Kootenai Church: Hebrews

I want to begin by saying I'm very grateful to Dave and Gordie for preaching for me while I was out of the pulpit the last couple of weeks. We are blessed to have men who are able to handle the Word of God with faithfulness and truth. And doing what they do in filling in is more difficult than the type of preaching that I do because they just step in and do one sermon. And it's more difficult when you're not doing it every week to just go back into a passage that you were in four or five months ago and to try and pick up where you were at and carry that theme along. That is more difficult. So I'm grateful for the extra work that they did in doing that. And Dave managed to preach without stepping all over my sermons and repeating what I've said. So kudos to him for that. And kudos to him for mentoring Gordie to do his dirty work for him. I didn't see that coming. So Gordie ended up stepping all over it instead. I guess that's just the way it is.
Gordie did a great job of sort of bridging the transition between Hebrews 10 and Hebrews 11, which we're starting this morning. Hebrews 11 is one of the better-known chapters in the book of Hebrews because it is sometimes referred to as the Faith Hall of Fame. And it is remarkable and singularly unique for a number of reasons, many of which we're going to get to this morning and many of which we will get to in the weeks that are ahead. It is referred to as the Faith Chapter and it is similar to what 1 Corinthians does with the subject of love. So what 1 Corinthians 13 is to the subject of love, Hebrews 11 is to the subject of faith. First Corinthians 13 is referred to as the love chapter. You kind of have a definition of love, illustrations of love, examples of love, an explanation of what love is. We have the same thing here in Hebrews 11 with the subject of faith. We have a definition of faith and then an explanation of what faith is and what faith looks like and then there are these numerous examples of faith in action and in life through all of the Old Testament illustrations that are given there.
And we're going to see in the weeks ahead that the biblical definition of faith is vastly different than what the world considers faith to be. And it is vastly different than what our culture regards faith to be. Our culture and our world and unbelievers have a certain idea of what faith is, and it is entirely wrong what they think faith is. They use the term faith, but as Gordie mentioned last week, they pour into that term an entirely different meaning than Scripture does when it speaks of faith.
So Hebrews 11 is also going to show us that unfortunately many well-meaning but misguided Christians also have an inadequate view of faith. I think that if you were to poll Christians writ large across the country, not necessarily in this church but just people who claim to be Christians in churches all across America, you would get a definition of faith that is more in keeping with what the world thinks faith is than what the Bible describes faith actually to be. And our study over the next few weeks is going to contrast biblical faith with the world's definition, the culture's idea, and even sometimes Christian misconceptions of what faith is.
Hebrews 11 has been called the Heroes of Faith, the Honor Roll of the Old Testament Saints. How many of you were ever on the honor roll in school? I didn't raise my hand for a reason. Nobody who—yeah, my wife is up here quietly raising her hand. That's why she did the schooling and I did not for the kids. The Honor Roll of Old Testament Saints—it has been called the Westminster Abbey of Scripture. Hebrews 11 has been called the Saints Hall of Fame or even the Faith Hall of Fame. You take a stroll through Hebrews 11, we are getting a chronological and historical journey through the Old Testament, stopping, as it were, at many of the main characters and significant people and places and times of Old Testament history to see faith on display. I like to call it the Faith Hall of Fame and you've heard me refer to it that way a couple of times in recent weeks.
A little bit of an aside—back at the end of March to the beginning of April, I made a trip, Diedre and I did, with some friends out to Cincinnati, Ohio and then Cleveland, Ohio, and I was asked to come out and participate in a project and do some work on something out there. So we took a couple of extra days and went to Cincinnati and saw the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter and then we drove up to Cleveland where I was supposed to do this work and we had an afternoon and we were within an hour of Canton, Ohio, which is where the Pro Football Hall of Fame is. It has been a dream of mine as long as I've been following football, which is since I was ten years old, to be able to go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I've watched the induction ceremonies and I've read up on stuff and visited the website, so to actually be able to go out and to walk through the Hall of Fame was itself quite a treat.
So we did that one afternoon. It was kind of later in the afternoon and we got to go there. I was giddy about being able to walk through the nostalgia of it and see the paraphernalia and be reminded of things that I've forgotten about and be reminded of things that nobody could ever forget about. I was really looking forward to it. And we got there, and after we paid our entrance fee to get into the Hall of Fame, we were getting ready to walk into the exhibit hall and there was an older gentleman there who was approaching retirement age or he was maybe past retirement age. He obviously worked for the Hall of Fame. His job was to welcome everybody that came there and answer any questions that you might have and direct you to where you should go, how to enter the exhibit hall.
