25  What Faith Is (11:1-3)

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. (11:1-3)

“The Saints’ Hall of Fame,” “The Heroes of Faith,” “The Honor Roll of the Old Testament Saints,” “The Westminster Abbey of Scripture,” and “The Faith Chapter” are but a few of the titles that have been given to Hebrews 11. This chapter deals with the primacy and the excellency of faith, and fits perfectly into the flow of the epistle, that the new is better than the old.

First-century Jews saw everything as a matter of works. Even after being shown the basic truths of the New Covenant, the tendency was for them to try to fit these new principles into the mold of works righteousness.

By the time of Christ, Judaism was no longer the supernatural system God had originally given. It had been twisted into a works system, with all kinds of legalistic requirements. It was a system of self-effort, self-salvation, and self-glorification. It was far from the faith system that God had given. In many ways it was a religious cult built on ethics. (And even the divinely ordained Judaism was falsified without its fulfillment in Christ.)

As all works systems, it was despised by God—particularly because it was a corruption of the true system He had given. God has never redeemed man by works, but always by faith (cf. Hab. 2:4). As this chapter makes clear, from the time of Adam on, God has honored faith, not works. Works have always been commanded as a by-product of faith, never as a means of salvation. God does not tolerate any self-imposed ethical system as a means of reaching Him.

This theme of faith connects with chapter 10, where the writer has already presented the principle of salvation by faith, of which the saints named in chapter 11 are examples. He quoted from Habakkuk, a Jewish prophet, reinforcing the truth that this was the principle of redemption that God had always honored. “But My righteous one shall live by faith” (Heb. 10:38; Hab. 2:4). Faith is the way to life, and faith is the way to live. There has never been any other way.

These Jews who have heard the powerful arguments for the superiority of the New Covenant over the Old are being told that, in regard to faith, the two covenants are the same. That is, the faith principle did not originate with the New Covenant. It was also active in the Old. In fact, it was active the moment man fell and needed a way back to God. It originated even before the earth began. Since God chose us in Christ “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), and since the only way God accepts us in Christ is by our faith, then God obviously established salvation by faith at that time. The way back to God, as far as man’s part is concerned, is by faith—it has always been by faith and only by faith.

Between the statement of the faith principle and the long list of Old Testament men and women who illustrated it, is a brief definition of this faith.

THE NATURE OF FAITH

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (11:1)

In a form the old Hebrew poets often used, the writer expresses his definition of faith in two parallel and almost identical phrases. It is not a full theological definition, but an emphasizing of certain basic characteristics of faith that are important in understanding the message the writer is trying to get across.

THE ASSURANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR

In Old Testament times, men and women had to rest on the promises of God. God had told them of a coming Messiah, a Deliverer who would take away sin. He told them that one day all Israel would be made clean and be ruled by this righteous Messiah. God’s faithful believed God’s promises, as incomplete and vague as many of those promises were. They did not have a great deal of specific light, by New Testament standards, but they knew it was God’s light, and put their full trust and hope in it.

That is what faith is. Faith is living in a hope that is so real it gives absolute assurance. The promises given to the Old Testament saints were so real to them, because they believed God, that they based their lives on them. All the Old Testament promises related to the future—for many believers, far into the future. But the faithful among God’s people acted as if they were in the present tense. They simply took God at His word and lived on that basis. They were people of faith, and faith gave present assurance and substance to what was yet future.

Faith is not a wistful longing that something may come to pass in an uncertain tomorrow. True faith is an absolute certainty, often of things that the world considers unreal and impossible. Christian hope is belief in God against the world—not belief in the improbable against chance. If we follow a God whose audible voice we have never heard and believe in a Christ whose face we have never seen, we do so because our faith has a reality, a substance, an assurance that is unshakable. In doing so, Jesus said, we are specially blessed (John 20:29).

Moses considered “the reproach of Christ [Messiah] greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward” (Heb. 11:26). Moses took a stand on the messianic hope, and forsook all the material things he could touch and see for a Messiah who would not come to earth for more than 1400 years.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego were confronted with the choice of obeying Nebuchadnezzar, whom they could see very well, or God, whom they had never seen. Without hesitation, they chose to obey God. Man’s natural response is to trust his physical senses, to put his faith in the things he can see, hear, taste, and feel. But the man of God puts his trust in something more durable and dependable than anything he will ever experience with his senses. Senses may lie; God cannot lie (Titus 1:2).

The philosopher Epicurus, who lived several hundred years before Christ, said the chief end of life is pleasure. But he was not a hedonist, as many people think. He was talking of pleasure in the long view—ultimate pleasure, not immediate, temporary gratification. He held that we should pursue that which, in the end, will bring the most satisfaction. Understood in the right way, this should also be the Christian’s objective.

