Hebrews Lesson 175
NKJ Isaiah
40:31 But
those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount
up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and
not faint.
Chapter 11 introduces us to the next section in the book of
Hebrews. Section 5 focuses on - the main teaching is on the importance of
confidence in God's Word and God's plan.
That is really the import of the faith that is being talked about here -
is a confidence and an orientation to our future destiny and the impact that it
has on the way a believer lives during time.
All of these examples that we see in chapter 11 focus on that. So chapter 11 gives us the teaching in
relationship to the importance of doctrine, the importance of an ongoing walk
by faith.
Then chapter 12 gives us our first exhortation, chapter 13
our second. So we'll get into the first
verse here, a verse well known by many people - often thought of as a
definition of faith, but really isn't a definition of faith itself, more of a
description of its reality and significance in the life of the believer,
It begins by saying:
NKJ Hebrews
11:1 Now
faith is the substance of things hoped for,
We’ll have to stop and think about what that means a little
bit.
the evidence of things not
seen.
These two ideas are written in a way that they are parallel
to one another and so they complement each other in bringing out a key idea
related to the confidence, the certainty that doctrine has in the mind, the
thinking of a believer. But first we
have to understand this concept of faith.
So we ask a question - what is faith? Faith has various meanings in the Bible and we
have to understand these in different contexts, different ideas. The main thing, the basic meaning of the word
pistis in the Scripture for faith is
just an understanding, that faith is understanding something and then accepting
it to be true, understanding something and accepting it be true. That’s a really basic definition. You can't believe something you don't
understand. Now you may not understand
whatever it is you’re believing exhaustively or comprehensively. You may not come to fully understand all the
nuances of what it is you’re believing; but you can't believe something that
you really don't understand. I've had
people over the years listen to something that a pastor teaches.
They say, “Oh yeah. I
believe that.”
”Well, explain it to me.”
…can’t even come
close.
How do you know
that you believe it if you really don't understand what that statement meant?
You can't believe something you don't understand. That's where you get into mysticism. So faith means it’s thinking. It's not emotion. It is an intellectual process. You believe with your mind. You understand something; and then you decide
whether or not it is true. Then you
believe it to be true.
So we get into
various verses on faith. I just want
over about 5 or 6 verses on faith to begin with to just show some of the
different ways that the Bible uses the word faith.
First of all
Romans 10:17 is a very important passage.
We don't need to look at the context because this represents a universal
principle.
NKJ Romans
So you have
three parts here. You have faith,
hearing and the Word of God. What that
shows you is that faith is related to the Word of God. That is what we believe is something that
comes from the Word of God. So it is
related to something that is written or something that is stated.
Now this is
going to get us into a discussion in a few minutes on something that some
people really have a hard time understanding.
I’ve sort of been surprised by some people, some pastors that I’ve
talked to who got into this discussion.
They don't really seem to understand this. That is that whatever happens
when we believe something, we are ultimately, simply believing a proposition.
“Wait a minute!”
you say. “I’m believing in the person of
Jesus.”
Have you ever
met Him? Have you ever talked to
Him? Did you meet Him on road
somewhere? Did He come into your house? You've never met Jesus, not in that
sense. You have only read what other
people wrote about Jesus. The only way
you know anything about Jesus is on the basis of certain historical accounts
written in the Bible about Him. You are
believing what they are telling you about Jesus. There is not a direct encounter with Jesus in
that sense - not in the same sense that Peter was called by Jesus when he was
coming in from a fishing trip one day, not in that same sense that the two
disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized that this stranger they thought that
they didn't recognize with them was actually Jesus. We’ve never had that kind of empirical
encounter with Jesus Christ. We only
know Him by virtue of the statements that are made in the Scripture. You believe those statements to be true.
Now that means
as a result of that we enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ;
but in a lot of cases when people talk about Christianity you’ll hear folks say
that, “Well, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?” as if that’s
really important.
Judas had a
personal relationship with Jesus. It
didn't do him any good. See it's not
about having a personal relationship with Jesus. It's about believing Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God who died on the cross as a substitute for us. So we’ll get into parsing out some of that a
little bit so you understand it a little more clearly. Don't think I've lost my mind.
So faith comes
by hearing the Word of God. That's why
you’ll hear theologians (pastors) talk about the revelation of God as
propositional truth. That is really an
important statement. I remember hearing
that before I went to seminary; and I really didn't understand that because I
had no background in philosophy or logic at the time. And that's really a very important statement;
and it means that a proposition in logic is any declarative sentence.