So he walked up and he greeted us and he said, “Greetings. Welcome to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Where are you folks from?” And I said, “Well, I’m from Sandpoint, Idaho, up in the Pacific Northwest.” And he said, “Oh, do you all have a favorite football team that you cheer for?” And I said, “I actually do. I cheer for the San Francisco 49ers. It's been my favorite football team since I was ten years old. I have watched football, and it is something of a novelty for me and I'm excited to be here since half of the people in the Hall of Fame have played for my team,” which is something of an overstatement. And he kind of chuckled. He said, “Yeah, there are a lot of 49ers in here.”
And then without really thinking about it, I said, “So what's your favorite team?” And as soon as I asked that question, I had pop into my mind this sort of Rolodex of football insults that I could pull out, depending on what team he said that he would cheer for. I just had them kind of all just all at the same time pop into my mind. And I didn't suppress the urge at all to say something. And he said—well, for instance, I'll give you some examples of what popped into my head. If he had said, “I'm a New England Patriots fan,” I would have said, “Oh, are there Patriots players in the Hall of Fame who got in without cheating?” That's what I was prepared to say. Yeah, no, it gets better. If he had said, “I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan,” then I was prepared to say, “The Cowboys who were inducted into the Hall of Fame, did they get out of prison on work release long enough to make it to the induction ceremony?” Or if he had said, “I am a Seattle Seahawks fan”—you knew I was going there, right? If he had said he was a Seattle Seahawks fan, then I would have said to him, “Oh, I didn't realize that the bandwagon came out this far east.”
But instead, and I should have expected this, he said, “I'm a Cleveland Browns fan.” And I said, “Of course, we're an hour outside of Cleveland. Who else would work at the Pro Football Hall of Fame except for a Cleveland Browns fan?” So I said, “I guess I should have expected that.” And then before I had a chance to second-guess the wisdom of my next sentence, my brain flipped through the Rolodex of insults, the type of insults that you just banter back and forth with friends like I've just been doing, and it pulled out the Cleveland Browns card, and I said to him, “So tell me, what is it like working in the Football Hall of Fame when nobody from your team is in it?”
Now as soon as I heard those words come off my lips, I had the exact same reaction that you just had. “Ohhh.” And I thought to myself, Jim, he doesn't know you. You have never had a conversation with the guy. He is a complete stranger. He has done nothing to deserve this except welcome you to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and you treat him as if he is Mel Jensen and you're joking about his team and trying to get in digs back and forth. This is the type of stuff that we say amongst our family. But I could tell from the look on his face that two things were true. Number one, that was a bridge way too far. I had crossed it and burned it behind me. And number two, this guy was never going to forget me. His countenance changed instantly.
Now, fortunately, he led us into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And I understand that was a long walk for a short drink of water, but here's the drink of water. When he got into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, since football is one hundred years old, the Hall of Fame is laid out according to decades. So you take this walking tour through this series of exhibits, and it's quite long as you go decade by decade, one after another, from the beginning of football all the way to the end. You see a lot of the paraphernalia and media stories, and you see trivia. And you just walk through history, one hundred years of football history. It was neat to get up into the time that I was more familiar with in the 1980s and ’90s and to enjoy some of that.
And then when you get done with the walking tour through history, you walk into the room where—you've seen all of the copper busts that they make of the players when they induct them into the Hall of Fame. There's a room that is bigger than this room here, and it's a big semi-circular wall like this, and it has all of the busts lined up I think in the order that they were inducted into the Hall of Fame on one wall that would encircle at least four of the walls in this room, and then there's a whole other wall that they've started heading their way down to. And as you're walking past all of those busts, I got to be reminded of players that I had forgotten, players that you could never forget, players that are very familiar to me, other players that I had heard a little bit about, and as I got to see each one of them and when they were inducted and who they played for, it just reminded me of all of these significant figures.
Now, here's the parallel. In Hebrews 11, we have the exact same thing, both a chronological tour of the Old Testament as well as a series of busts that the author brings out for us, some of whom we're very familiar with. Others, like Barak and Jephthah and Samson, unless you went through Miss Diane’s Sunday school class, you're probably less familiar with some of those players. But we get a chronological grouping of the Old Testament saints in order, and he brings up various saints and various heroes of the faith, this hall of fame, these characters who lived according to faith, obeyed God in faith, and are notable for that reason. That is what we have in Hebrews 11.
