Well, if you have a Bible, let me write you a term with me to Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 11, as we turn a corner, so does we. This evening we're in Hebrews chapter 11, 1-3. This chapter, as you well probably know, many have called the Hall of Faith, or some have called the Westminster Abbey of the Faithful.
And here can speak of the faith of a whole variety of Old Testament saints. Now if you want to say, watch out for your chapter divisions, I just simply turn a corner. But actually I'm about to say what Calvin said, whoever made this the beginning of the 11th chapter has unwisely disjointed the context for the object of the apostle was to prove what he had already said. In other words, it's intimately connected what he was saying at the end of chapter 10.
What had he said there? He had said, and we looked at this, the just shall live by faith, and we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but we are of those who have faith and preserve their souls. Now, how do we know that we are of those who have faith, that we will in fact preserve the soul? That is, how do we know, because we are those of faith, that we will enjoy, as he was speaking of, the better possession and the abiding possession, our heavenly home.
How do we know that we who have faith will actually receive our great reward that God has promised to us? Well, in chapter 11 he tells us, and we learn many things here. We learn how it is we can be confident and so confident. And he piles up examples for us of believers who share this confidence.
So let me invite you to consider Hebrews chapter 11, just verses 1 to 3 this evening. In other words, God. 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 he seen was not made out of things that are visible. Amen, this is God's Word. Let's look to him in prayer. Father, what we know not teach us and what we have not give to us and what we are not make us through our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ.
In his name we ask it. Amen. How do we know that if we have faith we preserve the soul and enjoy what we hope for? Well verses 1 to 3 are a confirmation that we will, and there's an explanation at verse 1 and an example at verse 2 and an illustration at verse 3.
Before we dive into these things, a few words about the kind of faith he's speaking of. Some people think that faith is like the little girl who was asked to divine faith and she replied, well faith is believing what you know ain't so. That's what many people think faith is. You are blind, leap in the dark.
Turn off your brain, don't listen to evidence, don't evaluate whether Christianity is true. Just blind, leap jump off a cliff and hope it works out. That isn't what our author has been talking about when he's been describing Christian faith. He's spent 10 chapters showing you, hasn't he?
Jesus. And telling you, you can trust in him. I've long promised him and he came and fulfilled what God promised he would do. So what he's talking about here is trusting in Jesus to be your savior, your great high priest, the true atoning sacrifice for your sins.
That's what he's talking about. You aren't asked to believe then in Jesus who appears out of nowhere with no warning, no preparation, no introduction, but you are invited to believe in Jesus who God spent thousands of years preparing the world for through promises and prophecies and pictures and copies, old covenant priests and sacrifice, all for signifying the Christ to come. So he's saying, believe in this Jesus, the Jesus of Hebrews chapter one through ten, chapter one, he's the heir of all things. And he's the one through who God made the universe.
He's the radiance of the glory of God, the exact representation of his being. And he upholds the universe by his power. That's the Jesus we believe in. He's the Jesus of chapter one and two, better than the angels.
Why? Because he's their creator and they worship and serve him. He's better in chapter three than Moses. Why?
Well, because Jesus is the son over God's house, whereas Moses was simply a servant in that house, that Jesus is building. In chapter four, we saw Jesus is better than Joshua. Why? Because while Joshua led the people of God into the earthly promised land, Jesus leads God's people into the heavenly eternal promised land of true spiritual rest.
In chapters four to ten, we saw that Jesus is better than Aaron because Jesus is the great high priest after the order of Melchizedek, not after the order of the Levites and Aaron. So Jesus is a better sacrifice. He's better than the old covenant animal sacrifices because he's the priest who offers himself the single sacrifice that once and for all takes away sin and he rose from the dead and he seated in heaven and he always lives to intercede for us at the right hand of the majesty on high. So Charles Spurgeon said, it is not your hold on Christ that saves you.
It is Christ. It is not your joy in Christ that saves you. It is Christ. It is not even your faith in Christ that saves you.
So that be the instrument. It is Christ's blood and his merit that saves you. And so faith is the instrument by which these things become ours, but our salvation is Christ who he is and what he did. And so faith is the empty outstretched hand of the beggar receiving God's richest blessings in Christ.