Remember back in
this sixth or seventh grade when you learned that there were 4 different kinds
of sentences.
Those are your 4
basic kinds of sentences. Well, a declarative
sentence is roughly a proposition. Jesus is God. It’s either true or it’s false. Jesus died on the cross for your sins. It’s either true or it’s false. God created the heavens and the earth in six
days. It's either true or it's
false.
A proposition is
any statement that is either verified or falsified, not a question. A question
(Who are you?), you can't prove that to be true or false. You can’t take a command (Pray without
ceasing.)- is that true or false? It’s
neither. It’s a command. So a proposition is just a simple declarative
sentence that can be proved to be truth or false. So you either believe it to be true or you
believe it to be false but on some basis.
There's got to be some reason to believe something is true or something
is false. If there's a reason, that
means that faith is rational and not irrational. So that means that it is the
process of the mind. It’s a process of
intellectually apprehending or understandings something.
So faith comes
by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.
We hear various statements made in the Word of God; and then we have an
option to believe them or to reject them.
That's one way of using faith.
Faith is directed towards the Word of God.
Then Romans
So Paul states:
NKJ Romans
Isn't that interesting?
If you think it's wrong to eat pork and you haven't been taught
differently. You haven’t really come to
understand grace yet – that there's no law.
And, you eat pork and you're still not sure - you’re condemned. That’s sin.
Why? Because your conscience is
telling you that it's wrong and by eating it you're violating your conscience
and you're setting a terrible precedent of ignoring your conscience. That's why it becomes wrong, and it sets that
precedent. So later on when things
really are wrong, you've already established a practice of self justification
in choosing to violate your conscience.
So it begins that process of desensitization and so that's why he says
that - because he does eat from faith.
So, faith here is not the act of trusting as it is really
talking about a body of truth, a body of doctrine. He hasn't been taught yet these principles
related to dietary law; and so he's not making his decision from the position
of strength, in other words a knowledge of doctrine.
Then Paul says:
for whatever is not
from faith is sin.
Now if you look at that as just sort of an initial first
blush analysis, you think that this sort of gives you a definition of
faith. I thought that for awhile. I taught that for awhile, but that really
doesn’t fit the context. It's not really
a good definition of faith because he's using faith here in this sense of that
body of truth, that body of biblical teaching.
So if it's not consistent with biblical teachings, then it’s sin. That’s what he’s saying - not the act of
trust, but the body of truth. If it's
not based on the truth of Scripture, that body of teaching incorporated in the
Scripture; then it's sin. You're
violating scriptural teaching. So it’s used
for a general sense for what one believes.
Then we see another example of this same kind of usage in
Romans 8:26. He says:
NKJ Romans
There with the article in front of faith, it has that same
sense as a body of doctrine, a body of belief, a body of propositions – a
doctrinal statement you might say, or a creed.
Or, in older times they used to talk about a confession of faith. So you had various creeds that came out of
various denominations. These were
basically doctrinal statements that summarized the belief system of that
denomination or that group. So obedience
to the faith is obedience to a set group of propositions or belief
statements.
This is used the same way in Galatians 1:23.
NKJ Galatians
This is talking about the Jews (in
"He who formerly
persecuted us now preaches the faith which he once tried to destroy."
So see once again you have the use of the word “the faith”
in terms of a set body of doctrine, a group of teachings that are related to a particular
group.
Then Ephesians 4:5 uses it in the same kind of way.
NKJ Ephesians
4:5 one
Lord, one faith, one baptism;
So all this is to show #1 that faith is related to the Word
of God; and it's also used to summarize the body of doctrine that comes across
in the Word of God. So it's not just the
idea of simply believing or trusting. It
also has to do with what is believed, what is trusted – that body of doctrine
that informs a Christian as to who he is and what is destiny is.
Now having said
all that, let's look at some basic points on faith. First of all we saw from Romans 10:17 that
faith is a response to what is taught in the Bible - clear statements that are
articulated in the Scripture.
NKJ John 20:31 but these
are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
that believing you may have life in His name.
“Jesus died on
the cross as a substitute for your sins.”
So it is related
to the belief that Jesus is God, belief in the trinity, belief in various other
doctrines. Faith is related to what is
taught in the Bible.
Second, faith is
an act of trust. That’s basically what
faith means. It means to trust in
something or someone or it refers to a belief that something is true. So belief is an act of trust in something or
someone or belief that something is true.