So now that we are there, we're going to give you a couple of—well, I'm going to give you a warning right now. We are going to get through the whole chapter, but it's not going to be the only time we're going to go through the whole chapter. We're going to go through the whole chapter today at thirty thousand feet, as it were, to see the broad strokes of this. And I want you to be able to sort of get an idea of the entire context of this chapter. We're going to see some of the main players, some of the main ideas, some of the main themes, and what we can learn from the chapter in general. We're going to do that this morning, and then next week, we're going to get out of the plane at thirty thousand feet and go down and we're going to walk through, beginning again at verse 1, and look at some of these saints in much more detail.
But before we go through the passage, let me give you two very general observations. First, we're going to read the word faith a lot in Hebrews 11, a lot. In fact, it occurs twenty-six times in this chapter alone. This is not even to mention chapter 10, the end of chapter 10, which also describes faith, but just in Hebrews 11, the word faith occurs twenty-six times. Nineteen of those, we read the words by faith. Three times we read in faith or through faith. Three times we just read of faith. And then once there is a reference to faithfulness. And in that occasion it is actually referring to God who is faithful to do what He has promised. The word faith and faithful are related in Greek just like they are related in English. So the author is using various constructions to describe faith—by faith, through faith, in faith, just faith, faithfulness. That is the emphasis and the main theme of chapter 11.
Second, I don't want you to forget that we are right on the heels of the warning chapter that is at the end of chapter 10. Remember that warning chapter ends with a discussion of faith, a quotation from Habakkuk 2:4 that the just shall live by faith. Then there’s that reference in verse 39: “We are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.” So that is how chapter 10 ends, and I don't want you to let the chapter division, sort of the chapter denotation there, make a division in your own mind in this material. He has just described for us the role that faith has in preserving those who believe, that it is an enduring faith, that it is a gift of faith, it is something that those true believers have, that it is the mark of genuine Christianity. Those who shrink back to destruction shrink back to destruction because they do not have true and genuine faith. But the faith that saves preserves us to the end all the way through the preservation of our soul. That's the idea.
So when we get into chapter 11, we're going to see themes that we've seen in chapter 10. This is not the first time we read about faith or the effects of faith. There are other themes that we also have in chapter 11, like reproach and reward and faithfulness in the midst of hostility and enduring to the end, living and dying in faith, obedience and perseverance. These themes are all woven through chapter 11 because they were part of the warning passage at the end of chapter 10. So he has implored for us to have faith, he has encouraged us to have faith and described it a little bit at the end of chapter 10, and now in chapter 11, he's really going to drill down on what this faith looks like and how this faith preserves us and keeps us in the midst of a hostile and hateful world that opposes us at every turn. And that is really going to be one of the main lessons as we work our way through.
So let's get an overview now of Hebrews 11. We're going to read the chapter, not in one stop, but we’ll read a few verses and I’ll comment. And we'll just note some things as we work our way through this entire chapter. Beginning in Hebrews 11:1–2: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it [that is, by faith] the men of old gained approval.” We have in verse 1 a definition of faith. It’s one of the most memorable and oft-quoted verses in all of the book of Hebrews, certainly one of the most memorable and oft-quoted in Hebrews 11. It is the biblical definition of faith. It is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction or the confidence of things that are not yet seen.
In verse 2, we have a commendation of faith and a reminder that the men of old, through faith, gained approval. And this indicates to us that the author is now going to go back and begin to discuss some of the men of old who gained approval through their faith. He's going to take us back in history into the Old Testament times, and he's going to give us a chronological tour of the men and sometimes women who gained approval with God through the faith that he has been describing.
Hebrews 11:3: “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.” Now there he's not describing somebody who had faith in the Old Testament, and don't be confused and think that by faith God created the world. God didn't create the world by faith. That's not an action that God did. God doesn't need faith. God doesn't possess faith. So God didn't create by faith, but he is saying that we, going all the way back to creation, we believe at the very beginning of the book of Genesis that God made the entire world, and everything that is, out of things that were not yet and things that were not even seen. So that's a reference to creation.
So he's taking us in verse 3 all the way back to creation. So it's as if we were beginning back in Genesis 1:1. Right, the beginning of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You’re right in the foyer and there is a car there. This represents the birth of professional football since people sat around in a car lot on this car and birthed the idea of football. So now we're going back to Genesis 1:1, the creation of all things.
And now we're going to start a chronological tour through Old Testament history. The first character, Abel, in verse 4.
4 By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks.
5 By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and he was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God. (Heb. 11:4–5 NASB)
Notice the reference there to pleasing God being gaining God's approval. That was in verse 2, remember?
