specifically.  Faith, simply put, is living according to God’s promises, even though we have not seen them materialize yet.

 

Thus, when Hebrews says that hope is the confidence of what we hope for and the assurance about what we don’t see, it refers specifically to the great hope of resurrection that God has promised to those who would die to themselves and entrust themselves to the life of Christ.  Believing that in Christ God has given us access right now to the life of the age to come that will appear fully at the time of the resurrection is what brings animation to our life and is the basis of how we live.  Faith is living as though we are already in God’s future and ordering our lives by the values of the resurrection age rather than the present age.  The ancients lived for the promise of God’s age to come and were commended for it, even though they did not have the advantage of ever seeing the partial fulfillment of those promises that came through the life of Christ; promises that we have seen and that guarantee that the rest of God’s promises will surely be realized.

 

Hebrews thus, begins to take us through a brief history of the need for faith in God’s promises.  It starts in verse 3 with the creation and will go through to chapter 12 with the new creation.  It starts by going through the Old Covenant and will culminate in the coming of the New Covenant.  It is by believing God’s word that we know that the universe was formed.  Certainly none of us were there to witness it and so we must take by faith (in God’s word) the fact that the physical universe has not always existed.  Behind what can be seen, the created universe, stands the eternal God who made it.  We must believe God’s word that this is the case, although the sheer logic of the existence of creation further bolsters God’s word.  How so?  Simply put, if the universe had a beginning (and even most atheists will agree with that) then something outside of the physical universe of time and space must have caused it to exist.  So if the cause was outside of physical matter then it must be something non-physical, or what we would call spiritual: which would seem to be the God who has given his word that he is the creator of the universe.

 

From the very beginning of the creation, then, faith was the language of having a relationship with God.  Abel was commended to a relationship with God while Cain was rejected because Abel had faith and Cain did not.  The writer of Hebrews doesn’t detail how or in what way Abel had faith and Cain did not, and neither does Genesis make it overt either.  The point of our author may have simply been that God’s word declares that his righteous people will live by faith, and because Abel was considered righteous, that was the identification card that he had faith.  Abel’s life and actions continue to carry on to this day because he lived by faith in the promises of God to live in eternity with his people.  That is why a life of faith and labors of faith will carry on forever and cause Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:58 to declare that “your labors in the Lord are not in vain.”

 

Enoch, a biblical figure that was highly respected by first century Jews, was no exception to the faith factor.  He was one of two men in history that was taken directly by God; and why? Because he lived by faith and that faith pleased God.  Enoch pleased God by his faith, says the writer of Hebrews, and that’s important because it is impossible to please God without faith.  Again, we must stress that this is not a vague post-modern type of faith that is a theoretical agreement with certain biblical truths.  The kind of faith that pleases God is a life that is lived unswervingly according to the word and will of God. 

 

That is why the author lays out two aspects of faith in God.  The fist aspect is the most common, that we must believe that God exists.  Many people today stop right there as though as long as they believe that God exists, even if they pay a little lip service on occasion to him and his Son, then they consider themselves in relationship with God.  But they far too often forget the second part.  Faith not only demands that we believe that God exists but that “he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”  In other words we must believe both that God exists and is God, and we must live our lives as though his promises of the reward of resurrection are true.  If we believe God’s word, that faith will be reflected in lives that reject the empty promises of the present age and strive constantly to embody God’s will and the life of the age to come in the real world in which we live and struggle.

 

 

Devotional Thought

In what things do you really have faith?  How does that faith have an impact on how you live each day?  Are you truly living by the values of the age to come because you believe that God’s promises are true?

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