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| Strength for the Journey #12 Take Heart From Others' Stories |
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Take Heart From Others’ Stories
Reading: Hebrews 1:1-40
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 1:1, 6). Or, as the New International Version translates these two verses: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see…And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” These verses are at the beginning of perhaps the most famous chapter in Hebrews, that chapter many have called Faith’s Hall of Fame.
The context for this famous definition of faith and the series of examples that follows is the exhortation that we listened to last week in chapter ten. In light of the once for all sacrifice of the Jesus and his entrance into the throne room of God on our behalf, having cleansed/perfected the conscience of all who believe, the writer invited his listeners to “draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (10:22-24). At the close of chapter 10 the writer placed the language of faith specifically in the sphere of endurance: “For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. For yet (here he quotes from Habakkuk 2:3-4) ‘in a very little while, the one who is coming will come and will not delay; but my righteous one will live by faith. My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.’ But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved” (10:36-39).
The assurance of faith and the hope we profess at the beginning of the exhortation in chapter ten now take on particular weight with this definition at the beginning of chapter eleven. I should add that the word translated “assurance” in 10:22 is not the same as that in 11:1. This word in chapter eleven is the word the writer used back in 2:14 to describe the way in which Christ was just like us because he shared in the substance, the sameness of humanity. There is an objective substance, in other words, to this assurance of things hoped for. Faith is the way of knowing the as yet unknown, the future that is hoped for. It is a conviction about something that otherwise has no evidence—it cannot be seen.
I have to confess to you this morning that even though I have preached this text in the past and I have known this definition of faith and it’s corollary promise in verse 6 for most of my life, I found myself deeply troubled this week by the definition and by the stories that follow. Faith is a conviction concerning the unseen. It is an assurance about the future that is unknowable in the present otherwise. But don’t you and I live in a world that constantly reminds us that sight is necessary, that the future really, truly is unknown and unknowable until it happens? Assurance and conviction come with evidence in every other arena of life. We no longer live in a world that believes you can simply “take my word for it.” We want to see contracts in writing. We believe that science and empirical data are the support system for proof and authentication. We need facts in order to establish truth. We are a people who want to see for ourselves rather than accept the testimony of others. We may accept things without personal sight but only when we believe we can trust those who have seen. And most of the time, even when we talk about faith, we immediately go in search of bridges and support systems because there is nothing worse than the idea of blind faith or a leap of faith. We marshal our evidence from archaeology and apologetics and logic and common sense reasoning so that faith can be something other than blind.
Apart from the definition itself, and the promise that God rewards those who have faith and diligently seek him, there are the stories and examples in the text itself that puzzle and confuse. The definition suggests that faith is a means by which we can live in the present by anticipating the future. But the first illustration looks backward instead of forward. By faith we understand that God made all that is visible from the invisible. By faith, we believe in God’s creation, he says—not logic or science. By faith we claim that what we see in creation came from what was not seen. So now what is seen proves the reality of the not seen or the not yet seen? Make sense, so far?
Then come the human examples. Some of these stories I’m familiar with; others I had to go look up. But the way the writer talks about many of them is strange. Abel was a great example of faith, he says. “Through his faith, he still speaks,” verse 4. But when you read this story in Genesis, nothing is said about Abel’s faith, nor is any explanation given for why God liked his sacrifice best. And this idea that “Through his faith, he still speaks” seems to be an interpretation of Genesis 4:10 when God tells Cain that the blood of his dead brother is “crying out from the ground.”
The faith of Enoch I understand, even though Enoch is barely mentioned—just two verses in Genesis 5. The faith of Noah to build the ark is indeed commendable, but I remember the rest of the Noah story. I remember Noah after the flood, getting drunk and his son “uncovering his nakedness”—whatever that means—and his son and grandson and their heirs being forever cursed. Noah was the one who got drunk in the first place!
Then there are the Patriarchs Abraham and his wife Sarah, Isaac and his sons Jacob and Esau. Without doubt the parts of the Abraham story that he tells are remarkable. Abraham does leave behind the city for a life of wandering without a home, and he does seem to take the news well when God tells him that it will actually be more than 400 years before his descendents inherit the land. He and Sarah do have a son in their old age. But I remember the rest of the story. I remember Abraham being afraid for his life whenever he came across kings he didn’t know and he would look at the king and look at his wife and say, “She’s my sister.” Yes, they were blessed with a son, Isaac, but not before trying to fix the problem themselves with Hagar and Ishmael and not before falling to the ground in laughter when God told him that at the age of 99 he would have a son and his too-old-to-have-children wife would give birth. They both laughed.
