Tonight we are starting a series on faith. “Faith is the basis of Christian life.” Those are the words of Dr. J. I. Packer when he was speaking on one of the last books that he ever wrote back in 2014. The book was called, Taking God Seriously. Packer says, “Faith is the most momentous reality I can think of. We need to know what we believe. We need to be able to defend it when it’s challenged, and we need to have reason for relying on it as the basis of our lives. Faith is the basis of Christian life.” “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for. It is the conviction of things not seen.” And this is what we stand on – our faith. This is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith. And we just finished studying through the book of Lamentations. For the writer of Lamentations, everything that was his had been stripped away. All that he had left in many ways was his faith. And yet maybe, just maybe, that was enough. Maybe that’s what really counts anyways.
And so for the rest of this fall, we are going to look at faith. We are going to spend the next couple of months looking at Hebrews chapter 11. If you want to turn there in your Bibles, Hebrews chapter 11 is found on page 1007 in the pew Bibles. This entire chapter is a chapter about faith. It’s about the faith of so many Old Testament figures – the faith of Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Moses and so on. They all died in faith. They all died not having received what was promised, but they all died having been commended for their faith. And that’s what matters. So tonight we’re going to look at the first three verses of Hebrews 11. We’ll hopefully see two things. Number one – the commendation of faith. And then secondly – a commentation to faith, or an encouragement to believe. The commendation of faith and a commendation to faith. Before we read, let’s pray and ask God’s blessing on His Word. Let’s pray.
Father, we come before You as we open Your Scriptures, we confess as we have done many times before, we believe, Lord help our unbelief. And so we pray as we turn to look at faith, as we turn to look at the object of our faith, as we turn to look at the fulfillment of all Your promises, that You would help us to see Jesus, that You would help us to see Him in His perfect sufficiency, that You would help us as we run the races that are set before us, that we would do so with endurance, with joy, that we would do it with faithfulness because of Your great faithfulness to us. We pray for Your Spirit tonight. We need the work of Your Spirit in all our hearts. Speak Lord, for Your servants listen. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Hebrews 11, verse 1:
“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.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, the commendation of faith. “For God is my witness.” “For God is my witness” is a saying; it emphasizes the truthfulness, the sincerity of what someone is saying. “For God is my witness,” Paul writes in Philippians chapter 1. “For God is my witness, how I yearn for all of you with the affection of Christ.” You see what Paul is saying in Philippians chapter 1 is that God serves as witness because it is a matter of his heart. It is a matter that only God can testify to. And in a very similar way, it is God as witness for the writer of Hebrews. It is to the testimony of God that this writer points us as he talks about those from of old and the lives of those, the faith of those from of old and the commendation that they received. Verse 2, “For by it the people of old received their commendation.” That word, “commendation,” is the same word that is sometimes translated as “witness” or “testimony.” It’s the word, “martyreo” or “martus.” It’s like our word, “martyr” as David was mentioning this morning in this morning’s sermon about Lawrence the deacon in Rome who was killed for his faith, killed for his testimony about Jesus. That word, “martyreo” from which we get “martyr,” it means, “witness” or “testimony.”
Well here, in Hebrews 11 verse 2, the one who is doing the testifying is God Himself. The people of old were testified of. They obtained a good testimony. “They received a good report,” as some translations have it. But from whom? Who gave the good report? It’s from God Himself. God gave the commendation of the people from of old. That’s all we want, isn’t it? That’s all we really want – to get to the end of our lives and to be able to know that we will receive the commendation of God, that our lives have had value, that our lives count to some degree. And to some extent that’s why, whether it’s logical or not I think that’s why we put in extra hours in the office, that’s why we bring our work home with us, that’s why we worry so much about how our kids will turn out, that’s why we want to leave a legacy – because in some way, we want our lives to count.
A few years ago, a small group of elders and our wives took communion to a friend, a member of the congregation who was dying from cancer. And she had not finished raising her children, there was more that she could have done professionally, more that she hoped to do in ministering to the sick and the suffering, and she said that night when we gathered together at their house, she said, “I just want to hear, I just want to hear, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’” And we all do, don’t we? That’s what all of us want when it comes down to it. What do we want to hear? We want to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” That’s what the people of old heard because, as verse 2 tells us, they received their commendation, their commendation from God. But why? Why did they receive that commendation? How was it that they received, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? What does verse 2 say? It says, “By it the people of old received their commendation.” What’s “it”? “It” is faith. “It” is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It was by faith that the people of old received their commendation and that’s it. It wasn’t because of their heroic acts of bravery. It wasn’t because of their unbelievable sacrifices. It wasn’t even because of their character which was forged in fiery furnaces. No, when it all comes down to it, it was their faith. You can strip everything away, you can lose everything else you have and whittle it all down, but if you have your faith, that’s what matters.
