Hebrews Lesson
177
October 22, 2009
NKJ Psalm 119:9 How can a young man
cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your
word.
We’re in Hebrews
11. We're down to about verse 4. While you’re turning there in your
Bibles I wanted to make a couple of comments.
This evening we
had a deacons meeting. Of course, Mark Friedrich is one of our
deacons. He heads up the prep school. He was talking a little bit
about an exercise they've been doing in the teen class. This is important
for parents to be aware of as well. That is that he's been running them
through some exercises on witnessing and why it's important to witness and to
talk to their friends at school and eventually when they get to that point
where they start getting interested in boys or girls (whichever the case may
be), where they start to get interested in dating the importance of finding out
if the other person is a believer, and how you go about that using that as an
opportunity to witness and how to go about that. He's been discovering
some interesting things as he's talked to kids.
“Well, they’re Methodist. Of course they’re
saved.”
“They go to church or they say they’re Christian.”
…just really getting down to
the real issues. I was laughing. It reminded me of the drill sessions
(the grill sessions) that I used to get from my mother. She started that
young. I thought that was a just a great example of parenting. I
remember as early as second grade coming home and I’d say, “I met so-and-so
(this guy) in school today and he lives down the street. I’m going to go
over there and play this afternoon.”
The first question out of her mouth was, “Well, you
need to find out that he's a believer.” She established that pattern very early
so that when I would come home she’d say, “Well is he a Christian?” She
would always say, “Is he a believer?” I’d say, “Well, yeah.” “How do you
know? What did you say? What he say? Did
he actually say that he believed in Jesus Christ as His Savior? Does he think
you need to be baptized?” I mean she would absolutely exegete the whole
conversation.
You know as a parent you establish that so that by the
time they get into those critical years in junior high and high school you’ve
already laid down a whole pattern of behavior there that they know exactly what
to expect when they come home and they say, “Well, I've got to go to dance this
weekend; and I’ve asked so-and-so to go” or “I've been asked by so-and-so to go
to the dance with them.”
They know the first question out of your mouth is
going to be, “Well, are they a believer? How do you know? How did the
conversation go? What did they say? Do they go to church?”
Parents too often forget that children are not their
peers. You may not grill your peers like that, but as a parent who is
responsible for the training of children, you are a training officer like a drill
sergeant in the military. There’s not a 100% parallels there so you know
you’re not going to get up in the morning, blow reveille and call them down to
do pushups. You might do that though. That might help in some cases. You
are responsible before the Lord for how those children turn out when they
become adults and establishing those behavior patterns and their thought
patterns as early as you can to get those set in their minds is really, really
important.
Then of course, as a parent you should be modeling
that as well in your friendships and in your associations. That's of
course where it starts getting real personal.
“Well, that’s getting a little too close. Let's
move on to the next verse.”
But that's where it matters and that's the pattern of
being a good parent, being a good leader, in terms of being a pastor, of being
a church leader is that those kinds of things are set by example. We
learned many things in life, not just because we're taught the principals from
the pulpit, but because we get a visual representation
of those principles being applied through those that we observe.
I remember many years when I grew up in Camp Peniel.
One of the things I valued so much during the summers when I would to up there
in high school was just being around older Christians. And by that I meant they
were 25 or 30 or maybe 22. But you're 16 and you think at 22 they’re old.
And yet you would see college kids that were very concerned about their
spiritual life in and Bible study and thinking through the issues of life in
terms of what the Scripture said. That set such a great example.
You’ve had the same king of things happen in your life
because you’ve going through certain situations you think, “Ah. I remember
when so-and-so who was an older more mature believer went through something
like this and this is how they set an example.”
So that's important. So that's the idea that we
have here in these passages is the example of these Old Testament believers
that even though they may be dead for 6,000 years (for example in the case of
Abel) nevertheless their testimony as the writer states at the end of verse 4, the
testimony still is alive.
NKJ Hebrews 11:4 By faith Abel offered to God
a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he
was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and through it
That is through his faith and through His example.
he being dead still speaks.
So we also need to learn as parents teaching your
children having a regular time of Bible study with the family is very important,
modeling that decision making process before your children, husbands before
your wives – you’ve got decisions to make.
“Well, let's go to the Scripture and find parallel
circumstances, parallel situations and think through how this biblical figure
either blew it or didn't blow it and what the principles are that we learn from
that.”
That's what we see the writer of Hebrews doing in
Hebrews 11. He's going through the roster of spiritual leaders in the Old
Testament, key people in the Old Testament, focusing on their
testimony. That testimony is a witness. It is the evidence of
something in their life, their spiritual life. So faith as we saw him in
verse 1 says:
NKJ Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen.