Faith is a cop into which God pours his grace. Faith is lots of things, but it is an empty mindless or a blind leap in the dark. It's faith in the Jesus revealed in history and in scripture. So we want to think about this faith and why it is if we believe in Jesus that he can say so confidently the writer can, well then you have faith in Jesus, you preserve the soul.
And we will persevere to the end. So he is going to highlight four things here. Let me do that. In the beginning of verse one, he is going to highlight that faith is the title deed to God's promises.
And then at the end of verse one, faith is the legal evidence we possess God's promises. And then in verse two, faith is commended in God's people and verse three, faith believes the word of God's power. So these four things, let's walk through them one at a time. First faith is the title deed to all that God has promised.
Notice that language of the first half of verse one, faith is the assurance of things hoped for. What's he talking about? Well, before we get to that, he's helping us see that this is why faith preserves the soul. Last week we looked at other reasons our souls are preserved, other assurances we have that our souls are preserved.
You may recall we looked at God's eternal decree. He doesn't change his mind. It got unchangeable love. He doesn't quit loving.
God who began to get working us will carry it on to completion. There are all kinds of scriptural supports to assure us and reassure us in all the weakness of our faith that God will hold on to us more strongly than we hold on to him. But here he's building an argument simply on this, that you are a people who have faith in Jesus. And that is simply enough to go, he's saying, that you will persevere and have what you hope for.
Why do I say that? Because the word here he uses for assurance, it's an unusual word. It's translated in a variety of different ways across the different English translations that we have, English, the ESV as we have it, our P-Bible says, assurance, that's what we read. The new international version says, now faith is confidence in what we hope for.
The new American standard says, faith is the certainty of things hoped for. The King James and the new King James say, faith is the substance of things hoped for. I recall from my early days of being a Christian in the faith is being sure of what you hope for. I'm just trying to give you a sense of the different flavors here of the word that is translated so variously.
And the reason for that is in the septuagit, the great translation of the Old Testament used by the apostles, it occurs, this word occurs 20 times and to translate 12 different Hebrew words. So it has this great variety of shades of meaning. That doesn't mean we need to throw up our hands and say, well, I guess we can never know what this means. But just reflect on two different approaches to the understanding of what this means.
One understands it subjectively and another understands it objectively. That is to say, what we might ask you this way, is he talking about the quality of our faith, the quality of the faith we express, or is he talking about the presence of faith, the simple reality of faith itself? If he's talking about the quality of our believing, then he's talking here about how sure we are, how confident, how certain, how strong our faith is, or how it assures us personally. But if he's talking simply about the reality of faith, the very presence of faith and Christ, the fact that you have that, that itself, he's saying, is the guarantee of what you hope for.
The subject of understanding is faith means being confident of what we hope for. It makes a sure of something. It makes us convinced and confident about something. But an object of understanding is faith itself is the title deed of what we hope for.
Its presence, or its reality in us, guarantees the reality of the other independent of the strength of our assurance, or the strength of our certainty. And viewing this objectively, and this is the way I take it, can be a great help to your soul. Because we all find us Christians that, well, our confidence in God, our faith, ebbs and flows, sometimes it's strong, sometimes it's weak, and we can get very self-focused. And that can be very discouraging at times.
But the fact is, we may be weak in our personal assurance, or certainty, but that makes the reality no less true or certain. He illustrated this idea of this way when a traveler in the early days of the West came to the Mississippi. He discovered there was no bridge across the Mississippi. Fortunately it was winter, and the Great River was sheeded over with ice.
But the traveler was afraid to trust himself to it, not knowing how thick it was. And finally with infinite caution, he crept on his hands and knees and managed to get halfway across. And then he heard, he heard singing from behind, and cautiously he turned, and there out of the dust came another traveler, driving a four-horse load of coal over the ice, singing as he went. Somebody obviously with great confidence in the ice.
But here's the thing, they were both on the ice. They both so to speak had entrusted themselves to the ice. They had faith. The quality of faith in one was strong.
He's got horses and coal. And the quality of the other was weak and timid, but it was not their belief, but the object of their belief that kept them alive. Faith in Jesus may be strong or weak, but its presence, however, small, even small as a mustard seed, is all that is needed. There's faith, the presence of faith in you is the title deed from God that you have what you hope for.