And just before these verses, in chapter 10, the writer is exhorting his readers not to lose their confidence but to endure. To have endurance through hard times. And he quotes from Habakkuk chapter 2. In chapter 10 verse 38 here, it says, “My righteous one shall live by faith. The just shall live by faith.” He says, “We are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.” Why? Because the just live by faith. And I love what one old preacher writes about these words. He says, “These words, they do not flash or glitter, and like the ocean, they do not give any indication on the surface of the profundities and the mysteries that lie concealed beneath, and yet it is as though it were the sum and substance of everything to be proclaimed by the prophets in the old dispensation and echoed by the apostles in the new to be translated into all languages and transmitted to every corner of the earth. The just shall live by faith.” It was Bishop Lightfoot who says, “The whole law, the whole law was given to Moses in 613 precepts. David, in the fifteenth psalm, brings them all down within the scope of 11. Isaiah reduces it to 6. Micah down to 3. But Habakkuk, what Habakkuk does is he condenses them all into one – the just shall live by faith.”
So the question is, “Do you want to be just before God? Do you want to be right in His sight? Do you want your life to be commended by Him? Well done, good and faithful servant.” It comes by faith. And what is faith? Faith is the believing. Faith is believing the promises of God and having the certainty that God will keep those promises, even in spite of all appearances to the contrary. Or as verse 1 says, “Faith is the assurance of thighs hoped for; it is the conviction of things not seen.” It’s hard to think of a better definition of faith. We might say that there is almost an indescribable quality to faith. Yes, there is a sense in which all of us, there is no one ever who cannot live by faith to some degree. Faith in the pew that you are sitting in. Faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. But this faith, the faith of Hebrews chapter 11, this is what defines a life. It is as John Owen says, “Faith divine, supernatural, justifying, saving.” It’s the faith of God’s elect. It is the faith that comes not of ourselves but it is the operation of God. It is that witch which all true believers are endowed from above. That’s the faith of Hebrews chapter 11. And over and over and over again we read, “By faith. By faith. By faith. By faith.” Eighteen times, that refrain is found in Hebrews chapter 11. It is the heartbeat of this chapter. It is what carries the flow of the passage from one thought to the other and ties it all together.
But don’t miss this. It is not the main point of this chapter because Jesus is. Jesus is the one to whom our faith looks. Jesus is the object of our faith. He is the founder and perfector of our faith as chapter 12 will say. Jesus is the reason we have an assurance of things hoped for and a conviction of things not seen. You see, the reason that all these people of old receive their commendation is because they believed God’s Word and they lived for the things that only Jesus can provide. Even when it meant suffering and persecution and hardship, even when it meant never seeing or receiving in this life the things that they hoped for, they all died, and yet their lives still speak. “They are a great cloud of witnesses,” as chapter 12 verse 1 says; a cloud of witnesses to Jesus and to the faithfulness of God and to the commendation that comes from God alone to those who believe and to those who run their race with endurance. The one thing that matters, the one thing that is necessary for them and for all of us is faith. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and your household.” “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Do you believe? Have you confessed that Jesus is Lord? Do you have an assurance of things hoped for and a conviction of things not seen? There is no more important question, no more important question for you to settle in your hearts and in your minds than for you to settle it in your hearts and minds tonight. This commendation of faith.
And yet why believe? What is the basis of that faith? Well, the first commendation to faith that this writer gives us is really to look at what we can see. There’s maybe an irony in that – that if you want a certainty of things not seen, then look to the things that are seen. And this is the first tier – a commendation to faith that we find in verse 3. In first grade Bible a few weeks ago here at the Day School, the topic was Genesis chapter 1 and creation, and Molly was talking about God creating everything out of nothing, and about the things that we need in order to make things and to be creative. They were talking about how we are not like God and how God is infinitely more powerful than we are. And one of the first graders, he said, “Yeah, if we want to make something, we have to have resources! We have to gather our resources in order to make something!” I just wouldn’t have expected a first grader to use a word like “resources!” Even today, I’m pretty sure right now, not to mention in first grade, I would have said something like, “stuff” or “things!” But he’s right. We need resources, but God does not. God creates the resources. And by faith, we understand, verse 3, that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
Think about, think about what you can see. Think about the fact that you can see. Think about your eyes. The eyes send 100 billion signals to the brain every second. Each eye has over 100 million light sensitive cells. Our eyes only produce two dimensional images, but because we have two of them, and they’re two inches apart, they see things from different angles so that our brains are able to create the illusion of depth, of three dimensions. Our eyes, they are set in our heads in such a way that they are protected from impact by the orbital bone, from sweat by the eyebrows and from dust by the eyelashes. There is a reason why when you search for the way that our eyes work, there is page after page on the websites of ophthalmologists and optometrists and retina specialists about the wonder of the human eye. Just the little eye. And then, just to take in everything that there is to see with our eyes – the blue sky, and a sunset, and the moon and the stars, and mountains and oceans and waterfalls and cardinals and bluebirds and tulips and a baby’s hand – there’s beauty all around us, beauty of such variety, beauty of such overwhelming complexity.