…because what faith is doing
is it is believing something that isn't seem. Ultimately it's not based on
empiricism or rationalism. It is based on believing something that God has
said because God said it. So it is the faith, that faith and the life that
comes, the result that comes in the life from the act of believing God. When
you believe God says to do X, if you believe it you do it. When you do it, that gives a visible witness before the angels and
before men of the faith that of course can’t be seen; and the object of the
faith, which is the promise of God, the promise of God being a key idea all the
way through Hebrews.
So last time we looked at the example of Abel and
towards the end it got to be a little hurry so I wanted to just go back clean
up one or two things before we move on that by faith Abel offered to God a more
excellent sacrifice than Cain.
NKJ Hebrews 11:4 By faith Abel
offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained
witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and through it he
being dead still speaks
It is that act of believing that culminates in a right
action, an obedient action that establishes a witness or an attestation of that
which is not seen. It attests to it, that the idea of being a
testimony.
The word that’s translated there is the same word
where we get our word witness or testimony, but it has this idea of
commendation or confirmation or testimony. All of these are ideas that are
very close to one another. So we have to I think massage the Word a little
bit. If we look at martureo we think
that’s just always means to witness. There are shades of meaning there
that make a little bit more sense, to clarify the passage a little more.
As I pointed out last time, one of the questions that
come up in this is just on the nature of the sacrifice. Was is Abel’s
attitude versus Cain’s attitude or is it the kind of sacrifice that was
offered? This phrase “more excellent sacrifice” in Hebrews 11:4 suggests
(You couldn’t hang the whole doctrine on this) what is confirmed by other
passages that it is the quality of the sacrifice because it was what God said to
do, what God said to bring. This is always an issue. You will hear if
you have ever been around (I think I said this last time) Bible teachers, you
listen to KHCB, you listen to some other people talk about this you may, you
may (probably will) run into those who say, “No, it wasn't an issue of bringing
a blood sacrifice versus bringing a gift from the produce of the field.
It was their attitude.”
That really does miss the boat here for a couple of
different reasons. It's not just the quality of Abel’s faith; but it is
the quality of the sacrifice. It is that he brought the kind of sacrifice that
God had instructed him.
Now somebody may say, “Well, how do you know?” Well,
you're not told clearly anywhere in Genesis 3 about sacrifices – any kind
of sacrifice. So whatever you say has got to be somewhat of a theological
deduction on the basis of the rest of Scripture. One of the ideas that has
really leaked in (I don't think it's a good idea. I disagree with it very
strongly) is the idea that you just interpret stuff in light of what that
author says or you just interpret it in terms of what would've been understood
by the original audience. It has become more dominant. I've seen among
Old Testament scholars in the last few years to use this methodology and to say
that you can’t say that the serpent in Genesis 3 is Satan because nowhere in
Genesis does the text identify the serpent as Satan; nowhere at all. The
only place that that’s identified is in Revelation 12, the dragon, the serpent
of old.
So you can’t go to something written 3,000 years later
to define something that’s written earlier. That's the methodological
assumption. The problem is that Revelation 12 actually does define who
that serpent is. There are indications in the Old Testament that that was
understood. It’s just these kinds of things that leak into hermeneutics
that start causing major shifts in people's theology and the orientation of
seminaries and things of that nature. It's the same pattern that we
saw. You go back to the end of the 19th century and the
influence of the human viewpoint thinking that came from the rationalistic
schools in Germany in the 19th century that threw out inerrancy and
infallibility.
But now we live in the world of this crazy postmodern
thinking where you can hold to two opposites and say, “Oh well. I believe in
both of them. Everything's just fine.” I've heard faculty
members at major schools say when questioned on something like this say, “Well,
that may be what…”
I heard somebody says this about the doctrinal
statement at Dallas Seminary. A faculty member there said, “That may be
what Chafer intended; but that's not how I interpret that doctrinal
statement.”
This is just very dangerous. But I'm not picking
on Dallas because this is something that is happening all around evangelicalism
today because the church always reflects and imitates the trends of the world
system, the thinking of the world system around us, which is why Paul says,
“Don’t be pressed into conformity. Don't be pushed into conformity with the
thinking of the world around you; but rather be transformed by the renewing of
your mind.”
So you have these indications in here that Abel offers
a sacrifice; and it's the sacrifice that is more excellent, that is
superior. This is backed up by passages such as Hebrews 12:24.
NKJ Hebrews
12:24 to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of
sprinkling that speaks better things than that
of Abel.