Verse 6: “And 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.” That is another one of the most oft-quoted and familiar verses in Hebrews 11. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. It describes there the necessity of faith, the centrality of faith in the life of those who are pleasing to God.
Verse 7: “By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.”
So in those first—what are we at?—seven verses we've gone through Genesis 1–9. And we have hit the highlights of faithful men, a lineage of faith—Abel, Enoch, Noah. Coming to verse 6, he tells us of the centrality of faith, the necessity of faith in pleasing God. Notice the reference to Enoch pleasing God; that is the same idea that we read in verse 2 about those who gained God's approval through their faith.
And very quickly then in this chapter we come to Abraham and he camps on Abraham for a bit, beginning in verse 8.
8 By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.
9 By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise;
10 for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
11 By faith even Sarah herself received ability to conceive, even beyond the proper time of life, since she considered Him faithful who had promised.
12 Therefore there was born even of one man, and him as good as dead at that, as many descendants as the stars of heaven in number, and innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
13 All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.
14 For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own.
15 And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return.
16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son;
18 it was he to whom it was said, “In Isaac your descendants shall be called.”
19 He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead, from which he also received him back as a type. (Heb. 11:8–19 NASB)
That is a long paragraph that describes the faith of Abraham. And you can probably see from that some of the references in that song that we sang with Josh this morning, the references to a city whose maker and builder is God, a city, a nation, a land, the promises, dying without receiving those promises.
It is interesting that this is the longest single example that the author provides in Hebrews 11. All of the other patriarchs other than Moses are brief references to either what they did or how they lived or what God did through them, but this is the longest example that he provides. It is as if he races through Abel and Enoch and Noah, and then he comes to Abraham and he hits the brakes and he camps on Abraham. And I think that there is a significant reason for that, one of them being that there is a lot that is connected to Abraham. You have the Abrahamic covenant, an unconditional covenant that God made with His people and with Abraham, the details of which have yet to be fulfilled in this world. And that unconditional covenant being connected to Abraham obviously affects not just the Jewish nation but also the nations of the entire world.
So when you get to Abraham, suddenly you have the expanding of the scope of God's intention in His redemption and in His covenant plans, and you get glimpses of Abraham being a father to many nations and his descendants being as numerous as the seashore. We get into Romans 4 and Paul says that those of us who are not just under the law but those of us who are by faith are also children of Abraham. So we consider Abraham, our father, as a faith father. So we have Abraham now standing as a father in the way of the law with the Jews and physically to the Jewish nation but also as a faith father to all who follow in the steps of Abraham and believe God as Abraham did.
So he comes to a screeching halt at Abraham in order to camp on that and show us all the various lessons from the life of Abraham. Abraham believed God and left his land. He believed God and left the comforts and conveniences of his own land, went out and lived in a tent not even knowing where he was going, being promised a land that he had never seen occupied by people that he could not conquer or kick out of the land. He was promised descendants that he had never seen and Abraham died without ever seeing the fulfillment of the promises that God made to him. He trusted God for a land, he trusted God for his offspring, and he trusted God even though God told him, “Sacrifice your only son Isaac.” That's an interesting encounter. We're going to spend some time camping on that and the significance of it, the typology of it, when we get to that.
The other patriarchs are also mentioned that are attached to Abraham—Sarah, Jacob, Isaac. Hebrews 11:20–22: “By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau, even regarding things to come. By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff. By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel, and gave orders concerning his bones.” So we have Isaac and Jacob and Esau and Joseph, all of which did things in faith, all of which had things happen to them and were blessed in faith by their patriarchs.
So we get to the end of verse 22 and we've reached the end of the book of Genesis in our tour. You say, “Wow, we’re halfway through this chapter and we've only gone through the book of Genesis.” Notice the references in verses 20 and 22 to dying. Abraham died, never receiving the promise. Jacob died, never receiving the promise. Joseph died in Egypt, never receiving the promise. All of these men lived and then died in faith.
And then next up is Moses, beginning in verse 23: “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child.” That's the faith of Moses’s parents, not Moses's faith. He was a baby. His faith wasn’t operative, but his parents’ faith.
23 And they were not afraid of the king’s edict.
24 By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter,
25 choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin,
26 considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward.
27 By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing Him who is unseen.
28 By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood, so that he who destroyed the firstborn would not touch them.
