Hebrews: The New Covenant Administration of Christ Max A Forsythe (c) Anno Domini 2005

From the Pulpit at Pilgrim's Rest Presbyterian Church in America

The Nature of Faith
For the Lord’s Day:  the 15^th of May 2005

Hebrews 11: 1-3

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  For by it the people of old received their commendation.  By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. ”

Introduction:  Years ago, I read a story of a carriage driver in a coastal town of England.  As “cabbies” went, he was fairly prosperous, having several horses and vehicles as well as a home and stable to maintain his business income.  One of the local gentry hired him to take a party to their yacht and he was told to wait at the dock until the family returned.  However, once at sea – the noble decided to sail on to the Mediterranean for an extended cruise, leaving the local cabbie in the lurch.  At night fall, the driver returned home to care for his horse and family, early the next morning he returned to await “his lordship’s return.”  Day after day he returned and as the months went on the whole town was making fun of his forlorn hope.  Since his whole business enterprise was now bound up in waiting – every other source of income dried up.  Over time, he had to sell off his surplus animals and vehicles to make ends meet.  And yet he announced to one an all that he would complete the implied contract given to him.

Another traveler in the Mediterranean ran into the man who had hired the cabbie and told him all the latest gossip at the supreme idiocy of the cabbie in question.  While the man responsible took it all in, he delayed his return another six months.  Finally after a year and a half at least, the yacht sailed home.  The family stepped onto the dock, loaded into the carriage and the “cabbie” returned them home.  The next day, his lordship not only made his debt good, but took such a loyal and faithful servant into his own household.  Many would think this story too fanciful to be true!  And yet, we have to remember that this is how the world looks at our lifelong endeavor of faith in God and Christ.

One co-worker once observed that those of us who believed in the final return of Christ must indeed live in a fool’s paradise.  Why not “eat drink and be merry” like all the rest of the world – they wondered out loud.  I simply pointed out that they were free to bet their life on the principles that they believed in, just as I was free to do the same, but with different principles from theirs.  And then I added if they were right, and life ended abruptly as they believed with no afterlife at all, there would be no harm done.  However, if I was right and they were wrong – they would have hell to pay for their spiritual stupidity.  End of discussion!

Development:  Now, obviously – the gospel of grace and the hope ingrained in our soul is much more than the demonstration of faith and hope which we display day by day in living our lives before a pagan world.  F.F. Bruce parses the words here in the Greek to demonstrate the real “substance” and “confidence” that is given to all who have come to faith in Jesus Christ.  He writes of the Old Covenant personalities that “there were many men and women who had nothing but the promises of God to rest upon, without any visible evidence that these promises would ever be fulfilled; yet so much did these promises mean to them that they regulated the whole course of their lives in their light.”  He continues with the observation that while “the promises related to a state of affairs belonging to the future; these people acted as if that state of affairs were already present, so convinced were they that God cold and would fulfil what He had promised.  In other words, they were men and women of faith.”

Now, the key word here in verse one is “hypostasis,” which you see translated as “assurance” in our esv translation.  A literal translation will read “the reality.”  The word was used earlier in Hebrews 1:3 where the Apostle notes that Christ is “the exact imprint of [God’s] nature.”  Further, in Hebrews 3: 14, Bruce tells us that “believers are said to be Christ’s associates if ‘we hold our original confidence firm to the end.’”  Earlier, I had used the word’s “substance” and “real essence” as opposed to what the worldly merely considers a superstitious opinion.

John Owen quotes Oecumenius who observes: “Faith is the essence of these things, and their subsistence, causing them to be, and to be present, because it believes them.” 

Commentator John Brown paraphrases the first verse of chapter eleven to wring out further meaning and understanding:  “Faith gives, as it were, a real subsistence in the mind to things hoped for; it makes evident things which are not seen – it gives a present existence to things future, a visible form to things unseen.  A promise is made of future good – a revelation of something not discoverable by sense or reason.  To the unbeliever the promised good, the revealed truths, are an unsubstantial vision – mere creatures of the imagination; to the believer they are substantial realities.”

In Romans 8: 24b-25, the Apostle Paul observes:  “Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”  Thus, the vital impact of faith upon the believer is the framing of our spiritual mind and then our living demonstration of that spiritual hope which is in us.

The next important Greek word in verse one is “conviction.”  Bruce notes that “Physical eyesight produces conviction or evidence of visible things; faith is the organ which enables people to see the invisible order.”  I would, of course change his last sentence to read:  faith is the Spirit given insight that enables us to know the divine reality.  And in the working of the Holy Spirit in our hearts – thereby the conviction that is sown is driven deep enough to hold us tight through thick and thin.

Of course, there are times in our lives when our spiritual convictions run down, not from any failure in the faith once given, but in our understanding and application of that faith to our lives.  Like David, we can even loose temporarily the assurance of hope given to us.  This is when we must be challenged in the sense of the Letter of James to prove the hope that is within us and to get off our behinds and return to worship if we have been delinquent or to reorder our lives yet again to demonstrate the calling of faith given to us.  Well does F.F. Bruce observe that the Apostle could have proceeded from Hebrews 10: 39 to Hebrews 12: 1, “but first he encourages [us] by reminding [us] of examples of faith in earlier days.”  The lengthy list of the faithful here in Hebrews Eleven is meant to encourage us through our own dark days and to help us realize how much worse other people had it and still they persevered to “run with patience the race that is set before us.”

Application: That thought brings us to our verse two for today:  “For by [faith] the people of old received their commendation.”  This verse will introduce us to the extensive listings in the remainder of this chapter, but first the Apostle will reinforce what he means by saying that faith is a conviction in reference to things not seen.  Thus, in verse three we read: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

This is similar to the classic intellectual proof for God.  In such an argument it was common to suggest that the very presence of a hand held watch was more than adequate proof for there being a watchmaker.  Once a student objected to that analysis, so I took up his favorite theory of evolution and demonstrated the absurdity of the theory with an example.  For some reason, I had a broken crock in a bag for someone.  So I took out a piece and suggested how I might have found it in the ground, and that if I was smart, I would return it and dig it up later once it had evolved into a useful product.  I know that is a bad example, but sometimes it just isn’t worth the effort to wrangle with people who believe in evolution.  They are so blinded by false evidence that they cannot conceive the obvious evidence that creation demands a Creator.  Paul argues in Romans that this is sufficient to convict all men that there is a God. 

And so, the Apostle uses the ordering of creation to establish not only the creative work of God in Christ, but also to demonstrate the solid foundation for believing not only that there is a God, but also that He has spoken and finally that His word can be trusted.  But, this is only the beginning in this grand chapter that celebrates the work and witness of the faithful down through the millennia.  This statement in verse three only establishes the stage where the drama of God’s unfolding promises was worked out through the lives and witness of his servants.

There in is the challenge for us: to demonstrate our faith in the way we live and the testimony we share with all men.  Our faith and witness has just as firm a foundation of that of the universe and the world we live in.  May we be so convinced and may we bold to share the substance of our convictions.  Amen.

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PREACHING RESOURCES

 Brown, John.  A Geneva Series Commentary:  Hebrews.
Brown, Raymond.  The Bible Speaks Today:  The Message of Hebrews.
Bruce, F.F.  The Epistle to the Hebrews.
Owen, John:  Commentary on the Book of Hebrews.
The Holy Bible:  English Standard Version.

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