It gives you possession of things that are hoped for but are not yet part of your experience. What we hope for is not yet in hand, the glory that is to come in the resurrection and the new heavens and the new earth. But it is so to speak hid from us at least for a time, and the enjoyment of that future day is delayed to a future time. But the word was used this way, this word we're talking about, it was used of documents that attest to or provide evidence of the ownership of something.
A title deed is not the house itself, but the title deed assures you that the house belongs to you to have the title deed is to be the possessor of the property. So to have faith in Christ is the title deed to all that is in Christ, because you have faith in Christ and everything belongs to Christ and everything is in fact yours in Christ, and God stands by it. Because faith unites you to him and everything is his. And he shares with you as a co-air of all things.
And so why does it work that way as a title deed? Why can you say, well, you trust in Jesus or everything is yours in Jesus? Well, because faith itself is part of the gift that God has given you, in the gift of salvation. That is the gift of salvation includes everything from beginning to end.
And faith itself is God's gift to you and a gift is a title deed. And the Philippians 1, 29 says, for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ, you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake. Now the Paul there is assuring the Christians who are suffering for the sake of Christ, that it was actually God who has granted them that, well, it's called a privilege and a responsibility. But in sort of to reassure them that this is true, he reminds them that not only has it been granted you to suffer for Christ's sake, but it has been granted to you to believe in Christ.
Or as we know from the experience of Lydia in Acts 16, that the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying. Why did she believe? Well, the Lord opened her heart. And so Ephesians 2 says, for by grace you have been safe through faith.
And this is not your undoing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one can boast. And so since God has given you from the beginning, faith, he's also going to give you the ending, all that you hope for in Christ. That's the first point.
The second is faith is the legal evidence then that you have what is promised. Faith, verse 1, is the assurance of things so forth, the conviction of things not seen. It's the title deed, but it is also the proof, the legal proof or legal evidence here that word translated conviction of things not seen is an unusual way to translate it. Its normal use is proof or evidence.
That's the King James and the new King James. That is, as another put it, if you had to be convicted in a court of law over whether you have an abiding possession and a better possession, what would be the evidence to prove, the legal evidence to convict you of that? It would be that you have faith. Faith is the proof that you do.
I think it's just how important that legal evidence can be at times or how important evidence can be at times. Proof, we had to return a pair of sunglasses at one point to Walmart. I bought them for somebody else in the family and didn't work out exactly how we wanted. I went off to return them, but we needed the receipt.
Why? Well, because she was going to take those to the service counter and they would want proof of purchase, proof that we bought them and simply taken them off a rat from somewhere and then walked up to the counter and tried to sell them back to Walmart to get our money back. We hadn't actually spent. No, no, no.
They don't want people watering around the store, grabbing things off the shelf and walking up to customer service and demanding a refund on what actually isn't rightfully theirs to get a refund on. Right? So, you're going to keep here the proof of purchase. If you have the proof, then you get the return of the money.
And he's saying here, your faith in Christ is the evidence or proof of things not seen. That these things not seen are actually yours. They are yours in Jesus. And so then thirdly, he gives an example of this kind of faith when he says in verse two, for buy it the people of old received their commendation.
Faith brings God's commendation to God's people. God commended them for believing. He gave them faith and then he commended them for their trust. We're going to have plenty of examples of this over the course of chapter 11.
That's basically what it is. One example after another. Buy it. The men of old gained approval or commendation.
And obviously he means commendation from God. And so one of the things he's saying here, of course, is to his first hearers, who as we've noted, time and again, were Jewish converts. There may have been other, of course, not yet converted but listening in. Tell us more about this Jesus who saves the Messiah.
But for those who have come to believe who would be tempted to go back and abandon Christ and go back to Judaism, they need to see that the people they admire across the pages of the Old Testament, right? Lived like they lived and did what they did by faith in God's Messiah. That is he's saying to them, if you depart from faith in Christ, you're not going back to the patriarchs and having them because the patriarchs believed in this Christ. So don't abandon the faith that they were commended for having from a fold.
If you abandon Christ now, you abandon the whole history of the people of God as your people who share a like faith in the Messiah. But don't do that. And so at least as we'll see over the course of the chapter, when the writer says these were commended for their faith, we'll see for instance in verse four, by faith able offered a more acceptable sacrifice than came in verse five. We'll see that by faith, Enoch was taken up and he did not see death.
By he pleased God. Three faith, verse seven. You know, by faith, Noah built an ark for the saving of his household. These people were saved by faith.