29 By faith they passed through the Red Sea as though they were passing through dry land; and the Egyptians, when they attempted it, were drowned. (Heb. 11:23–29 NASB)
Now Moses is the second longest example from the Old Testament. Abraham and Moses. He scurries through the other Old Testament saints. He gets to Abraham and he stops there, parks on Abraham, describes Abraham's faith and life and all the incidences from the life and faithfulness of Abraham that are worth emulating. And then he skips over Jacob and Isaac and Joseph, and there's certainly a lot of things that they did in faith. He kind of bounces past those, and then he comes to Moses and slows down, hits the brakes, as it were, and again stops and camps on Moses.
Why Abraham and Moses? What do those two men have in common? Covenants—Abraham an unconditional covenant regarding a land, a people, and a promised Messiah; Moses a conditional covenant that dealt with the people in the land and preparation for a Messiah. Those two men to whom God gave covenants and who were in a sense mediators of those covenants and involved in those covenants, the author is camping on those two significant historical figures. Why? Abraham being the father, the patriarch of the entire nation of Israel, the one to whom every Jew would go back in his lineage and to whom as believing Gentiles we point back to as the example of a faith that is imputed to us as righteousness—we point to Abraham as well. But then he stops on Moses who was the mediator of the old covenant, the old covenant that the author of Hebrews has spent the last ten chapters arguing has passed away and is no more. So he stops with that covenant to deal with Moses to show that even in terms of Moses's life with that transitory and temporary covenant, the old covenant that has passed away, faith was operative in his life and faith was operative in the life of Abraham as well.
So those two men have the most real estate devoted to their lives of faith in Hebrews 11 in contrast to all of the others. Moses's parents are mentioned here. Notice Moses's acts of faith. He turned his back on Egypt, which meant its wealth, its reputation, its status, its position, his acceptance with all of the hoi polloi of society. Moses turned his back on that. He left Egypt and he was associated with the people of God, saying, as the author of Hebrews does, that he considered the reproach of Christ as greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt. Moses understood something about Christ in his expression of faith when he walked away from Egypt. He obeyed the Passover, he obeyed and kept the law, mediated the law, he went through the Red Sea.
And now we come to the end of verse 29 and we've only gotten through the Pentateuch. We've only gotten to the—now we're at the book of Joshua, which is where verse 30 begins. “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been circled for seven days. By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish along with those who were disobedient, after she had welcomed the spies in peace” (vv. 30–31). So now we're into the book of Joshua. We're getting toward the end of this chapter and you think, man, you need to speed it up a bit. You got a lot—you say this of my preaching all the time. You need to speed it up a bit. This is what we say to the author of Hebrews. You got a lot of folks to go through. We've only made it through the first six books of the Old Testament and you have already filled us with examples of faith.
Joshua is the one who is—though not mentioned—is obviously in view in verse 30 when he references the walls of Jericho falling down. And then there is Rahab in verse 31, Rahab the harlot. Now she is something of an anomaly in this chapter so far, isn't she? Why is that? It's not because she's a woman. She's not the first woman mentioned. Remember Sarah was already mentioned earlier in connection with Abraham. It's not the fact that she is a woman that makes her unique in this chapter. What makes Rahab unique is a number of things. First of all, the author mentions it—she is a harlot. Don't let that escape your notice. She sits kind of outside the stream of the faithful, obedient, righteous, godly men that we've been examining so far, doesn't she? You’ve got Abel and Enoch and Noah and then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua. Oh, and a harlot. You kind of stop, and it should strike you. If you weren't familiar with it, it would kind of strike you.
A harlot, and not just a harlot, but here's a woman who is outside of the lineage of Abraham who was a member of an idol-worshipping nation that was dwelling in the land whom God was going to command the children of Israel to go in and to wipe out and cleanse the land of all of them and destroy them. She did something by faith. She stands out amongst all of the people in the land of Canaan as a singular example of someone outside of the lineage of Abraham and outside of the godly lineages that we read of in the first five books of the Old Testament. She stands out as somebody who is outside of all of that and yet has faith. And she is a Gentile. So if any Jew were reading this and he thought, “Yeah, of course, this is my godly lineage. I trace it all the way back to Abel through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. That's my lineage. Those are my guys, those are my peeps”—Rahab the harlot. See, this kind of faith that we're talking about in Hebrews 11 is not just for Jews and it's not just for the outwardly righteous. If Rahab, a harlot, can have faith and be made acceptable to God and please God, then every person in this room can be made acceptable to God and be pleasing to God on the basis of faith as well. Because I promise you, Rahab did nothing deserving of God's favor or His pleasure. Nothing. But here she stands.