That is the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice is superior to
that which is better things than that of Abel which refers actually to his
blood because it was his blood that cried out from the ground in Genesis
4:10.
A better passage is 1 John 3:12 which clearly says in
the last phrase that Cain’s works were evil and his brother’s
righteous. It was the works. It is what they did that had the
qualitative difference, not the attitude that Cain brought or that Abel
brought.
NKJ Genesis 4:4 Abel also brought of the
firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And the LORD respected Abel and his
offering,
So these verses put
that focus on the offering. Now we know from other passages of Scripture
and from the implications in Genesis 3 that God had to have killed an animal in
order to clothe Adam and Eve after they sinned. We assume; but I think
that these are the kinds of things that are justified that when God sacrificed
that animal and skinned it that a lot had to go on there. He had to show them
how to skin the animal. He was showing them what death was. He was
giving them a picture, a real example of what He meant when He said that death
was coming into the world. So there was instruction on that. They
would see everything related to death and this tremendous visual example.
Furthermore another thing that we realize from this is
that it's not until after the flood that men are authorized to eat meat. So
why is Abel raising sheep prior to that? You can say, “Well, for the wool,
of course, and for the skin, for the leather as well as for sacrifices.”
So they were not using the animals for meat at that
particular time. So the idea of a blood sacrifice and the necessity of
that is something that runs all the way through the Scripture.
Having looked at that, the writer goes on to the next
example which comes from Genesis 5, right in the midst of the first genealogy
where most people sort of get bored and they read through the Bible they start
coming to this list of names that they're not familiar with and so-and-so begat
so and so-and-so on so begat so-and-so and the next thing you know their eyes
sort of glaze over and they fall asleep because they don't understand the significance
of those genealogies. What is significant about the genealogies is that in
Genesis 3 God said the seed of the woman would defeat the seed of the
serpent. Now you're going to trace the seed (from father to son to
grandson) all the way through from generation to generation all the way down to
Noah. Then when you get to Genesis 11 after the flood you’re going to trace
the line of the seed again. Each time you get to subsequent genealogies,
there is this historical record treating all of these people as if they were
real flesh and blood historical people. These aren’t legends. They're
not fables or myths or morality stories that were somehow generated just to
teach principles. Those principles are embedded in flesh and blood people
who lived real lives who were born at a specific time and who died at a
specific time showing that God's Word is operating in real history. This
isn't just some sort of mythological history.
So in Hebrews 11:5 we read:
NKJ Hebrews 11:5 By faith Enoch was taken
away so that he did not see death, "and was not found, because God had
taken him"; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased
God.
There's that word
group again. Martureo
is the verb meaning as a witness or to provide a testimony or attestation of
something or a confirmation or commendation of something. Each of those
words you have to look up in English and kind of see what their various shades
of meaning are in order to get one that fits the text and doesn't bring in
other ideas that may imply some sort of works salvation or something
else.
Remember these
individuals are all justified before they ever get to the action that’s being emphasized
in these in these stories. We’ll see that a little more with Enoch. It’s
less clear with Abel because little is said about him. Even less said
about Enoch, but there are some things that are the structure (grammatical
structure) of this sentence in the Greek certainly indicates that he pleased
God prior to being taken. So that that pleasing of God in terms of his
faith is an action that is early and that the faith is related to something in
his life. As we get into Noah and others will see that clearly that
they’re are justified. We say that they are saved (justified) long before
the particular incident that is being emphasized in the text.
NKJ Hebrews 11:5 By faith Enoch was taken
Now what the writer is emphasizing here is that the
core issue in this first rapture (because that's what it is.) Of course
the word that’s used here in the Greek isn’t the same word that you have over
in I Thessalonians 4; but it's the same idea. It means to transfer
something, to change it, to move it to another location. It's the same
idea that you have in the rapture. That word there, harpazo, means to be snatched.
What happened is that one day
Enoch is walking along and suddenly he walks off with God. He’s just having a
close conversation with God and walks from earth into heaven. This is seen in
Genesis 5:21-4. We're told in Genesis 5:21 that Enoch lived 65 years. That
was his father. Enoch lives 65 years and became the father of
Methuselah.
NKJ Genesis 5:21 Enoch lived
sixty-five years, and begot Methuselah.
NKJ Genesis 5:22 After
he begot Methuselah, Enoch walked with God three hundred years, and had sons
and daughters.
So that would
make him 365 years old at this particular time.
Verse 23 says:
NKJ Genesis 5:23 So all the days of
Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years.