Now when you are trusting in someone- I use that phrase because that’s
what you find in the Gospel of John, the verb pisteuo to believe plus the preposition eis plus the third person pronoun, him - believe in Him.
But how do we
know who He is? We know who He is by the
statements of Scripture, not by what you see but only on the evidence of what
an eyewitness has said. So we’re
trusting in belief that something is true -that statements in Scripture are true. Those statements in the Scripture point us to
a person that that's true; but we don't go directly to the person. We only believe in the person indirectly
through those statements in Scripture.
So it is an act of trust, an act of trust.
Now I remember
when I was a kid in Sunday school (This is not unique to any one group of
Christians.), but you often hear this that trust is believing that this chair
will hold me. Now do I believe that
chair will hold me? If I don’t sit in
that chair, do I still believe it will hold me? Yeah.
But you know that such a common illustration people use in Sunday
school. Trust means that you believe
that chair will hold you, so you sit in it.
But see, whether I sit in it or not, I still fully believe that chair
will hold me up. Sitting in it is not
necessary. That really starts to subtly
introduce a second act of works into belief.
You see that? I can believe it’s
true and there's not a shred of doubt in my mind that the chair will hold
me. That doesn't mean I have to sit in
it to prove it. Okay.
So faith is just
the act of trust - belief that something is true.
Third, faith is
an act of the intellect. It's not an act
of the heart.
Some people say,
“Well, they had a head belief and not a heart belief. It was just all intellectual.”
Now there is a
sense in which people may believe that the Bible teaches that Jesus is God and
that the Bible teaches that if you believe in Him you'll have eternal
life. Let me rephrase that. The New Testament teaches that Jesus is God
and the New Testament teaches that if you believe in Jesus you’ll go to
heaven.
Michael Medved
who is a news pundit (has a radio talk show) is Jewish. He’s a very conservative Jew; and he does not
believe that Jesus is the Messiah. But
he believes that the New Testament teaches that Jesus is the Messiah and that
the New Testament teaches that if you believe in Jesus alone you’ll have
eternal life. He's even corrected people
who call in and express Christianity in terms of works or doing good.
He’ll say, “No,
no. That’s not what Christianity
teaches. The New Testament teaches there
are no works involved.”
Now he doesn’t
believe that; but he believes that's what the New Testament teaches. See there's a difference there. That’s subtle. So a person can believe that the Bible
teaches something but not believe what the Bible teaches. Okay.
There's a difference. So some
people get, you know, they hear the gospel all their life and they think; but
they've never really made a personal - I believe Jesus is the Messiah.
I remember
having a kid growing up at
One year at a
spring camp he came up to me and he said, “Robby, I just really understood the
gospel and I trusted Christ.”
I said, “You've
been a worker every summer. You’ve been
coming to camp for years; and you’re actively involved in youth group.”
You know it just
blew everybody away. His parents were
saved; his brother was saved. Three
months later he was killed in an automobile accident. It was really clear that he had – he was
saved. He came to a point where he
understood the gospel that it was about him believing that Jesus died for him.
So faith is it's
an act of the intellect. It’s
understanding that this proposition is personal, that Jesus died for you and if
you believe in Him and you will have eternal life. It's an act of the mind because we understand
something and we believe. We don't believe
with our emotions. Belief is not an
emotion. Belief is not an act of some
organ other than our brain. Our heart
just pumps blood. We don't have a heart
belief. But you'll hear people make that
distinction that so and so just has an intellectual - they're so afraid that
somebody is going to get too intellectual or too academic. So they want to introduce emotion to
it. But, faith is not an emotion; it's
not a feeling. And, faith does not mean
commitment. You look it up in the
dictionary. It doesn’t mean
commitment. You don't commit your life
to Jesus. That's not what believing in Jesus means. It means believing and accepting that certain
things are true about Jesus; and that it relates to you personally.
Also the fourth
point, biblical faith is not faith in faith.
It's not faith in itself. Faith
is not a power. That's mysticism. That's also what you get in what’s called the
Word of Faith Movement that is a heretical movement that came out of the
Pentecostal movement starting in the post-World War II period. That's very popular in a lot of the so called
nondenominational churches. Back in the
60’s, nondenominational and independent meant that you were not affiliated with
a denomination. That got co-opted by a
certain segment, initially by a certain segment of Pentecostal charismatic
churches because they were getting kicked out of the Assemblies of God and
they're being kicked out of the Pentecostal denominations because they were
buying into the Word of Faith Movement which was declared heresy in the early
50’s by the Assemblies of God. So these
people got kicked out. So they started
churches that taught this Word of Faith gospel, prosperity gospel. All of that was kind of mixed in and the
name-it-and claim-it was part of the whole Word of Faith thing that faith was a
power. That's why they started becoming
independent churches because they were heretical, rightly seen as heretical by
the major charismatic and Pentecostal denominations.