It was at the end of this week, I had actually been reading about the eye and I ran into a retina specialist around town, and as we were talking I mentioned something about how I had been reading a lot about the eye. And he said, “You know, it’s almost like when Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving gear, that up until that time, around 1940s, no one could actually go more than about twenty feet deep in the water. But now you can go so much further than that, and it’s like it opens up this whole other world that we never knew existed to an extent.” He said the same thing with the ophthalmoscope. Until it was invented seventy-five years ago, we had no idea the complexity of the human eye. And it was almost like these two illustrations coming together in a conversation to think about the complexity and the beauty of the eye and the complexity and the beauty of God’s creation. How do you explain all of that? You could say it comes from randomness, chance, disorder, chaos. Or you could say that there is a source of beauty, a source of order, wisdom, creativity, purpose, that there may actually be a designer, a creator, who brought all of these things that we see into existence. That what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
In Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, his first chapter is on the theory of the Big Bang. And yet, he explains how, he explains things in that chapter about how “extraordinary,” in his words, “how extraordinary it is from our point of view how well it all turned out for us.” And he says that if gravity were fractionally stronger or weaker, everything would have either collapsed or nothing would have come together at all. If the six fundamental constants that hold the universe together changed even slightly, things could not exist as they are. And he quotes an astronomer talking about the solar system who says that, “These things are all in the same plane, they’re all going around in the same direction, it’s perfect, you know; it’s gorgeous. It’s almost uncanny.” Or a cosmologist from Stanford who, in discussing how the universe went from a form we can’t understand to a form that we can, he said, “These are very close to religious questions.”
What does Paul say in Romans chapter 1? “What can be known about God is plain to man because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.” And so what requires more faith – saying that everything we see happened by chance, or saying that everything that we see was created by God? And the writer of Hebrews would point us to the latter as the better option. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God. You see, our faith is not irrational; it’s not a leap in the dark. No, our faith is actually built on solid ground. It is based on the evidence that we can see all around us. It makes sense; there is reason to believe.
And we can say that it all starts with creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.” And the same God, the same God who reveals Himself in creation is the same God who reveals Himself in His Word. “In the beginning, God.” “In the beginning, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” And if God’s Word can do that, if God’s Word can bring something out of nothing, if God’s Word can make what it seen out of what is invisible, then don’t you think that He can bring about everything that He has promised to do? That He will keep His promises even when they have not been fulfilled yet? And you see, verse 3 is a commendation to faith. It’s a commendation to believe, to have faith, because God’s Word is powerful. It is living and active. Just look all around you and listen. Listen to how the book of Hebrews begins. This God who spoke in creation, the God who long ago, Hebrews 1:1, “at many times and in many ways, spoke by the prophets, in these last days has spoken to us by His Son whom He appointed as the heir of all things through whom also He created the world.”
Now, do you not think that the God who created the whole world out of nothing, could He not also come into that world in the person of Jesus Christ? And could Jesus not then be raised from the dead in fulfillment of the plan of God? Will God not also then be faithful to every promise and is He not able to deliver you out of every trial? And the writer of Hebrews is saying, “Don’t shrink back! Don’t throw away your confidence! Don’t lose your distinctiveness in this world, but keep your faith. Hold onto what you believe and endure whatever hardship it may be that you are facing right now or maybe some time in the future. Because significance in this life, reward in the life to come, comes through faith.”
Some of you, if you’ve been around here a long time, will remember George Lemon. Some of you will remember him very well. When I was growing up, I would have believed it if you had told me that Mr. Lemon would be found in the list of names in Hebrews chapter 11, or maybe he was even a contemporary of some of them! But I asked Brister the other day to tell me a story again about Mr. Lemon. He said Mr. Lemon had been somewhat indifferent in his faith, but when he was working on a bridge somewhere in Mississippi, and they pulled up some of the pilings of the bridge, when they pulled up the pilings of this bridge, what they found on it were these microscopic, unicellular organisms called diatoms. And it was these diatoms, they’re something sort of like a, you can think of it almost like a snowflake in their design and their uniqueness, but they’re algae. And diatoms make up a significant portion of the earth’s biomass that 20-50% of the oxygen we breathe is produced by diatoms. And those diatoms set Mr. Lemon thinking about creation and about the power of God, buried deep on the pilings of some bridge in Mississippi. And by his account, that was the thing that moved him from somewhat indifference to trusting in God and to following Jesus with a strong and vibrant faith.
And that’s the witness that we all have, from his life and from the life of those in Hebrews 11, and from the creation of God. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen. By faith we understand that the universe, the universe, was created by the Word of God.” Hold onto your faith. Let’s pray.
Father, we give You thanks for these living and active examples of faith from the days of old, those who trusted in You and followed You, who looked to the promises that You made to them and to us in Christ Jesus. And so we ask that You would strengthen our faith as we think about Your creation, the wonder of Your world, the majesty of all that You have done, we ask that You would strengthen us and that You would encourage our faith, that we would go from here with a strong and vibrant living faith to encounter, to endure whatever You may call us to go through in the week to come. We thank You for Your helps to our faith and for Your Word, for gathering us here tonight to hear and to sing and to pray and to praise Your name. Would You receive it all for Your glory and for the name of Jesus we pray, amen.