NKJ Genesis 5:24 And Enoch walked with God;
and he was not, for God took him.
Very clear, very
abrupt.
The first time I
learned this I don’t know, I may have been in the 5th or 6th
grade. I learned this from reading Ripley's Believe It or Not. I loved that book. I remember
discovering reading about the 5th or 6th grade. The
sentence there was “Methuselah was the oldest man in the Bible, but he died
before his father did.” Isn’t that right? Methuselah was the oldest
man in the Bible, but he died before his father did. Doesn’t that sound like an
odd contradiction? That’s because Enoch never died. He never
physically died. He just was transferred; translated directly from his
physical mortal body into his spiritual body that obviously wouldn’t have gone
to heaven from what we have understood from other revelation. He went into the
place the Old Testament saints went. He just goes through this translation
process that took him from his mortal body to his temporary transitional
body.
As we look at
this verse though there' are a few things that we ought to emphasize just to be
able to understand it a little more clearly. First of all the emphasis is
on faith. As I’ve said before this is not the faith that a person
exercises to be saved or justified. This is the faith that comes after
they’re saved, after they have trusted in the promise of God Old Testament,
which was future, the promise of God to provide a savior. Then after that
comes their life with God. That’s the emphasis there. Enoch walked
with God.
This term walking
we run into it many times in the New Testament: walk in the light, walk by
means of the Truth, walk by the Holy Spirit. Walking is a metaphor for a
lifestyle, for living. It’s used that way in a secular context. It’s
used that way in Scripture.
His walking with
God indicates that this was his lifestyle. This was the priority of
Enoch’s life, his relationship with God. He must have had a very close and
personal relationship with God. It's not like a walk with God that you or
I have. This was a much more direct walk with God. When God created
Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden of Eden, the garden was actually
east of Eden. Eden is seen as the dwelling place of God upon the
earth. This was where He would come. He would go to the garden to
walk daily with Adam and Eve to spend time with them, to teach them, to give
them information, to answer questions.
Then when Adam
sinned and they're cast out of the garden, then there is a wall of fire that’s
placed around the garden by this group of cherubs (more than one). There
was a contingent of cherubs. There could have been as many as 100 or 200
that guarded the perimeter of the garden so that man could not reenter the
garden and have access to the Tree of Life and thus live forever avoiding
physical death. But he would still be spiritually dead.
That's another
reason why I think that the main thrust of the warning that man would die when
they ate from fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not
physical death primarily there but spiritual death is that if it was automatic
physical death then they couldn't have circumvented by coming back and having
access to the to the Tree of Life, the fruit of the tree of life. So
they’re kept out.
Sunday I went out to lunch with some people and one of
the questions that came up was (People ask the most interesting questions
sometimes), “Well, how big was the Garden of Eden. How big do you
think it was? Could Adam and the woman leave the garden? Could they go
out and go around the Earth? Could they come back in?”
I think they could because of the dominion mandate
there in Genesis 1:26-27 that they were to multiply and fill the earth and
exercise dominion over all the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and the
beasts of the field. I think they could leave to go out and explore and
learn all about all that God had created for
them. But the garden was a special area. This was their
home. This was where they would meet with God. It was near to where
God had a location.
But we’re not told that when they were cast out of the
garden that God left the earth. We’re not told that. Now what I want
you to do is hold your place here in Hebrews 11 because when we get to the next
verse dealing with Noah we’ll go to Genesis 6 anyway. I want you to turn with
me back to Genesis 6. Genesis 6 talks about the conditions that are on the
earth before the judgment of the flood with Noah. In Genesis 6:3 we read
in the New King James (The same thing's true with the King James Bible and
probably some the other translations.)
NKJ Genesis 6:3
And the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever,
That seems to make sense. There is a context
there where man is being disobedient so there's a conflict between God and man.
But the Hebrew word that is translated strive is only used one time in the
Hebrew Old Testament. And it’s only used one time in any surviving Hebrew
literature. So we have to basically guess from context as to what that
means. That's what those translators of the King James Bible
did. They guessed. What seems to make sense here? Ah, well there
is conflict between God and man, so let’s translate this "strive".
Things like that get embedded in tradition and in
history. Later on when you think there's evidence to go another direction,
it's hard to do that because people don't like familiar words in the Bible
messed with. We learned that back with the Revised Standard Version
controversy in the ‘50’s when the liberal translators of the Revised Standard
Version decided that Isaiah 7:14 shouldn’t be translated that “a virgin will
conceive” but that “a young woman will conceive.” Sometimes these
scholars, you know, they get so educated beyond on their ability to think
because the passage says that you'll see a sign that a young woman will get
pregnant. Now how can that be a sign? It happens every day. I
bet there's going to be at least a thousand young women get pregnant in Houston
tonight. You know, what's so special about that? But this is a sign,
so there’s go to be something unique about this.