So faith is not
faith in itself. We do not believe that
faith per se has power - you just have to believe. Believe what?
It’s not just belief that has power.
It’s what is believed. It is the
object of faith. So it is what is
believed that is important, not the act of simply believing (not the act of
faith.) That's what I mean by that.
So if you
someone believes that Jesus died on the cross for their sins and their sins are
fully paid for and the other person believes that if they believe that Jesus
died for their sins and between what Christ did on the cross and baptism
they’re saved. Those are two different
objects of faith. One of those people is
saved and one of them isn't because of what they believe. One person it’s faith plus works – it’s
Christ plus works; the other one it’s Christ alone. So what is believed is what is important, not
just simply believing.
From that we
recognize that faith is something anyone can do whether you're a two year old
infant, two year old child to a 95 year old senior. You can believe. You believe all kinds of things; you believe
all kinds of contradictory things. We
all do. We believe whatever we want to
believe. We believe things about life
that we wish it were a certain way. But
we believe all of these things - sometimes with the evidence, sometimes without
evidence. Sometimes it’s just wishful
thinking, but we believe all kinds of things.
Faith is something anyone can do.
The act of faith
in Jesus is only distinguished from all the other acts of faith by the object
of faith, by what it is that we're believing in. We're believing in Jesus alone saves by
virtue of His work on the cross.
So faith is
something anyone can do. Saving face is
saving not because it is a separate kind of faith, but because the faith is in
the correct object - that is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ
alone.
Some people will
say in Lordship salvation which is contradictory to grace will say there are
some people who believe Jesus died for them; but it's not really saving
faith. You can believe in Jesus and not
be saved. Then they’ll use a passage
like John 2 where after Jesus performed many signs in the temple. He was confronted by the Pharisees.
He said, “If you
tear down this temple I will raise it again in three days and perform many
other signs.”
It says there
were many who believed in His name, pisteuo
eis which is the same phraseology all the way through John as the condition
for salvation - believe in Him. There
are many believed in Him.
The next
sentence says:
NKJ John
So somebody will
say, “See if were saved, if they really believed in Jesus, if they were really
Christians, He would have trusted them.”
Just because
somebody is saved, you are going to trust them?
Think that’s going to make them a better cardiologist or a better
dentist or a better car mechanic just because they’re saved? No, they can be an out of fellowship, carnal,
lazy worker who is trying to get patients on the fact that he's a
Christian. There are people who do
that. But that doesn't make them any
better or any worse than anybody else.
So Jesus didn't
trust Himself to those Jews because He knew they had a political agenda. They wanted to make Him the Messiah. They weren’t educated enough beyond their
salvation for Him to trust them. They
still had the same old political agenda which wasn’t His agenda so He wasn’t
going to entrust Himself to them. It
didn’t have anything to do with their justification stance.
Sixth point is
that faith refers to a set of beliefs or a body of doctrine - what a person
believes. So it’s not just talking about
faith in terms of what we would call phase one justification, what a person
needs to believe in order to have eternal life.
But faith also refers to that entire body of doctrine related to the spiritual
life of the believer after salvation. So
we have to distinguish in passages - is this talking about the kind of faith
that's necessary to be justified before God or is this talking about faith in
terms of how a justified believer lives now that he is saved? So we have to
look at it this way. Point 6 focuses on
the fact that faith often refers to that body of beliefs that is unique and
distinct to Christianity.
So
point 7, faith can either refer to phase 1 belief in Jesus as our substitute or
it can refer to the phase 2 trust in the promise, the power, the provision and
the procedures of Scripture that we follow in order to grow spiritually. Now that’s important because when we get into
Hebrews 11 here and we talk about by faith Abel, by faith Abraham, by faith
Moses, by faith - are we talking about phase one justification faith or are we
talking about some aspect of phase 2 spiritual life faith? It’s very clear they’re already
justified. We’re talking about phase 2
spiritual life sanctification faith.
So
that is going to impact us because as we have studied so many times breaking it
down in terms of the problem solving devices that really incorporates,
encapsulates the basic struggle of the believer’s life because we're all
involved in a war.