They lived by faith. They were justified by faith. They obeyed in faith. They suffered in faith.
They hoped in faith. And their faith is your faith. Your faith is their faith. Their God is your God.
Their Messiah is your Messiah. What characterized them characterizes you? What God commended in them? God commends in you.
And so one of the things we see here is that what we need, God supplies and what God commends, He actually works in us. And when He sees it, He commends it. So it's really interesting if you look at verse six about Enoch, he notes that, and without faith, it is impossible to please Him that is God. Whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.
Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Now where do you get this kind of faith that actually pleases God? And it's wonderful at the end of Hebrews chapter 13 in the Great Benediction, he tells you when he says, now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead, our Lord Jesus, the Great Shepherd of the Sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do His will working in us, that which is well pleasing in His sight. God works in us, that which is pleasing in His sight, and then God commends that.
And that faith is, as we said, the title deed, it's the legal evidence. The patriarchs before us had the matriarchs like Sarah, and then finally we see one last thing in this passage, and that is that faith believes the Word of God's power. One more lesson on faith. Verse three, 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.
Everybody has a faith to answer, how did the world begin? How did it come to be? How did we get here? Even if the answer is, it's always been, well that's an answer, that's a faith answer.
You can't prove that. People are working off of speculation, or they're working off of revelation. Either we're speculating about things in the far past that nobody saw, no human being ever saw, that predates humanity, that nobody saw nobody can tell you about. And however much some folks think they know, be out of shadow of doubt, what really happened based on the scientific method.
Well, the fact is the scientific method can't actually reproduce what happened in the beginning. We take it on faith. It's not a repeatable experiment. We take it on faith and we hear an explanation and we choose to believe it.
The writer hears this by faith we believe what we have never seen. We have come to understand and embrace that the universe was formed by God's command. He spoke it, be liked, and there was liked in what hadn't existed began to exist. And so we began to believe Genesis 1-1 as we were talking about this week, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
We come to believe it was by the Word of His command as the writer says here. And his point is this is actually an illustration of genuine faith. It's an illustration of genuine faith because think about genuine faith in Jesus. God promises to us in Jesus about our future with Jesus based on His priestly work for us.
But did any of us see Jesus die on the cross? No. But we believe. Can you see God forgive you?
Well, no, it's actually a relational category. But we believe that He has forgiven us on the Word of His promise. Can you see the resurrection? Well, we were not privileged to be there when Jesus rose and then ascended.
And we have not yet seen our own resurrection. We've not seen with our eyes the new heavens and the new earth. And yet we believe God's spoke, God promised His Word is powerful and trustworthy. And so we believe Him whom we've not seen face to face.
His Word is capable, in other words, of creating everything out of nothing. And if He can do that in the past, He can give you what His Word has promised for the future. His Word is trustworthy because He's trustworthy. And so God said, be like there was light and you believe in the God who formed the universe by His own command.
And even though you haven't seen, weren't there to see it when it happened? And so also you weren't there to see what Christ did for you when it happened. And you've not yet seen with your eyes all that is yet to be in your future. And yet you believe that you have what He's promised.
And now all of us, I think, feel our new to be stronger in faith. And we all could do well to pray even as the disciples said, Lord, increase our faith. Give me stronger faith, strengthen my faith, sure. But would you remember that He's promised to ask me that she'll be given to you?
Seek and you will find, knock in the door and be open to you. Everyone who asks for a seat, who seeks to find, for the hidden knock, the door will be opened. Ask for stronger faith, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit. And those who ask you the lights to give, good gifts to you, even the Holy Spirit.
He can strengthen our faith. And remember when you ask to grow, well, caveat here for all of us. When we ask to grow in trusting our Savior, He may actually show us things about ourselves that will make us desperate for Him, desperate to be saved by Him, right? Or He may give us circumstances that strip away our false confidence in ourselves in order to deepen our reliance on Him.
Don't fear that though. Faith is God's good gift and by His Spirit, He works that much as well pleasing in us. He who exposes your sin, releases you from it. He who humbles you, makes His power to be made perfect in our weakness.
Let's pray together. Father, we believe, help our unbelief. And we would say, Lord, increase our faith. Help us to know we have all that you have promised in Christ, because it's all His.
And He is ours, and we are His. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen, let's stand together and sing.