The word translated virgin there. Actually there's
some strong evidence that it should be understood as virgin in a number of
different contexts and especially there! But man, there was such a hue and
cry uttered by the conservatives in the 50’s when the Revised Standard Version
came out that it hurt their sales. So ever since then these Bible
translation publishers have been very careful about not messing with
traditional familiar terminology because it might hurt their bottom line. They
do want to at least turn a profit in their Bible publications.
Well, this word that is translated strive is a word
that in the 20th century we've discovered it’s cognate. That
means it’s the same root, but it’s a little different in languages that are
very close to Hebrew. For example Canaanite and Aramaic and Hebrew are
closer to one another than Spanish and Italian or Latin. Arabic is very
close to Hebrew. I'm told that in Israel that an Israeli that has grown up
speaking Hebrew if they listen carefully to someone speaking Arabic they can
kind of get a sense of what they're talking about because the languages are so
very close. Well, when you study these other languages—and that's
one of the things that you have to do if you're doing word studies and you have
words that are used less than five or six times in the Hebrew Old Testament or
Greek New Testament—you have to go out beyond the Scriptures, look at
other places, look at cognate languages.
I remember when I was in seminary having to learn the
Acadian alphabet and having to learn the Arabic alphabet and all these
different things so that I could go look these words up. Of course as
soon as the course was over with I forgot how to read those alphabets. But
it’s all still in the file somewhere. Thank God we have computers to help
us now.
But one of the things that you discover is that
Aramaic and Arabic and Acadian, the cognate to this word and there's a lot of
examples – doesn’t mean strive. It means abide. What God is
saying here is, “My Spirit shall not abide (or live)”. That’s the same as
the word meno
in the New Testament. God will not live with man forever because God is
still has a dwelling place on the earth in Eden.
You ask the question, “Well, why does God after the
flood establish or delegate adjudication in murder trials?”
Because before the flood, God’s the one who's adjudicating
the affairs of men. That's exactly what you see in Genesis 4 with
Cain and Abel. God is the One who's coming to deal with the crime of
murder. It makes perfect sense from this evidence that God is still
present on the earth. And it is Enoch walking with God. This is
profound. He’s not just walking with God in terms of having a good
spiritual life. He is physically spending time with the pre-incarnate Lord
Jesus Christ in the antediluvian earth. He’s spending so much time with
God one day that he just walks off with Him and just isn't going to go through
physical death at all. We can't even imagine what that was like. It
just says that he walked with God and he was not. There he was and then he
was gone – physical body and everything, just translated and moved right
on.
So Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death. That
idea of seeing death is really an idiom for experiencing death. He doesn't
experience physical death. I put it in quotations in the way I put it on
the screen because literally that next phrase is a direct quote out of the
Septuagint. “He was not found because God had taken him.” That indicates
that they looked for him. Where did he go? Methuselah is out there looking
for his dad. His sons are looking for their grandfather. But they
can't find him. He just walked off with God.
And then we read:
for
before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God.
Now notice the way that is translated
there. You can go with me. Keep your place back in Genesis 6 because
we’ll go back there when we get to Noah in a minute. But when we look at
that verse in Hebrews 11 it says:
for before he was taken he had this testimony,
That indicates that the testimony was there before
he's taken. So the testimony comes. That’s the attestation of his
faith, his actions of believing and acting upon what God told him was there
before he left. But it's a little fuzzy in the last phrase for before he
was taken he had this testimony that he pleased God. It's translated there
as if it’s saying that the testimony was that he pleased God and that's not the
way it's really best to be understood in the original.
The verb there for testimony is from martureo. It's
a perfect passive indicative. The perfect tense indicates completed
action. It is already done in the past. Passive means that he receives
a validation or attestation of something that he has done.
It should read: “before he was taken he had already
been attested.” It has already happened. That's the perfect tense. Been
tested is the passive voice. It had already been attested; and then you
don't have a purpose clause there that he pleased God. It's an infinitive,
but it completes the idea of the main verb. It had already attested to
please God. He had already been validated in his life. He was
pleasing God. The word there that's translated pleasing God is a word that
indicates that the way he lived was acceptable. It was satisfactory, that
God is as it were approving of his actions.