Then, like a typical preacher, beginning in verse 32: “What more shall I say? For time will fail me.” Right, I'm out of time. I wish I could go through the rest of Joshua and the book of Judges and 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, and give you the list of all the prophets and name each one individually in this long godly lineage filling the nation of Israel with men and women of remarkable and unique faith, but I'm running out of time. I've got to get to some other stuff. So he says, “Time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets” (v. 32). Just rattling off names. He starts by rattling off names, and then he's just rattling off a group of people. You can tell that he's trying to speed up toward the end, but he's beginning to call to our mind judges from Israel's past as well as prophets. Judges would include Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David was a king, Samuel also being a judge. And then all of the prophets: Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Obadiah, Jonah, Joel, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Malachi, Haggai, Habakkuk, all of those Old Testament prophets that are at the end of your Bible. What about Elijah and Elisha as well? They fit way back in the biblical chronology, back at the times of the kings, and they didn't write a book. Well, they're included in the lineage as well. It's just this whole group of people. Time fails.
And notice that some of these people are well-known to us. David, Samuel, Gideon, probably a little bit more well-known. Anybody here other than somebody who's gone through Miss Diane's class feel comfortable telling me all about Barak and Jephthah? Less well-known to you? Do you have any idea why they're included in the Faith Hall of Fame? Yeah, walking through the Pro Football Hall of Fame, I read names that I didn't even recognize. I thought, “I have no idea why this guy's in here.” A couple of Seahawks players, I said, “I have no idea why this guy's in here.” I'd have recognized the name, but the achievement's less than stellar.
Verse 33: these men “who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness.” So now he's moved from describing individual people in rapid fire and moved from just describing a group of people, the prophets. Now he's just describing the acts or the works or the events that surrounded these kinds of people.
33 [They] by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions,
34 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.
35 Women received back their dead by resurrection [That's glorious, truthful, beautiful, right? What an encouragement]; and others were tortured [What?], not accepting their release, so that they might obtain a better resurrection;
36 and others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment.
37 They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated
38 [and one of my favorite phrases in all of Hebrews 11] (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. (Heb. 11:33–38 NASB)
Men of whom the world is not worthy. What is the world's perspective on the list of names and events that we just went through? What's the world's perspective on that? The world's perspective is that those men are not worthy to appear in any hall of fame. That is the offscouring of society. Those are the rejects. Those are the fools who wasted their lives standing for and believing something foolish. Those men are not worthy to be compared to us. That's what the world would say.
And here's God's assessment. The men that we have just read about and the women that we have just read about, they are people of whom the world is not worthy. You take all of the people in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Cornhole Hall of Fame, every other hall of fame on the planet, you group them all together, lump in all of the people who have served in the highest offices of our land, in Congress and the Supreme Court and all of the presidents, and then you throw on to that all of the mayors and governors who have ever lived and then every last celebrity who has appeared in a movie or a television commercial or a TV series that you have loved and adored growing up, put all of them in all of that one mix, all of them together, group all of them together, and that whole mass of humanity, as much as they're loved by the world, is not worthy to be compared with even one person who is on this list who ended their life in faith. That is God's assessment. These are men of whom the world is not worthy. Roaming about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, suffering, hated by the world, these are men who are more glorious than anything that the world has to offer.
Hebrews 11:39: “And all these. . .” We get to the end of this list; all of these, the men who did this, the groups of men and women who did this, “all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made perfect” (vv. 39–40). Notice the reference again in verse 39 to them gaining approval through faith. You remember verse 2? “For by it the men of old gained approval.” So that idea of gaining God's approval at the beginning of the chapter and at the end of the chapter are like brackets. See, these people are notable because their faith gained them God's approval. God approved of them, and it is through faith that they did these things. They were pleasing to God because they had the faith that God demands. That's the point of the chapter. That functions as brackets around the entire list.
Verse 40 tells us that this list is incomplete. Look again at verse 40. They died in faith, right, having never received the promises. They did not receive the promise “because God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made perfect.” This list is not complete and these men are not complete. Why is that? There's something else to be added to this list. Not just everybody else who has ever lived and died in faith, having never received the promises, but who else belongs on this list? You do. That apart from us, they would not be made perfect. Because you see, the faith that he is describing in Hebrews 11 is the same faith that he is commending to us to have in God as well. And it is faith in the same God, it is faith in the same reward, it is faith that has the same end—that is, the preserving of our soul—it is the faith that does the same thing, which is enduring all the way to the end, and we are trusting and waiting for the fulfillment of the same promises that Abraham was waiting for, many of them.