Christians are not masochists. Quite to the contrary, we live for ultimate and permanent pleasure. We live in the certainty that whatever discomfort or pain we may have to endure for Christ’s sake on earth, will more than be compensated for by an eternity of unending bliss, of pleasure we cannot now imagine.

The Greek word hupostasis, translated here as assurance, appears two other times in Hebrews. In 1:3 it is rendered “exact representation,” speaking of Christ’s likeness to God, and in 3:14 it is rendered “assurance,” as in 11:1. The term refers to the essence, the real content, the reality, as opposed to mere appearance. Faith, then, provides the firm ground on which we stand, waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promise. Far from being nebulous and uncertain, faith is the most solid possible conviction. Faith is the present essence of a future reality.

The Old Testament saints “died in faith, without receiving the promises, but... welcomed them from a distance” (Heb. 11:13). They saw the fulfillment of God’s promise with the eye of faith, which, when it is in God, has immeasurably better vision than the best of physical eyes. They held on to the promise as the ultimate reality of their lives, as the most certain thing of their existence.

THE CONVICTION OF THINGS NOT SEEN

Conviction of things not seen carries the same truth a bit further, because it implies a response, an outward manifestation of the inward assurance. The person of faith lives his belief. His life is committed to what his mind and his spirit are convinced is true.

Noah, for example, truly believed God. He could not possibly have embarked on the stupendous, demanding, and humanly ridiculous task God gave him without having had absolute faith. When God predicted rain, Noah had no concept of what rain was, because rain did not exist before the Flood. It is possible that Noah did not even know how to construct a boat, much less a gigantic ark. But Noah believed God and acted on His instructions. He had both assurance and conviction—true faith. His outward building of the ark bore out his inward belief that the rain was coming and that God’s plan was correct for constructing a boat that would float. His faith was based on God’s word, not on what he could see or on what he had experienced. For 120 years he preached in faith, hoped in faith, and built in faith.

The natural man cannot comprehend that kind of spiritual faith. We see Him who is invisible (Heb. 11:27), but the unsaved man does not, because he has no means of perception. Because he has no spiritual senses, he does not believe in God or the realities of God’s realm. He is like a blind man who refuses to believe there is such a thing as light because he has never seen light.

Yet there is a sense in which all men live by faith. As illustrated in an earlier chapter, society is built on a foundation of faith. We drink water out of a faucet, with perfect confidence it is safe. We eat food in a restaurant, confident that it is not contaminated. We willingly receive our pay in the form of a check or paper money—neither of which has any instrinsic value at all. We accept them because of our faith in the person or the company or the government that issues them. We put our faith in a surgeon, and in medical science in general, though we may not have the least training, competence, or experience in medicine ourselves. We submit to the surgeon’s knife entirely by faith. The capacity for faith is created in us.

Spiritual faith operates in the realm of that capacity. It willingly accepts and acts on many things it does not understand. But spiritual faith is radically different from natural faith in one important way. It is not natural, as is our trust in water, money, or the doctor. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). Just as natural trust comes by natural birth, so spiritual trust comes from God.

THE TESTIMONY OF FAITH

For by it the men of old gained approval. (11:2)

Men of old gained approval from God because of their faith, and because of nothing else. God has always approved and recognized the person of faith. This verse implies what other parts of the chapter make clear—that God makes his approval known to those who trust Him. How God shows His approval varies, but every saint, just as surely as Enoch (Heb. 11:5), has God’s witness that his faith is pleasing to his Lord.

Faith is not simply one way to please God; it is the only way. “Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (11:6). No matter what else we may think, say, or do for or in the name of God, it is meaningless and worthless apart from faith. It cannot possibly be approved by God.

Modern man has put himself in a dilemma, as evangelical scholars such as Francis Schaeffer have frequently pointed out. Throughout virtually all of history, man had what philosophers call a unified field of knowledge. That is, man understood the supernatural, human history, science, ethics, economics—everything—within one frame of reference. These areas were all part of total reality. But then we had a great movement in philosophy known as rationalism, which denied the very existence of the supernatural, including—especially including—God. Men such as Graf, Wellhausen, Bauer, Strauss, Renan, and many others began systematically to undercut every supernatural doctrine or belief.

A prime target was the Bible. Often in the name of biblical scholarship they contradicted, by supposed disproof, every supernatural claim of Scripture. They reduced all knowledge and reality to the area of natural reason, which dealt only with what the physical senses could observe and measure and with what the human mind could interpret on its own. Man became the measure of all things. Everything outside the sphere of man’s physical experience and intellectual understanding was denied or discounted.