So what it means is first of all is Enoch pleased God
because of his consistent obedience and his walk by means of faith. That
pleasing of God was evidence or testimony. It attested to the reality of
his faith and trust in what God told him. Then the result of that was that
God then transferred him directly to heaven. So sort of an expanded
translation just to give us the idea of the nuances there:
By faith Enoch
was taken away so that he would not see death.
That's really a purpose clause there. The reason
he was taken away was so that he would not go through death. It is a clear
construction of an infinitive of purpose there. And he was not found
because God had taken him. That’s a quote from the Old Testament.
For before he was
transferred, he had already been attested to please God
It had already been validated. It had already
been commended as pleasing God.
Then what the writers is going to do in the next verse
is having mentioned this idea of pleasing God he's going to take sort of an
aside to explain something about the relationship between this idea of faith and
pleasing God and what this idea of being attested to is all about. That
comes in verse 6, a verse that many people have memorized and many people quote
when they talk about faith and they talk about the Christian life. It states:
NKJ Hebrews 11:6 But without faith
it is impossible to please Him,
Speaking of God
for he who comes to God must believe that He is,
That is, that He exists.
and that He
is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
Now “rewarding someone for diligently seeking Him”
isn’t talking about justification because that's not what's going on with
Enoch. That’s not what's going on with Abel. That’s not going on with
anybody in this passage. All the examples that we have all the way through
this passage are examples of believers walking by faith, believing God and
acting upon that in their life after their justification. So it has to do
with reward rather than the free gift of salvation.
See there's a difference between a gift and a
reward. A gift is something that you just are given freely. You don't
do anything to earn or deserve it. It is freely given to you. A reward is
something you have done something for. You're rewarded for it. You
have given somebody information about a crime so you get a reward. But
you've done something for it. You have worked for it and so you get an
extra bonus in your salary because of the fact that you've met certain goals in
sales or something like that. That is something that you do something
for. So we're not talking about salvation justification because that is by
grace and that is a gift.
NKJ Ephesians 2:8
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and
that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
NKJ Ephesians 2:9 not of works,
But a reward is based on works. So there's a distinction
drawn here. What the writer is saying is: without faith you can't please
God. That's the point of application, talking about Enoch. Enoch
walked so consistently by faith, and it pleased God. God puts the stamp of
approval on the life of Enoch.
What’s interesting is we don't know anything about
it. There's only one verse in the New Testament that deals with Enoch
other than this one and that’s in Jude 14 which mentions a prophecy in the book
of Enoch (1 Enoch) which is not even an apocryphal book. It was a
non-canonical book. It was never considered by the Jews to have any claim
to being inspired Scripture. It didn't even make the first cut. So
it's it just out there. But there are a lot of people, in fact we have it
now and people get it, read it and there's an interesting prophecies in there
and some interesting things that people want to speculate about because they
think somehow it might have some value. But people even from the inter-testamental period between the Old Testament and the New
Testament were just fascinated by this mysterious Enoch who just walked with
God and was not. So you have an apocalypse of Enoch that was written in
the intertestamental period. There are 3 or 4 other books that were
written. Philo wrote a bunch of stuff about Enoch and it's all just
speculation and guesswork because there was no hard data. So it's easy to
make stuff up about somebody when there's no evidence of anything in their life. But we don't know anything about him except
that God has said his life of faith and walk with the Lord was so consistent
that it pleased God such that God did something unique in him.
Only one other person gets translated directly from
physical body into the afterlife and that's Elijah in the chapter that we're
studying in 2 Kings 2. In the storm there Elijah is taken directly to
heaven.
So without faith it's impossible to please God. The
word there for impossible is as strongly stated as it possibly can be. That
means when we are not walking by faith and walking by sight (2 Corinthians 5),
then we're not pleasing God. We can only please God when we are walking by
faith and that means that we're trusting God. It's not faith in faith as I
pointed out last week; but it is faith in something that God has said to us: a
promise, various areas of instruction, mandates. We are
believing that to be true and it causes a certain action on our
part.
So without faith it is impossible to please God. Here
we have the word for pleasing. It’s euresteo. It's a perfect
active infinitive because once again it’s emphasizing that sort of completed
action.
NKJ Hebrews 11:6 But without faith
it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must
believe that He is,
Now the interesting thing about this particular passage
(especially in the Scripture, especially in the Greek) is that the phrases are
really mixed up because of emphasis. The writer starts off saying “for to
believe it is necessary, the one who comes to God that He is.” See that
doesn’t make much sense if you take it in that word order; but that's because
the writer of Scripture moves that infinitive to believe up to the very front
for emphasis. Then he puts the verb “it is unnecessary” second because he
wants to make sure you really understand that there are no options here. It's
absolutely unequivocally necessary. It is sole condition for pleasing
God. Then one who comes must believe that He is. Then all you have
there is just simply the verb which contains the pronoun. So it emphasizes
God's existence. You must believe that He is, number one. That He's
real and that the existence of God is as real to you as the existence of your
mother or your father or your best friend or anybody you see in this
room. That's the idea of faith. Faith is really acting when the
object of faith is just as real to you as anything you can touch or feel or
presently experience.
