Hebrews 11:1-16
“Hopeful Faith”
May 3, 2020 – Fourth Sunday in Easter
Thursday, we spoke to our pregnant daughter. She’s in Oxford, England. She is doing well and we are thankful that she seems to have good care. Susan assures us that national health service there has prioritized pregnant women. She will receive all the usual prenatal visits and attention leading up to the birth.
I also read something this week which assures me that if, God forbid, our daughter should have trouble during this time, the Lord is looking out for women in that kind of situation as well. An Oxford biomedical engineer named Lionel Tarassenko is adapting work on patient monitoring techniques to deal with COVID-19 patients, including high-risk pregnant women. And he is a Christian. He believes God is using his talents to address the needs of this pandemic.
As he talked about helping care for patients by making sure they can be seen and monitored safely and with less risk, Tarassenko said, “I am also very conscious that our world is not limited to what we can see or perceive with our scientific instruments.” Then he quoted verse 3 from our text today: “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.”[1]
Just so. While we struggle with all we can and cannot see around us, we as Christians, even at the forefront of the coronavirus fight, remember that we rely on a God whose Word has power beyond and behind anything visible to our eyes, whether that’s in person or on a screen. Our faith God through His Son Jesus allows us to live and act in ways which go beyond what we can see directly.
Hebrews 11 is often called the “great roll call of faith.” Interspersed with a bit of reflection on how faith works in human life, we read here stories of men and women whose lives were changed, and who changed the world, through faith. It all begins in verse 1 with what has sometimes been taken as a definition of faith, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
If you have a modern translation, almost any of them, you may find those words “substance” and “evidence,” which denote objective categories of existence in the world, turned into subjective attributes of our minds, like “assurance” and “conviction.” That may be a mistake. In other uses, these words in Greek clearly pick out things which exist outside of our thoughts. They imply reality other than our own selves. The first one, “substance,” is the Greek word Christians first chose to talk about the persons of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not just mental attitudes or conceptual aspects of God. They are each a concretely real person in relation with the other two, and with us.
Of all modern versions, it seems like the New Living Translation gets it best, “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.” That’s not so much a definition of faith as it is a description of what it does for us. It connects us with solid, living reality which is not immediately apparent to our senses. Faith lets us grasp that “seeing is believing” is not the whole story about what is real and true and what we may believe.
It might be easy to skip over verse 2, which simply tells us that “by faith, the elders received a good report.” It’s “elders,” people of old times, not “ancestors” here. They are not everyone’s ancestors, likely not your ancestors, except for Noah. They are people of ancient times whose faith made them live in commendable, even beautiful ways. The writer of Hebrews recited some of their stories here in the hope that you and I will be inspired to live like that, to live by faith.
I said last week that faith involves a living relationship with God, a trust in Him which begins by admitting our need for faith. Now here in Hebrews we see that kind of relationship working out in some of God’s people through the ages, while also learning that faith has content and direction. We don’t, like so many contemporary expressions of faith seem to suggest, just have faith in faith. We have faith in a God who does things.
Verse 3 reminds us that the very first thing God does is creation, that “the worlds were prepared by the word of God.” Genesis shows us God simply speaking our world, our universe into existence. “Let there be light,” “Let there be a firmament,” “Let there be waters, and land, and sun and moon, and plants and fish and animals,” and finally, “Let us make humankind in our image.” And all of it comes completely from God, the verse tells us, “what is seen was not made from things that are visible.”
The men and women of faith the writer gives as examples trust in God for what they cannot yet see. They are able to have that faith because their faith is in a God who works with what cannot be seen, with what does not even exist yet, and still He brings it into being. God makes the unseen, the non-existent, into something that exists, that can be seen. We trust in that God.
Hebrews’ first example of such faith in verse 4 is Abel, the second of the first two sons of Eve at the beginning of the human race. We tend to focus on the fact that Abel was murdered by his brother, but the author here mostly ignores that, to dwell on Abel’s faith. It was faith that allowed Abel to give an offering to God that was more acceptable than his brother’s offering. Neither Genesis nor the writer of Hebrews explains exactly why it was more acceptable, other than faith. Talking about the need for a blood sacrifice or some such is probably off the track. Abel’s offering was approved because it was given while trusting in God. It is faith itself which brings God’s approval.
That approval by faith is abundantly clear next in verse 5. The author talks about the mysterious figure of Enoch from the first genealogy of Genesis in chapter 5 verses 18 to 24. Enoch starts out like other people in the list, getting born, living a long time, having children, having one specific child, but then in verse 24 the story gets strange. Instead of telling us, like all the others, “and he died,” we read what Hebrews refers to here, “then he was no more, because God took him.” Genesis says just before that “Enoch walked with God.” Hebrews prefers to quote the explanation found in two apocryphal books which Bryan has been teaching us about. Both Wisdom 4:10 and Sirach 44:16 say that Enoch “pleased God.” What pleased God about Enoch was his faith.
Which brings us to verse 6 and to one of the most specific statements Scripture makes about the factual content of faith. “Without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” The first part doesn’t say much more than we assume for our other relationships. In order to get to know someone, you have to believe she exists. That’s pretty fundamental. But it can be a big sticking point for faith in God.
Lots of Christian evangelistic effort has gone into either asserting or arguing that God exists. I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying the arguments and I think there are several good ones. For those who need a reason to believe, it’s important work. Yet right alongside the belief that God exists, the writer to the Hebrews adds, “and that he rewards those who seek him.” In other words, also as in human relationships, it is key to faith that we believe God is good, that He cares about us, and that He knows what is best for us and wants to give that to us. All that is harder to prove, but people of faith have often discovered it to be true by experience. That’s the kind of experience this chapter is about.
