We are staying with the book of Hebrews as the writer continues to unfold his argument. In #45, we saw him encourage us to take advantage of the cleansing and the access into the presence of God that Jesus purchased for us on the cross. He continues in Chapter 10 by telling us that we need to endure and to take hold by faith of all that God has promised to us. The righteous shall live by faith, he says, and will press forward and not shrink back from the profession of faith they have made.
At the beginning of Chapter 11, it’s as though he’s heard someone saying “OK, but what does this kind of faith look like in reality? You have done a great job outlining it to us in principle, but are there any concrete examples that you can give to help us see it in action?” And so he begins the chapter with a wonderful definition of faith and spends the rest of the chapter giving us examples from the Bible of people who lived it out.
Biblical faith of necessity lives in the realm of unseen things. The writer spells out a kind of two-way street as he defines it for us in the opening verses of the chapter. It consists in two things, he says:
First, it shows itself in the believer as a God-given certainty of his or her interest in those unseen spiritual realities that we hope for but do not yet possess. Paul underlines this in Romans 8:23–25:
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
This is not a matter of gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves to believe against all the odds. Rather, God opens the eyes of our hearts to see the unseen things and to lean on them unshakably. We know for sure that we have an inheritance in heaven!
Second, (and this is really quite wonderful), the unshakable nature of our faith in these unseen spiritual realities is itself solid evidence that they are real! This faith is objective and rational, firm and immovable, in a way that the hopes and dreams of those in the world are not. They have no conviction and no certainty, just a vague wish that what they long for will actually come to pass.
So the writer defines Biblical faith as that which will persevere and not shrink back, and which is marked by a firm assurance of the good things that God has promised to His children. But what of examples? The writer lists out characters from the Old Testament who displayed exactly this kind of faith. They saw the eternal and invisible things. By the way they lived, they showed that they didn’t belong in this world but had set their hope fully on the world that is to come. They endured through hardships and persecutions. They were willing to give up their most precious things for God. They gave up worldly fame and fortune. They were mocked and scorned. They were tortured. They surrendered their bodies to death, all the while looking forward to what God had prepared for them in heaven, and being strengthened through His promise and His oath. None of them received the promised blessings in their day, because their full measure will only be received when Christ returns at the Second Coming, the dead are raised, clothed with their resurrection bodies and welcomed into glory.
It’s possible that the current pandemic has caused some to wonder whether it is worth continuing to profess Christ. Our frailty and mortality have been exposed, perhaps as we have never seen them before. We are tempted (since we may die at any moment) to make the most of the opportunities here to grab as much as we can of what the world has to offer. Perhaps we are questioning whether following Christ here on earth is the best possible use of our time when there are so many other things we could be exploring.
If that is you, then this whole letter was written for you, to show you how incomparable Christ is, and how worthless life is when it is not lived for Him and with Him. It is written to show you the emptiness of the world’s offers, and their inability to satisfy your deepest needs. It is written to strengthen your resolve to commit yourself fully to Christ, to forsake the world and to willingly accept whatever the Lord may have for you in this world, confident of the glorious eternity that will be yours through faith in Him.
So press into Him, press forward with Him and do not turn back. The blessings and the honor and the rewards that are the inheritance of every true child of God will make the very worst things that happen to us in this world seem light and momentary in comparison!