The writer says he who comes to God must believe first
of all that He is and secondly (These are two different things) that He is a rewarder
of those who seek Him. The way this is structured in the Greek, the emphasis
is on those who seek Him. It is separated out. These clauses separate
these out as two distinct ideas. One that God is and second that those who
seek Him believe He is a rewarder of them. So the idea there is God
rewards those who diligently seek Him. In other words salvation is one thing
because it gives you justification and your eternal destiny is secure, but
the second part is there is something that we earn which are rewards that are
related to the amount of time that we put in in
faith.
Now that sounds really challenging doesn’t it?
I can tell by looking at most of you that you are thinking “Boy, this is really serious. How in the world
am I ever going to measure up?”
One of things that I've always enjoyed about this
particular chapter is that there is the biggest bunch of screw-ups in the Bible
listed in Hebrew 11. As we go through this we’re going to see that they
failed. I mean, the first two guys there is nothing negative. Abel
didn't live long enough probably and nothing is said about Enoch so we don't
know how they messed up. But when we get to Noah, he has this great
victory where one big issue in life is: are you going to trust God to save your
family and build an Ark? (And he does) We get to Abraham and we
studied Abraham. Abraham made a lot of bad decisions. He made a lot of bad
decisions that are worse than decisions I make. Maybe mine are worse than
his. I don’t know. But Abraham ends up in this chapter.
We get down to Jephthah and Gideon and Sampson and we
think, “Man, Samson. Samson was just a womanizing out of control wild
man.” He ends up here. Why? Because at key turning points (key times)
in people's lives, it is critical: are you going to trust God or
not? And this is going to shape the rest of your life. And are you
willing to trust God at that moment when everything is riding on that decision?
Are you willing to truly take a stand for the Lord Jesus Christ in Scripture to
do what the Bible says? And that's going to make all the difference. You
know I think it's helpful to remember that because we all tend to get a little
too hard on ourselves, not that we shouldn't be. I’m not saying just give
into your sin nature, that it’s not really all that bad. But God I think is not
going to be a harsh judge at the Judgment Seat of Christ. He is going to be a
gracious judge. God has to have a lot of grace to put these guys in this
chapter. That gives me a lot of encouragement that maybe I’m not as large
a screw up as I think sometimes.
So the principle is without faith (That is without
that faith rest drill, without that growth in the practice, the application of the
Word of God; it's impossible to please Him. Explanation: for he who comes to
God must believe that He is (number one) and that He rewards those who
diligently seek Him. Is that true about your life?
Even David with all the great sins he did, God said
that: “Even though he messed up to the max, at the very core his heart is
focused on Me.”
That's what drives David, is his relationship with
God. Does that mean he didn't really mess up at times? No, but he
really did. But at the core was a desire to please the Lord and to obey
him.
Now we come to our next example in verse 7.
NKJ Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah, being
divinely warned of things not yet seen,
There we
go. The writer keeps tying together these previous phrases. Faith is
the evidence of things not seen.
The content of the warning and the idea there is
accurately communicated in this translation. The idea of the warning here
isn't just a warning. It is a divine warning. The word indicates that
there is specific supernatural information communicated to warn Noah.
Actually the participle there should be translated to
the temporal participle. Since it’s in the aorist tense it should be
“after he was divinely warned.” First he was warned; then he does
something. There is a time sequence there.
What was he told? It’s going to rain. It hadn't rained
before. When God used that word for rain it was a word that Noah had never
heard before. Nobody had ever seen rain. Nobody had any idea what
that was. But God explained it to Noah. He knew what it was going to
entail. No one had ever seen rain before. No one had seen a flood
before. He didn’t live in an area that was near one of the oceans. So he
started building a boat. It took him 100 years to build the Ark. One
reason it took him so long was because he had an evangelistic mission to warn
the people of that day. So he did. So he preached the Word, the
warning, the message of God's grace for over a hundred years and didn't get a
single taker. But he was a success.
See this is one of the problems we have in modern 20th
century Western civilization is we think success is measured in quantifiable
results. But as far as God is concerned, what's important in a servant (and
we’re all servants of God)? This is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:2.