Next in verse 7 comes Noah. All I want to notice here is what is often remarked on, how much faith it took for him to build that ark on dry land, believing and trusting God that it was necessary to save his family. We’ve all discovered just how hard it is to prepare and take shelter from a danger we can’t really see and which at present doesn’t seem all that close to us. But Noah trusted that direction because it came from God.
The next big section of Hebrews 11 is about Abraham. We’re familiar with how Paul, in Romans and Galatians, sees Abraham as the great archetype of faith, our father in faith. The key text is Genesis 15 verse 6, where we are told that Abraham “believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” And the writer of Hebrews sees Abraham in the same manner. But he tells how he demonstrated his faith in God in multiple ways.
First, and key to the whole chapter, is the fact that Abraham trusted and believed God when he was told to get up, leave his home, and head for an unknown, foreign country. Verse 8 says he didn’t know where he was going. But he went. Verse 9 goes on to add that the same faith which made him go, made him stay, there in that land God sent him to.
I imagine missionaries are often inspired by Abraham’s faith to get up and go where God sent him, making a foreign land his own home. But right now, with several missionaries we know sheltering in place here in our own community and elsewhere in Oregon, we might want to take heed to Abraham’s faith to stay where he was for a time. I think John Milton caught the spirit of that sort of staying faith in the famous line he wrote about his oncoming blindness, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Many Christians in our world now may be called to that kind of faith, to stay and to wait, trusting God for the day when it might be time to go again even if that’s only at the end of this life.
Abraham was able to stay and wait on God in a place which would always be somewhat foreign to him because as verse 10 explains, “he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” That city is the same “house of the Lord” from Psalm 23 that I talked to the children about. It’s the “sheepfold” we heard Jesus mention in our Gospel reading from John 10. It is the community those first Christians found with one another in their own households at the end of Acts 2. It is the great home which God gives us together in His kingdom when we come to Him in faith. The writer comes back again and again in this chapter to this idea of faith looking forward in hope to a place with God, to our reward in His presence.
In verses 11 and 12, we come back to where I began this morning, with God’s gift of a child. Here it’s to Abraham and Sarah when they were far too old to have children in the natural course of events. Yet we’re told that by faith Abraham and Sarah “received the power of procreation… because he considered him faithful who had promised.” It was a miracle birth, a gift to an old man and a woman who couldn’t have children. But it makes me think of the fact that in our time, just having children naturally can be an act of faith.
In his wonderful book, A Community of Character, Stanley Hauerwas talks about the importance of the family in Christian life, arguing that Christian family has to be understood in the context of a wider Christian community, a community of faith structured around the kind of character Jesus embodied and taught. He says that it takes that “city” of the people of God, toward which Abraham looked in faith, to sustain those who wish to marry and have children in the present world.
Hauerwas writes,
it is our conviction [read “faith”] that the church is formed by a story that gives it the convictions necessary to sustain those called to marry and have children in a world that has been bent by sin and evil. We have the courage to call children into such a world because our hope is not in this world but in a God who has called us to his kingdom through the work of Christ.[2]
For those of you doing your best to raise children up in the Lord during this hard time and in a world that often seems increasingly opposed to God in other ways, remember that what you do is an act of faith. And, for the rest of us, let us remember that all we do to help and support and care for those families and children, whether they are biologically related to us or not, is also an act of faith. It’s what the people of God did and what they still do, raising up children who are also called to “dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Almost all of us talk about how very strange the weeks we’ve just lived have felt. At the beginning some of us introverts made jokes about how we’ve been preparing for this isolation at home all our lives. But, really, nobody is joking now. Even for those of us who like being alone it has gone on too long and feels increasingly bizarre and difficult, especially as we consider how much longer we will have to socially isolate and how many of the changes we’ve experienced may be with us for quite a while yet to come.
Yet it is a perfect time to let ourselves remember what the last few verses of this text from Hebrews is telling us. As people of faith in Jesus Christ, we are, “strangers and foreigners on the earth.” When things are comfortable and flow along in ways we call normal, it’s easy to forget that, to imagine that we really are perfectly at home in this world. But now this virus has come along and forced us to face what people without homes, and refugees, and prisoners, and some missionaries have always known. As an old song by Albert Brumley says, “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through.”
Yet please understand that faith in that “better country, that is, a heavenly one,” does not mean we abandon this world. Abraham lived in and prayed for and made the land to which God called him a better place. He raised his children there and his descendants raised their children there while tending flocks and digging wells. Eventually Abraham’s descendants left but then came back to that land more than once. Each time they settled down and built homes and planted fields and loved that place with all their hearts.
That’s what hopeful faith does in our own world. We struggle along as strangers in a strange land, but we live faithfully and hopefully, embracing the places where God has put us and doing our best for them and for all those around us. It’s like how some of our friends in the Manantial de Vida church and other “green card” residents embrace America. We are not natives, but, as Hauerwas also says, we are “resident aliens,” who have love and hope for this world in which we live even if it’s not quite yet our home.
You see, even though we don’t really see yet, God’s plan is to bring that “city” we long for, that “house” in which we will live forever into this world. It’s a “heavenly” city, but at the end of Revelation we read how God will bring it down to earth. That’s the faith and hope we share with Abel and Enoch, with Abraham and Sarah, and with all God’s people through the ages. God leaves us as strangers and aliens for a little while in this world, so that we can demonstrate by the way we live that there is something better coming for this world.
Now as we come to the Lord’s Table apart and yet together, we do so remembering that God sets His Table for us in His own house. Despite evil and enemies, He is with us and our cup overflows. That’s the house and country of faith. We live in it already. May we dwell there forever. Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Christianity Today website, April 29, 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/april-web-only/coronavirus-christian-doctors-and-scientists-faith-covid-19.html
[2] A Community of Character (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 174.