These Old Testament saints are still waiting in Heaven for the fulfillment of some of these promises. And we are being added to this list. When we live our lives and die in faith and in faithfulness, we are going to be made perfect with them. Let me tell you something. When God fulfills every last promise He has made to Abraham and to David, when God fulfills every last promise that He has made to them, we are going to be included in that. We receive all of those blessings as well. That is what it means to be incorporated into all the blessings of the new covenant. Apart from us, the fulfillment is not going to come. He is waiting. God is waiting. And by faith, we are included into these promises so that we enjoy the fulfillment of them as well. Apart from us, they are not made perfect.
Now let me give you a few observations here from Hebrews 11. First, when we read through Hebrews 11—we are going to notice this as we work our way through—one thing that we learn is that we can read the Old Testament with an eye to faith. And when I say that, I don't mean that we read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament in such a way that we reinterpret the Old Testament in a way that nobody who had ever read the Old Testament prior to the coming of Christ would have ever understood. That is not what I am suggesting. I am not saying that we take a New Testament lens and reinterpret, refigure the Old Testament according to that. That's not what I'm suggesting. What I am saying is that when we read the Old Testament, we ought to understand that these men and women who lived and died in faith, faith was the operative principle all the way back then.
We read of their accomplishments. We read of these great men and women. We need to understand that these men and women did what they did and lived as they lived in faith, that faith was the operative principle back then as well, and it always has been. Men are always credited with righteousness and men are always saved on the basis of faith, not on the basis of works. So it is wrong to look at the Old Testament and say those people, those men and women, gained approval from God by obeying the law or keeping His demands or doing something that merited His favor or His pleasure. No, that has never been the case because the Old Testament saints were no more able to keep the law or merit God's favor on their own behalf than you and I are. We cannot merit God's favor. We must operate on the basis of faith. We must be made acceptable to God on the basis of faith and faith alone and never on the basis of works. It is the same thing in the Old Testament.
So as we read through the Old Testament, we ought to be looking at these men and women and realizing these men and women are men and women who believed God and it was credited to them as righteousness just like Abraham. They simply trusted God. These are not men and women who are greater than we are. They weren't made acceptable to God on the basis of obedience to the law.
Second, appearing in this list does not mean that these men and women are without fault. Need I remind you that there is a harlot on this list? Sometimes it's easy when we are thinking of our heroes and referring to our heroes to minimize and even ignore all the bad things that they did and then overemphasize all the good things that they did, to forget all the stuff that should cloud our memory of them and make us have a reality check and then to overemphasize all the good stuff that we can remember that they did. That's how we treat our heroes typically.
This list should remind us that these men and women on this list are broken people desperately in need of grace just like you and I are broken people desperately in need of grace. These are not men and women cut from a different cloth than you and I are. They're no less fallen. They're no less sinners. They're no less wicked and depraved. They were no less in bondage to their sin than you and I have been in bondage to our sin before we were delivered by the grace of Christ. Don't forget the brackets around this, that these men and women gained approval with God through faith. And that is what God calls us to.
And third, the point of Hebrews 11 is actually not even stated in Hebrews 11. It's actually in the first few verses of the next chapter. Look at chapter 12, beginning in verse 1.
1 Therefore [That's the conclusion, right? He's made an argument], since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us [Who is the crowd of witnesses? All the people we've just read about], let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with [now watch the repetition of this idea] endurance the race that is set before us,
2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
3 For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Heb. 12:1–3 NASB)
What is the point of Hebrews 11? You and I are to look at this list of the heroes in the Faith Hall of Fame and we are to gain from that a certain level of courage and endurance. We are to look to Jesus, who did the same thing. He endured the reproach of hostile and evil sinners. And for the joy that was set before Him, He endured all of that, endured the cross, despising the shame, and has received the reward of sitting down at the Father's right hand. You and I likewise will be called to endure the hostility of sinners to someday receive the reward and join Him at the Father's right hand. So He becomes the example of this.
Now that means that the point of Hebrews 11 is not to be found in all of the many wrong interpretations that people typically give to this chapter. And I'll give you an example of a few that I'll highlight in the weeks to come, but I want to make you aware of them at this point. Here's the way that Hebrews 11 might be typically handled by preachers today. They would say that the point of Hebrews 11 is that with faith, you can be a hero too. With faith, you can be a hero too. Yeah, I mean, you look at Abraham and Noah and Moses, Gideon. Samson was strong, took down the pillars. Do you want to be a hero to your wife? Do you want to be a hero to your kids? Do you want to be a hero in your community? Do you want to be a hero in your church? You just need to have faith. And if you have faith, you can be a hero too. It's a sermon that Joel Osteen would preach. I would do it with his accent, but after I did that a few weeks ago, Justin Peters called me up and he said, “Your Joel Osteen impression needs a lot of work. Don't do that again.”
