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Last week, in Hebrews 10, we heard an invitation to draw near to God. This invitation has come after much preparation and a long journey.
Drawing near to God was the whole point of everything we have seen through the story of Israel being rescued and brought into the wilderness of Sinai.
God made a way for them to draw near to him. But it was a temporary way until the final and perfect way was complete.
This new way is the way of Jesus. It is through Jesus that we draw near to God.
His perfect human life, his perfect sacrifice, and his resurrection has given us new life.
It is only in this new life through Jesus Christ that we can draw near to God.
And this is the deep desire of every human, whether they know it or not. Each one of us longs to be near to our Creator.
For it is in his presence, we will find complete satisfaction.
In the light of God’s glory, we will know who we truly are and who good God truly is.
There will come a day when we will have this experience in its fullness. Until then, we are still on a journey.
But it is a journey during which we can increasingly experience new life in Christ.
This is the purpose of obedience, not in order to become saved because of our obedience, but living out our salvation as new people becoming increasingly like Christ in our thoughts, desires, and behaviours.
Last week I said that drawing near to God in this life will require faith. This morning, we will look in more detail what this faith means.
Chapter 11 is the famous “faith” chapter, known by some as the Hall of Faith.
It features many examples of people who have gone before us, who are considered among the faithful.
It is good to learn about the faithful who have gone before us. I love to read biographies and memiores.
One of the more recent ones is the biography of Eugene Peterson, the author of the Message translation of the Bible. Peterson was a pastor for 29 years at the church he planted in the Eastern United States.
He went on to teach at Regent College and in addition to translating the entire Bible into contemporary English, he published several books for pastors, many of which I have read.
He writes as one who has traveled the journey of a pastor, not as one who simply has ideas about the journey.
There is a big difference between someone who knows about something and someone who really has experienced it.
When I am struggling through something, I prefer to listen to the lessons of those who have struggled in the same ways and made it through. Perhaps not unscathed, but they made it.
A key difference between someone who has practiced something and someone who has only speculated about something is that they write or speak not with ideologies or ideas, but with a grounding realism.
Someone can have all sorts of ideas of how to do something, but until they’ve actually tried out those ideas, they do not know whether their ideas will work.
Probably most of them won’t work exactly how they imagined.
Hebrews 11 reminds us that others have gone before us. They have travelled the road of faith and are considered among the faithful even though none of them lived in perfect obedience to God.
We can have confidence in God because of the witness of these people.
Let’s read the first six verses of Hebrews 11. I will spend most of our time here, seeking to paint a picture of the sort of faith that the rest of the chapter is talking about.
The sort of faith that the people are commended for. The sort of faith that will sustain us as followers of Jesus.
[Hebrews 11:1-6]
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead. By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Verse one contains the most succinct definition of faith in the Bible. “Confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
This short and powerful statement describes the typical pattern of faith. It starts with hope in something we do not see, and then we come to know with increasing certainty.
We become persuaded about what we hope for through faith. Faith is not mere belief, but as I wrote in this week’s letter, it includes action.
Christian faith is not blind faith. We do not carry on through our lives blindly hoping that what we believe is true without knowing with certainty. Faith doesn’t oppose knowledge—it anticipates it.
Faith is a preview of knowledge, like the song of a bird that announces the coming summer. Faith reaches up toward heaven, sensing the shape of what will unfold, even though it can’t yet see the full details or explain them.
This is what happened when Jesus first called His disciples, saying, “Follow me.” Why would He expect them to follow Him when they didn’t yet know Him?
Jesus understood that they had to walk with Him first, that only through experience could they truly come to know Him.
So he appealed not to their knowledge, but to their capacity for faith.
He asked them to offer the trust of their hearts, a trust that looks forward, like a promise.
He essentially said, “Walk with me, and I’ll show you the green pastures and quiet waters of life.” He extends that same invitation to us.
But to experience that, you must walk with him before you fully understand. Trust him with your devotion, even without proof.
Give him the steady focus of your faith, so that he can shape you in his image.
Surrender your will completely, so that it can become aligned with God’s will.
When that happens, faith will no longer be needed—faith will be fulfilled in sight, and you’ll truly know him as he knows you.
Just give him your heart’s trust for even a short while, and he will return it to you with abundant understanding.
Offer your heart in faith, and he will give it back to you filled with knowledge—the kind of knowledge of God that leads to eternal life.
Then you’ll be able to say, ‘Once I believed; now I know for sure.’
In other words, our faith demonstrated through our actions is the manifestation of our hope. This means that faith is more than simply believing something to be true.
Verse 3 says, ”By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”
The visible universe was not made out of visible material; it was called into being by God. This is a profound statement relating to verse one.
Just as God brought the visible into being from invisible things, so when we act in faith on our hope in the future things to come, we are making the invisible visible.