From
the instant you trust in Christ as Savior, you didn't know it; but you got
drafted into the Lord’s army and you're in a massive spiritual warfare and
Satan’s drawn a big target on your butt.
No matter what you do until the day you die, that's the way it is. So you have two options – are you going to be
a well-trained, well-prepared, mentally focused Christian soldier in spiritual
warfare or are you going to be a lazy non-competent, just hoping somehow people
don't see that you're hiding down in the trench somewhere. Okay, so the kind of faith that you need in
order to be successful in spiritual combat is faith that is informed by the
body of truth of Scripture, living on that basis.
So
this is what we see under point 8, the faith in Hebrews 11:1f is more that
phase 1; but refers to that collection of phase 2 beliefs that motivate and
propel us forward in our spiritual growth and enable us to surmount the
obstacles, the problems, the challenges that we face in life that when we’re
down, when we’re discouraged, when we’re tired and when we’re weary; what
enables us to get up and keep going?
It's because we understand what the end goal is. We understand what the end result is. As long as we keep focused on the end result
and where God is taking us and what the plan is; then we can handle whatever
gets thrown at us between now and phase 3 and our promotion because we know it's designed by God to
prepare us for our future with Him.
Okay,
that takes us through a kind of an introductory orientation then to faith and
to understand the basics in the discussion and debate today about what faith is
all about.
Now
one other thing we've ought to understand (just to bring it into our awareness)
is that historically coming out of the Reformation period faith (especially in
Reformed circles)… Now you know what I mean by Reformed circles. This is the branch of Protestant Christianity
that traces its heritage back to the French and Swiss Reformation period. The French-Swiss Reformation was influenced
by John Calvin out of Geneva and the German-Swiss by Ulrich Zwingli out of
Zurich and Bollinger out of Basel – these areas. So that's Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
many Anglicans (historical not present).
These all came out of that Dutch Reform – the Huguenots, the
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. All of these
various groups were influenced by Calvinism all the way down to
dispensationalism…Dallas Seminary because Dallas Seminary’s heritage - Louis
Sperry Chafer an ordained Southern Presbyterian evangelist. You had Scofield was a Congregational pastor
(First congregational Church of Dallas which is now Schofield Memorial Church.)
John Nelson Darby though he was Plymouth Brethren, he still had a lot of
reformed doctrine in his thinking.
So
in this stream of thought, faith was often defined as having 3 things. This is in the Latin, notitia,
assensus and fiducia.
Now I’m not smart enough to figure this out. Gordon Clark wrote a
wonderful book (At least the first part of it’s wonderful.) called What is Saving Faith. He never clearly defined what the content was
by the end of the book; but he did a great job in the first half of the book of
defining what faith was and what faith wasn't.
He pointed out that there is a hidden redundancy in this definition. First of all you have understanding, notitia. We have to understand something about what
we believe. Now when you’re three years
old you can only understand something about sin and Jesus and His death on the
cross to a certain level; but that's enough at the level of a 3 year old. When you're twenty years old you can
understand the meaning of those things at a different level. But you have to understand something about
what it is that you are believing.
Now
assensus means to assent to
something as true, to agree that it's true.
Now this is a lot of evangelicals stumble because at this point what
they want to say that well, it’s just intellectual. Well if it's not just intellectual with what
else do you believe? Just think about it
a minute. Do you believe with something
else other than your mind? No! Okay, assent means to agree that something is
true - not to agree that the Bible says it’s true, but to agree that it is
true. That goes back to the distinction
I was making earlier - not simply to believe that the Bible says God created
everything, but to believe to agree that – “Yes that is true.” That’s what agreement means.
I
like to use the illustration. You know
I'm not real good with numbers and I have never liked to balance a
checkbook. When I would sit down and
balance a checkbook and I would get the bank statement out and I would write
down all the checks and add everything up.
You know you cross reference your numbers so that when everything is
said you’ve reconciled your checkbook.
The number that the bank says is in the account equals the sum of what
you worked through all the calculations.
Now the way I do math, when those two numbers agree, then I quit. I rest.
I put down the pencil.
I
don't say, “Oh well. You know I must've
made a mistake. These numbers
agree.”
I’ve
thought that a few times because it's so rare that they do. But when they do agree, you rest. You don't keep working. You say, “This is true and I'm relying upon
this to be true.” That is what agree or
assent to something being true actually means.