NKJ 1 Corinthians 4:2 Moreover it is
required in stewards that one be found faithful.
What is required of a servant is that they be found
faithful. It doesn’t say that what is required of a servant is that they
have a lot of converts. He doesn't say that what’s required of a lot of
servants is they memorize all the Bible, what’s required of a servant is that
they pray 10 times a day. Now what is required of a servant is that
they're found faithful to God.
So Noah was faithful and he fulfilled the mission that
God gave him.
NKJ Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah,
being divinely warned of things not yet seen,.
…that there would be this
great flood. Then the text says he was moved with Godly fear.
moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving
of his household,
This is an interesting word. It's the Greek word eulabeomai. It’s
an aorist passive participle, which indicates that it has an action that is
related to the verb, previously to the verb. But it is really used
adverbially here to talk about the verb. The main verb here is to
prepare. It modifies that word prepare and it explains the manner of that
preparation. So we would call is an adverbial participle of manner because
it's saying something about the attitude he had when he went about building the
Ark.
That next verb there indicates the construction of the
Ark and it means to prepare something, to construct something, to build or to
create it. We should understand that this means he was moved not with
godly fear. God isn't anywhere in this. There's no word translated
God or godly. It is a word though that indicates some sort of reverential
regard for something or respect for something. Its other uses in the
Scripture indicate being anxious about something or concerned. I think that
really brings it out as I said as I put it in a sort of an expanded translation
it's not just that he responded out of respect for God. He basically
responds out of the fear of God because he knows what's going to happen. God
made it very clear how He was going to destroy the earth. There was a
sense of real awe and fear and concern that dominated his attitude. It is
respect for God’s authority. But it is a respect for what God can
do. He understands the power of God and that when He says He's going to
destroy the whole earth by water that that is extremely serious and that God is
going to do exactly that. So he acts.
Faith looks at the statement of God and says if that
is true, then I need to be doing this. The “this” is what God told him to
do which was to construct the Ark. So he constructed the Ark for
salvation. And idea there isn’t just for justification but for the physical
deliverance of his house. That is his family.
Then the Scripture goes on to say:
by which he condemned the world and became heir of
the righteousness which is according to faith
His faith stands as an evidence, as a witness, as
someone who takes the stand in a trial except here you have the physical
representation of Noah doing exactly what God said to do and everybody else is
the world is thumbing their nose at God and doing what they want to do and they
are hostile to God and ridiculing Noah and laughing at him for building this
big boat and thinking it's going to rain because that's never happened before.
But his life, his obedience, his action of acting on what God said is what
provides the testimony that condemns the world. It is evidence that they
could have been doing the same thing; but they didn't because they rejected the
Word, the message of the gospel. As a result he became an heir of
righteousness, which is by faith.
The concept there is that becoming an heir of
righteousness comes by faith. That is post-salvation faith. Now we
get this idea; we have gone over this before in Romans 8:17. Now the white
lettering up there depicts the verse as it’s punctuated in most English
translations. Remember there was no punctuation in the original
Greek. They didn’t even have spaces between the words.
The second rendering of the verse in yellow has re-punctuated
it so that there is distinction between heirs with God and joint heirs with
Christ. The normal rendering is “if children heirs also, heirs of God and
fellow heirs of Christ” as if they are referring to the same thing. But
that would mean because of the last clause (the conditional clause) that to be
an heir of God and fellow heir of Christ which in the context at least some of
this has to be related to salvation. It would be conditioned upon
suffering with Christ. If we don't suffer, well you’re not saved. So
the gospel would be believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and suffer with Him. Then
you’ll be saved.
That can’t work so we have the re-punctuate. If
we put punctuation (a comma) only after heirs of God to distinguish it from
joint heirs with Christ then we have two categories; heirs of God which relates
to every believer and joint heirs with Christ for those who press on in their
spiritual life. As a result of pressing on and living in the cosmic
system, one result is that we're going to suffer. That doesn't mean that
we're going to be whining and moaning about how hard life is; but that we’re
going to go through various tests and circumstances to stretch our faith and
test our faith and to build our faith. So that's the focus here is that
only by walking by faith do we become an heir of righteousness. That
concept of an heir of righteousness is parallel to the concept of being rewarded
that we saw in verse 6. That is parallel to the concept of having that
ongoing testimony that still speaks in relationship to Able so that this is
part of the post salvation spiritual life.
Now next time we’ll come back and review that just a
little bit, expand the inheritance idea and then we’ll really see this
developed as we get into the next example which is
from Abraham in verse 8 through 12.
Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.