But most men could not handle this radical explanation. Even from the human perspective, it left too much unaccounted for. It made man nothing more than part of a huge, meaningless machine. Some philosophers began to see the limitations of rationalism. Kierkegaard, for example, decided to make a place for the supernatural by putting it in a different order of reality than the everyday world. This “upper story,” as Schaeffer describes it, is thought not to be knowable in the same way that the lower, earthly level is knowable. It is experienced only by a “leap of faith.” Because it supposedly cannot really be known, every man is free to make of the supernatural what he wants. He can believe in a “Wholly Other” kind of god, as did Paul Tillich; or he can simply believe in believing, have faith in faith. But what is believed has no definite content, no definite reality, no definite truth. It is purely existential, without content, nonrational, and nonlogical. To use a phrase from Schaeffer again, it is an “escape from reason”—the opposite extreme from that of rationalism. Both of these philosophies, of course, are escapes from the true God.

This new, nonrational philosophy first began to influence art, which had always been basically realistic. Artists varied widely in style and technique, but they all sought to portray reality. That is, a picture of a man always looked like a man, a picture of a flower looked like a flower, and so on. Art was reasonable and realistic. It corresponded to what all men saw and experienced. But with the coming of nonrational philosophy, art began to reflect this new outlook. There were no absolutes, no certainties about anything. A man was represented as the artist felt like representing him at the moment. A flower took the form of whatever the artist had in mind when he painted. Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and many others developed what became known as abstract art, which was completely subjective, imaginative, and contentless.

The next influence was on music. It, too, began to reflect only the subjective and imaginative, apart from content or structure—as seen in Debussy, Cage, and rock music.

Then came the effect on literature, with Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, and such writers who used their skills to undercut absolutes and standards not only in literature but in spiritual and moral areas as well. Love, honesty, truth, purity, the sacred, the right—all were grist for their existential mills to grind into relativism.

Relativism can lead nowhere but to meaninglessness and despair, which many proponents of this philosophy realized and acknowledged. But they insisted that this is all there is to the world, to life, to man, and that we therefore have to make the best of it. Since God was ruled out, man had no measure of himself or of his world—and could not expect to find any.

The most significant area to be affected was theology. A god that may be there, that may be good, that may care is hardly a god that inspires devotion and commitment. A god that man makes and imagines, man can remake and reimagine. A theology of a god that cannot be known or understood is not theology at all. It is hardly surprising that the extreme form of contentless theology declared that God is dead. Of course, even this “doctrine” had no content, no exact meaning. It simply meant whatever the person who used it may have meant when he said or wrote it.

Such nonrational philosophy is perfectly illustrated in the book Catch-22, which centers on a squadron of World War II American fliers stationed on the ficticious island of Pianos in the Mediterranean. Their job was to fly extremely dangerous missions over southern Europe, and they had to complete 25 missions before being eligible for transfer. One of the men, Yosarian, was especially anxious to get out. But when he had completed his twenty-fifth mission, the new commanding officer raised the number to 30, and then to 40, 45, 50, and so on. Insanity became the only justification for transfer. But if a flyer turned himself in for being insane in order to get out of flying the missions, that was evidence he was sane. It became clear to the fliers that they were playing a sadistic game, with no way out. So Yosarian decided to build a raft and float to Sweden—no matter that a whole continent was between him and Sweden or that the ocean currents would have taken him anywhere but there. Despite the impossibility of accomplishing what he intended, he could not be dissuaded. He had devised a hopeless escape from a hopeless situation, and insisted on his right to pursue it. He jumped headlong into the absurd.

People take alcohol and drugs today because they have run out of rational options. They are also trying to escape into witchcraft, astrology, reincarnationism, and countless cults. They are looking for meaning and sense and reality, often while denying that there can be any such things.

These are some of the desperate lengths to which men will go when they reject God, and even the rational and the sensible. They are left only with the absurd—no faith, no hope, no peace, no assurance, no confidence. They can only leap from one vapid and empty absurdity to another, with no prospect or expectation that the next will be better than the previous.

God is the only rational answer, the only sure answer. Only the God who made men can ever satisfy men. Only the God who made reason can make life reasonable. Only the God who made the universe can show man any purpose in it. Since the time of Adam, some men have believed in God and believed what He has said. For them life has been meaningful; it has had assurance, substance, and confidence. They did not make a blind leap of faith, but put their faith in a future reality that, because of their faith, God made certain and sure for them. And with this certainty came assurance, confidence, and hope. Believing in God gives reason for living—and for dying. Just before Stephen was stoned, “he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). This glimpse of his Lord vindicated all he had endured for the gospel’s sake and all he was then about to suffer. He had something to live for and to die for.