Second, a wrong interpretation is that with faith, you can do miracles too. Moses walked through the Red Sea. Joshua made the walls of Jericho fall down. Gideon defeated an army, conquered a kingdom. These were miraculous works. And all that is necessary for you to do miraculous works is for you to have faith like those men had faith. And if you just had the right amount of faith, if you just had the right quality of faith, if you just had faith long enough and strong enough and hard enough, you could do miracles too. That is a wrong interpretation of Hebrews 11.
A third one is that with faith you can leave your mark on this world. If you have enough faith, you can make this list too. These men and women left their mark on history. What's necessary to leave your mark on history? Become well-known, fabulous, and famous, men of repute. If you want the annals of church history to record your name in glowing terms, you just need to have the same kind of faith that these men and women had, and you can leave your mark on history too. That likewise is—I mean, all of these really are a Joel Osteen sermon, but that one's as well. You can leave your mark on history. That is not the point of Hebrews 11.
There are thousands, millions, of people who have the same faith that Abraham had who will never be known in the annals of church history. If they update Philip Schaff's three-volume History of the Christian Church two hundred years from now, unless something drastic happens that changes the course of history after today, nobody in this room, including myself, is going to be mentioned in the fourth volume of Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church. This is not a recipe for being a hero. This is not a recipe for being remembered for all time. This is not how you become remembered four thousand years from now. That's not the point of Hebrews 11.
Neither is it the right interpretation that with faith you can be successful in life. These men did great things. I mean, David was a great king. Samuel was a great judge. Noah was a great shipbuilder. Abraham was a great businessman. He was wealthy. He was successful. He was healthy. He was happy. It was glorious. I mean, he had four wives. If you have faith, you could have four wives too. That's not the point of Hebrews 11. We need to make sure that we draw the right analogies and come to the right conclusions from this chapter.
So what then is the point of Hebrews 11? Faith is commended not because it will make us heroes or miracle workers or successes or history changers or get us into the fourth volume of Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church. Faith is commendable because it endures to the end. It endures to the end. We have faith to the preserving of the soul, all the way to the end. It does not abandon the truth. It does not shrink back to destruction. The same faith that saves you and makes you righteous is the faith that sanctifies you in this life. It is the faith that motivates you to serve the Lord in this life and trust Him for the outcome. It is the same faith that secures you all the way through this life, and it is the same faith that will result in the glorification of all of those who have been justified by that faith. This faith endures all the way to the very end. It does not fail. It preserves and keeps us, and it governs all of life. Faith's value is not that it makes us notable people in the history of the Christian church. Faith's value is not that it makes us significant in the lives of our family or friends or our coworkers or in history at all. Faith’s value lies in the fact that it preserves the soul. Hebrews 10:39: “We are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.” That's the whole point.
Therefore, since you have that faith that Noah had and Abel had and Enoch had and Moses had and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, Gideon, the prophets, all those other people who did those things—the point is not that in having faith you will do those things. The point is that in having faith, they lived in faith, trusted the promises of God, died in faith, and will receive the reward of the reproach of faith. Remember what we talked about weeks ago? Those who endure the reproach of faith receive the reward of faith. Every one of these men and women endured the reproach of faith. Moses considered the reproach of Christ as greater riches than the treasures of Egypt because he looked forward to the reward, seeing what is yet unseen. That is faith. Faith’s value is in that it preserves us all the way to the end.
Those who live in faith and those who die in faith receive the reward of faith. And they have the power, the strength, the ability, the God-given capacity to endure hostility from sinners. And you and I can do the same thing because we are just like the men and women of old. We're cut from the same cloth. We're sinners. We’re made righteous on the basis of faith. We’re sanctified on the basis of faith. We serve on the basis of faith. We are secured and preserved on the basis of faith. And we are, in all likelihood, most of us, if not all of us, going to die having never received or seen the promises that have been given to us, unless the Lord returns. I would prefer to not die not seeing the promises, but if history continues, we're all going to die just like these men and women from Hebrews 11. That's the point of faith.
Starting next week, we're going to review some of these lessons and we'll go back to the beginning of verse 1 and walk through this definition of faith. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence or the conviction and the certainty of things that are not yet seen.