To add trust to that is a redundancy because to agree that something is
true means that you are saying it is true.
“I
believe it's true.”
So
Gordon Clark in his work on What is
Saving Faith? did a tremendous job. That
was published the late 70’s just as a lot of the battle over the free grace
movement…Some of Zane Hodges works were just beginning to come out. When many of us read Gordon Clark’s book, it
was like somebody parted the skies and we could see straight to the throne of
God. It was just such a blinding flash
of the obvious that faith means to agree that something is true. But, the something that you're agreeing is
true has to be in the statement that Scripture makes that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God and that He died on the cross for your sins. You have to believe that. So when you do, you rest. You quit working. You just rely upon Jesus as the one who He
saves. So that is on how we should
understand faith. Once you add another
element of trust then it really did open the door historically to subtly
bringing in sort of backdoor works and the whole perseverance concept of
Lordship salvation into the equation.
So
let's go back to our verse and look at how it begins.
NKJ Hebrews
11:1
Now faith is
Something…
NKJ Hebrews
11:1
Now faith is the substance
…or
the evidence,
NKJ Hebrews
11:1
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for
There
are various ways to translate this.
It’s an interesting word and here we go up on the screen, a word you
will think sounds familiar. It's a Greek
word hupostasis where we get our
English word – we talk about the hypostatic union. The hypostatic union refers to the union of
two essences or two substances in the one person of Jesus Christ, 100% deity,
100% humanity united together in one person.
So it’s the union of two substances or two essences. So that’s the idea of hupostasis. So it has a wide
range of meanings though. It can mean a
substantial nature.
Now
if you haven’t had philosophy and you haven't studied Aristotle, you may not
catch all the nuances of the word substance when it comes to Greek
thought. In Aristotle’s thought you had
two things. You had substance, and you
had attributes. Attributes were things
like color and size and temperature and height and width. All of those things are really the
attributes. So you look at one of these
chairs and its attributes are that it’s about three feet high and about twenty
inches from front to back and about 20 to 24 inches wide. It has four legs and metal. All those things have to do with
attributes. But you can’t the
substance. All you can see are
attributes. The substance is this thing
that’s somewhere in there that makes it a chair. It's almost invisible and then these
attributes are packed on it and that's what makes it visible. So that idea of substantial nature really
refers to the essence of the thing.
And
guess what we ran into this same word back at the beginning of Hebrews 1:1
talking about Jesus being the hupostasis
of the Father. He has the essential
deity of the Father. So is refers to
substantial nature, substance, essence or actual being.
Then
the second meaning is that it refers to confidence, conviction or
steadfastness. That's the idea in the
way in which it is used here in 11:1. So
faith is confidence. It’s not just
substance. That’s the idea for the
foundation of something. That’s sort of
this imperceptible thing that lies behind the attributes. But faith is the confidence, the conviction,
the steadfastness of something. The New
International Dictionary of New Testament Theology states that one of the
meanings is confidence, expectation - see that brings in the idea of hope that
we'll see here in the next word.
Confident trust in what is hoped for; another meaning is the idea of a
pledge or security, a guarantee, an assurance.
One writer thinks that it ought to be translated that faith is the
guarantee of what is hoped for and I'm not sure that's right nuance there. It has more the idea that faith is that which
reflects the absolute certainty within a believer’s soul, his core convictions,
and certainty of absolute reality that what God has promised will be
fulfilled. In other words the promise of
God becomes more real to the believer than any experience or anything else.
God's Word is absolute truth. There's
this settled certain conviction that goes to the core of your being, the
foundation of your person. That would
express the idea that faith is a confidence.
Faith is the confidence of things hoped for.
Now
just before we move on from…finish confidence, let’s think about how we know
some things. We know some things are
true because we can reason to them and we believe our reasoning is valid. Think of Descartes’ statement, “I think
therefore I am.”; solid reasoning.
Because I'm thinking, that means there's something going on there inside
my head of some sort. There is self
consciousness there and if there’s self consciousness that means I must exist
for me to have this self-awareness of thought.
So we know that’s true. But not
everything we think can be true. We can
be self deceived. There can be other
problems. That was one of the things
Descartes thought through – “maybe I’m just deceived in all this. But no, because I'm thinking whether it’s
right or wrong just the very act of thought means I exist.” But we're believing ultimately behind the act
of reason, we’re believing that I can have I have faith in my rational
capabilities to come to some measure of truth.
Other things we know because we experienced
them. We believe our senses tell us the
truth and we can actually interpret the data.