THE ILLUSTRATION OF FAITH

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. (11:3)

The writer is saying to the Jews who had not yet trusted Christ, “You already have a certain faith in God. You believe that He created the universe and everything in it.” They believed this without any doubt, even though they were not there when God created. They could not see His act of creating, but they could see His creation and they believed in the Creator. They had a start of faith. They knew and accepted this truth by faith, not by sight. Their own Scriptures taught it and they believed it.

God did not just create the world, but the worlds (ain), which designates the physical universe itself and also its operation, its administration. He created everything simply by His word (rhma), His divine utterance. He created from nothing, at least not from anything physical, or visible. The writer makes an absolutely stupendous claim in this short verse. The greatest claim, and the one hardest for an unbeliever to accept, is that understanding of creation comes entirely by faith.

The origin of the universe has been a long-standing problem for philosophers and scientists. Centuries of investigation, speculation, and comparing of notes and theories have brought them no closer to a solution. Every time a consensus seems to be developing about a particular theory, someone comes up with evidence that disproves it or makes it less plausible.

Bertrand Russell spent most of his 90 years as a philosopher. His most certain conviction was that Christianity was the greatest enemy of mankind, because it taught of a tyrannical God who stifled man’s rightful freedom. He admitted at the end of his life that philosophy “was a washout,” that it held no answers for anything. He had written that “we must conquer the world by intelligence,” and yet all of his own great intellect and all of the other intellects who looked to themselves for answers never found an answer. Russell’s greatest faith was in the idea that there is no God. He rejected the only source of answers, meaning, and hope.

Most philosophy is mere doodling with words, as many people do with a pencil. Without revelation, a source of basic truth, the best it can do is make verbal squiggles. Some are more impressive than others, but none can lay claim to the truth or to ultimate meaning. Paul warned the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men” (Col. 2:8).

Science has done no better than philosophy in offering answers to the origin of the universe. Even though science, by definition, is limited to the observable, measurable, and repeatable, some scientists persist in speculating about the origin of the earth and of the entire universe—trying to reconstruct the process from what can be observed today. They, like the philosophers, have assumed a burden far beyond their competence and resources.

For some 100 years the nebula theory was the dominant scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. It was eventually replaced by the tidal theory, which was soon replaced by the steady-state theory, the super dense (big bang) theory, and so on. None of these theories gained universal acceptance among scientists. Today, theories are still multiplying and none yet is universally accepted, much less proved. The same is true of theories of evolution. Even some nonreligious scientists are calling for science to reconsider the very notion of evolution. Discovery of origins is far outside man’s scope of knowledge and investigation. His attempts to discover where the universe came from, or where man himself came from, cannot possibly end in anything but futility. He is doomed to go from one unprovable theory to another.

Physics professor T. L. Moore of the University of Cincinnati has said, “To talk of the evolution of thought from sea slime to amoeba, from amoeba to a self-conscious thinking man, means nothing. It is the easy solution of a thoughtless brain.”

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, a truth the world’s most brilliant thinkers have not discovered and cannot discover on their own. It is beyond the realm of scientific investigation, but it is not beyond knowing—if we are willing to be taught by the Word of God. The Christian has no reason to be proud of his knowledge. It is a gift from God, like every other blessing of faith. By his own resources, he could no more discover the truth about origins than could the rankest atheist.

The Christian insists that all truth is God’s truth. Some of it—the natural world—is discoverable with our eyes, ears, touch, and intellect. A great deal more of it, however, is not. It is apprehended only by faith, for which the Christian should make no apology. The very attempt to explain the universe, or our own being and nature, apart from God is a fool’s effort. These things we understand only by faith in the revealed Word of Scripture. Faith comprehends that which the mind of man, no matter how brilliant, cannot fathom. “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him. For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:9-10).

An evangelist of many years ago told the beautiful story of two little boys he once visited in a London hospital.

The cots were side-by-side. One boy had a dangerous fever, the other had been struck by a truck and his body was badly mangled. The second one said to the first, “Say, Willie, I was down to the mission Sunday school and they told me about Jesus. I believe that if you ask Jesus, He will help you. They said that if we believe in Him and pray to God, then when we die He’ll come and take us with Him to heaven.” Willie replied, “But what if I’m asleep when He comes and I can’t ask Him?” His friend said, “Just hold up your hand; that’s what we did in Sunday school. I guess Jesus sees it.” Since Willie was too weak to hold up his arm, the other boy propped it up for him with a pillow. During that night, Willie died, but when the nurse found him the next morning, his arm was still propped up.

We can be sure that the Lord saw his arm, because the Lord sees faith and the Lord accepts faith. By faith Willie saw the way to heaven. By faith he saw what the learned will never discover on their own. God’s greatest truths are discovered by simple faith. It is not the world’s way to truth, but a thousand years from now—if the Lord tarries that long—the world will still be devising and rejecting its theories. The person of faith knows the truth now. Faith is the only way to God.