We are mimicking God’s act of creation when we live out our hope through faith.
The faithful people we will read about shortly lived as though the future was already present.
They saw the promises of God as completely trustworthy and lived with them as their confident hope.
Their faith is the evidence of this. In other words, their faith proved God’s existence.
Look at the two examples in these opening verses: Abel and Enoch. Abel brought an offering that was pleasing to God.
He seemed to have a more intimate relationship with God than his brother Cain.
In Genesis 4:6, God asks Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?”
Something about Abel’s offering was more pleasing to God. Abel must have seen what Cain could not see.
His sacrifice was acceptable not so much for its substance but because it was an expression of Abel’s devotion to God.
Next, we have Enoch, who was said to have pleased God and never experienced death. God took him before he died.
The point of mentioning Enoch here is to say that he was commended as one who pleased God.
Enoch lived in the time before the flood when evil had consumed the world. Yet, in the midst of evil, Enoch walked with God faithfully.
Hebrews 11:6 says, without faith, it is impossible to please God. Why?
Because faith is the evidence that your life is built upon God’s promises, that your hope is truly in the things to come.
Let’s continue reading Hebrews 11 and see what faith meant for the people listed here.
Hebrews 11:7-31
By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith. By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore. All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death. By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future. By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons, and worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff. By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions concerning the burial of his bones. By faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the application of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel. By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the army had marched around them for seven days. By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient.
By faith, these people obeyed God, and by obeying God they gave witness to their hope. Noah was told to build an ark, and Noah believed God’s promise that he would need it, so he built an ark.
Abraham was told to go to an unknown land, and that if he did, God would make him into a great nation, so he went.
Moses was told to go rescue God’s people, and that God would give him what he needed to make it happen, so he went.
They lived as though what was promised to them was already theirs.
Because there is so much in this passage to cover, and because I have already covered in the Pentateuch series most of the stories mentioned in these examples, I’ll focus on just one often overlooked element of this passage.
Verse 10: For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Verse 16: Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
And then, looking forward to next week’s message, we see in Hebrews 12:22, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.
The idea of a future city now comes as a main theme in these last chapters of Hebrews.
The author draws our attention to the promise God made to Abraham and his descendents, the promise of a kingdom that would be ruled by God.
He makes the connection between that promise and the deeper reality that was becoming clear to the first Christians, that the promise was not to be ultimately fulfilled in the establishment or the renewal of the ancient city of Jerusalem, but is yet to be fulfilled in the new Jerusalem which God is preparing for his people.
The faith of those listed in this chapter is based on the certainty of a future in which God is the perfect ruler over a perfect kingdom.
This is what propelled them forward despite so many challenges.
They took God and his promises seriously, living with confidence in God’s ability to do what he said he will do.
Let’s read the final section of chapter 11 and wrap up with a challenge for ourselves today.
Hebrews 11:32-40
And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
Chapter 12 will go on to say, therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great crowd of witnesses… do not grow weary and lose heart. This takes us back to the beginning and the reason for this letter. 2:1 says, “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.”
The whole letter is a call to keep fixing your eyes on Jesus, on the promises of God, on the city of the living God.
The world around us is full of distractions, messages that pull our eyes down and away from God and toward the troubles of this world.
Our hope is not in our money, or possessions, or the promises made by politicians, or any earthly inheritance. Our hope is in the living God.
The people of faith in Hebrews 11 demonstrated their hope in God by their faith, by living as though God’s promises were already theirs.
“…they believed that God was making a new world in which everything would be better… they were living by faith in God’s future world while society all around them was living as though the present world was all there was or ever would be; and God was giving them strength to live like that… They were, in their own lives and sufferings, living beacons of hope, pointers to the fact that the God who had made the world was intending to remake it, and that they were the early witnesses of that great moment.2”
We too can be witnesses to God’s remaking of creation by the way we live. As people whose eyes are fixed on the hope of all things being made right.
We can live as people who are already participating in making things right. We can live with the love and generosity of God’s kingdom.
Not worried about all the terrible things happening all around us, but responding to a broken world with faith and as beacons pointing people to the true hope of the world, Jesus Christ.
1 F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Rev. ed., The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), 277.
2 Tom Wright, Hebrews for Everyone (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 145.
Hebrews Series Bibliography
Allen, David L. Hebrews. The New American Commentary. Nashville, TN: B & H Publishing Group, 2010.
Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Hebrews. Rev. ed. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990.
Guthrie, George. Hebrews. The NIV Application Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1998.
Lane, William L. Hebrews 1-8, vol. 47A, Word Biblical Commentary. Dallas: Word, Inc., 1991.
New International Version Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016.
Wright, Tom. Hebrews for Everyone. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004.