We can tell the difference between hot and cold unless of course you put
your hand on dry ice for about thirty seconds and then you put it on something
hot. It’s not going to necessarily feel
hot. So you have these various things
that can confuse your senses. But behind
that it's not just that we have experienced something, but we believe that our
interpretation is correct. So faith lies
behind that.
When
somebody tells us - I don't go outside; and you come running in and say, “You
know, it is raining out there.” Or you
come running in and say there’s a tornado out there. Okay, let’s get down. I don’t have to run to the front door and
look out there to see the tornado. I am
believing that you are honest and trustworthy and what you say is
reliable. So I am believing the
authority of your pronouncement.
That
is comparable to what we do in the Christian life. We have the eyewitness account of God and
we're believing that eyewitness account.
We have the eyewitness account of the disciples. We’re believing their eyewitness account -
that is true. And so we believe
that. And so we have absolute confidence
in that. Faith then is the confidence of
our hope - of what is hoped for literally, not the things hoped for but what is
hoped for. What is hoped for casts us
forward. That confident expectation – it
looks to a future destiny. As I often
say, it's not a sort of wishful optimism that I hope we get a cool front that
actually cool things down the next few days (probably won't, but it's wishful
optimism) to I hope that I will get to heaven.
Well, that's a certainty. I have a confident expectation. Now hope is a major theme that we have seen
all the way through Hebrews. Hebrews 3:6
says:
NKJ Hebrews 3:6 but Christ
as a Son over His own house, whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence
Different word for confidence.
and the rejoicing of the hope
firm to the end.
In other words, if we live without giving up our future
expectation.
NKJ Hebrews
6:11
And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full
assurance of hope until the end,
NKJ Hebrews
6:18
that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie,
we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the
hope set before us.
All these are talking about this confident expectation of
our future destiny.
NKJ Hebrews
7:19
for the law made nothing perfect; on the other hand, there is the bringing
in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God.
NKJ Hebrews
10:23
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who
promised is faithful.
So hope is a key theme throughout this epistle that we need
to focus on that eternal destiny and the certainty of it. So faith in the believer is a confidence, a
certainty in what is hoped for. We are
certain of what our destiny is. So that
is going to impact how we live today because we know where God is taking us. We know what the future holds. We know what the plan is. We live today in light of eternity.
Now
the second half of this says that faith is the evidence of things not seen, the
evidence of things not seen.
NKJ Hebrews
11:1
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen.
Now that brings in this word elegchos. Sometimes this
word is used of conviction. To convict a criminal in court means to present
what? Enough evidence. Now there’s that word evidence again. We just ran into that in relationship to
substance. Faith is the evidence or the
substance of things hoped for. Some
translations will put it that way that faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen.
That's how elegchos is translated
here, as the act of presenting evidence that something is true.
So faith is a certain conviction that something is
true. We agree that it's true and now
we're saying again in a different way.
It is the evidence of something that is true, the evidence of something
that is true. It is not the truth
itself; it is the evidence that something is true.
Now what is evidence? Think about that. What is evidence? Look it up in a dictionary. Evidence is a sign or an indication of
something else. So if you walk into an
apartment somewhere and you see about two gallons of blood on the floor. There's evidence that somebody’s dead. You don’t see the body, but you see the evidence. That can only mean that someone has died;
someone has exsanguinated and they are no longer alive. So it's a sign or an indication of something
else. So you have a believer who has to settled conviction in God, that what
the Scripture says is true. That is
evidence of something else. It's
evidence of something that is not seen, something that is yet future, something
that is invisible. So faith is the
conviction, the evidence of something that is unseen.
Now
another thing that we can say about the evidence is that it's something that
bears witness to something else so that if you go to a crime scene and your DNA
is at the crime scene then that means you were there. It doesn’t mean you’ve killed them. It might, but you see your DNA is there, your
fingerprints are there. That’s evidence that you were there. It witnesses to something.
Look
at the next verse to see where we're coming from.
NKJ Hebrews
11:2
For by it the elders obtained a good testimony.
..the New King James says.
The verb there is martureo
where we get out English word martyr which relates to giving a testimony or
being a witness to something. So you see
how these words all are connecting together.
We have faith is the evidence. It
bears witness to something in another way of saying it. It bears witness to something. So what the writer is saying here is that a
person’s beliefs, the body of beliefs that informs a person’s present decisions
because the future is as certain of them as if it was already in the past. So that's what he's talking about is this body of belief that a person has that
determins their present decisions because as far as they're concerned the
future destiny with God is more real to them than it would be if it was already
past.
So God's Word becomes more sure and certain to us than
anything in our experience and so we can face persecution. You can face the loss of your job. You can face the loss (the death) of loved
ones. You can face any situation in life
because your relationship to God is more real to you by virtue of your
understanding and knowledge and belief in Scripture than anything else.
So this is the point in this first verse. It states a very strong principle of faith
that these victorious believers had is the substance of things hoped for. It tells you about what they're looking for
and it is the evidence of things not seen.
So we’ll learn something from them.
Then in verse 2 we have:
NKJ Hebrews
11:2
For by it
Which is faith because we have a feminine demonstrative
pronoun here that refers back to the feminine of pistis in the first verse.
the elders obtained a good testimony.
That’s really a bad translation. It is really poor because it indicates that
the elders received somebody else’s testimony.
I mean it’s just very confusing.
Actually in the Greek text it’s very similar. It says, “In this the elders ( hoi presbuteroi).”
Then you have one verb from the aorist passive of the verb martureo. Martureo
means to confirm or to attest to something.
It has to do with evidence again.
Didn’t we just talk about that?
To confirm or attest something on the basis of personal knowledge or
belief, to bear witness to something or to be a witness. What is awkward in translating this is martureo means to give a testimony, to
be a witness, to witness. Those are all
active voice senses of the verb. But
when you have it in the passive form that means the subject (the elders)
receive the action of the verb. That's
just an awkward thing to express. So we
have to come to an understanding of the basic meaning of the word.
The basic idea there as I just took that dictionary
definition straight out of Bauer Art Gingrich means to confirm or attest to
something. So the elders meaning our
spiritual ancestors were attested, were confirmed. They were evidenced you might say, although
that doesn’t make a lot of sense in the English, but you get the drift. They were evidenced by faith. In other words their faith is what was
seen.
What wasn’t seen which is what's missing from this verse is
the core convictions of their soul, the certainty of what God promised
them. That's what's not seen. And that faith is the witness to that. The faith is the evidence of that and the
faith is the means by which they give evidence of their certain conviction of
God's plan and purpose for their life and the promise.
So as I put it down at the bottom, the elders are our
spiritual ancestors, the Old Testament heroes.
The future hope, the certainty of their future hope was attested or
confirmed by their faith. But it doesn't
say the “certainty of their hope” within the text. But it’s supplied or implied by the context
with the previous verse.
So that brings us to verse 3. Now verse 3 is the first in a series of
doctrinal beliefs or persons in the Old Testament running through the
chronology of the Old Testament to talk about the importance of what we
believe, the body of belief. The first
thing is creation. How about that! Creation and this whole argument with
creation and evolution isn't just some distraction that some people want to
think it is. Creation isn’t just
something… “Well, that’s what those Old Testament believers believed because
they didn’t have modern science.”
What this is saying at the very foundation starting point of
that body of beliefs that is going to inform your thinking about your future
destiny is understanding the past. If
you don't have a good understanding of God’s creative actions in Genesis 1 with
a literal Genesis; then how can you have a literal revelation, a literal
future? If you can’t believe what God
said about the past, how can you believe what God said about the future? In other words if you don’t have a good
protology, you can’t have a good eschatology.
If you don’t have a good beginning; you’re not going to have a good
end. The two go together. If you screw up Genesis, you’re going to
screw up Revelation. If you screw up
Revelation, you’ll screw up Genesis. So
we have a starting point there.
In verse 3 we read:
NKJ Hebrews
11:3
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that
the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.
The verb there is noeo
from the noun nous meaning the mind. So
faith again (as I pointed out already) is an act of thinking, an act of
intellection – not emotion, not feeling.
Noeo means to grasp or
comprehend something on the basis of careful thought. So by faith we come to understand. Faith is knowledge.
It’s not like Bertram Russell says that faith is an
irrational belief in something. It
contradicts itself. Faith is rational. Faith is understanding something on the basis
of careful thought. It means to
perceive, to apprehend, to understand, to gain an insight into something, to
think something over with care, to consider it.
That's the idea of understanding.
So faith is based on thought.
That's why we analyze Scripture so we can come to a better understanding
of what we believe.
We'll stop there and we’ll come back pick up verse 3 next
time dealing with the object of our understanding that the worlds were framed
by the Word of God. So, we'll start
with that.