We witnessed the saga of Isaac and Jacob and Esau last weekend in the play put on by our teens. In the midst of all the lying and cheating and stealing, there is faith? Joseph certainly had his faithful moments, but there were others as well. He couldn’t have been much fun to live with when he was having all of those dreams.
Then there is Moses, and I want to read this section because it’s the most confusing to me of all: “By faith Moses was hidden by his parents for three months after his birth, because they saw that the child was beautiful; and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking ahead to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, unafraid of the king’s anger; for he persevered as though he saw him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel” (11:24-28). I don’t know what to do with that line about Moses considering “abuse suffered for the Christ.” It’s possible the Hebrews writer is saying to his audience that Moses suffered abuse that was like that suffered by Christ. It also seems possible that he wants to suggest a straightforward link between Moses and Christ. But that’s only part of the problem. The bigger problem is in reading the story of Moses in Exodus 2:14f.: “Then Moses was afraid and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharoah and went to live in Midian. ”
I’ve read the story about Israel crossing the Red Sea. Yes, they passed through on dry ground but not before complaining bitterly that Moses and his God had brought them out to the Wilderness to die. I love the Rahab story, on the one hand, because she is not even an Israelite. But haven’t you wondered why Israelites spies ended up at the house of a prostitute in the first place?
Neither the writer of Hebrews nor I have time to explore the stories of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, and Samuel. But I know too much about those stories as well. If faith does not require sight, why did Gideon keep throwing out that fleece so that God could prove himself? Barak is a rather obscure military general who indeed won a great victory over Sisera, but he refused to go to battle without a woman at his side! Samson was the strongest man who ever lived, but he couldn’t keep the one rule that God stated over and over again in Torah—don’t get involved with those pagan nations. Do NOT take a wife from among the pagans. He couldn’t stay away from Philistine women. Jephthah is the one who made a vow and told God that if the LORD would give him a military victory, he would offer up in sacrifice the first person who greeted him when he returned home. It was his daughter….
David? Yes, he was the man after God’s own heart. But he was also adulterer, murderer, horrible father… Samuel? Surely there was a man of great faith, from his youth to his death—except for the fact that he too raised sons that had no respect for God or the people of Israel. It was because his sons were so evil that the people of Israel asked for a king so that they could be like the other nations around them.
The writer goes on to list both men and women who, in the name of faith, either enjoyed great victories or suffered horrible abuse and torture and death, people “who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground” (11:33-38).
I like the victorious part; that second group doesn’t sound so appealing. These are the great heroes of faith. These are the ones who received God’s approval. These are the ones whose faith produced great endurance. They are the people who lived and died with an assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.
It occurs to me as I think about these people that perhaps my problems with all of these examples come not from the Hebrews writer failing to tell us the whole story, but with my own notions of what authentic faith looks like. Maybe the writer does indeed know all of the stories, not just the good parts. Maybe that is the point. Being faithful is not about being perfect! It’s about getting up again when you’re down. Being faithful is not about winning, it’s about enduring whether you win or you lose! Being faithful guarantees no outcomes on this earth. Faith survives this life because it gives assurance and conviction to a reality that is yet to come.
That is the power of the last two verses in this chapter: “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect” (11:39-40). All of these witnesses never actually received the promise they trusted, because God was waiting on us to join them before turning the faith into sight!
Even now, those whose testimonies of faith preceded us await our testimony, await our joining them at the finish line, await the outcomes of our part in the journey. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Faith is not a guarantee of our faithfulness. Actually, rather than being troubled by these stories I should be excited about them because they reveal human beings that are just like us! So faithful one moment, such miserable failures at faith and love and life itself the next. The question for God’s faithful is not whether or not we can now be perfect—we can’t. The question is how faith endures when we fail! Will we keep our eyes on the goal? Will we look beyond all that is apparently real in this life and see the unseen that is yet to be?
All of these heroes of faith were flawed human beings. None of those witnesses received in their lifetimes what we have received. None of them experienced in their lifetimes the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. It is our window into the throne room that is given to us this morning in Christ. It is the opening of the space-time continuum through which we are invited to see and believe/believe and see. It is the power to know a reality that has yet to be realized, to see what otherwise cannot be seen. It is the power to endure tragedy and triumph in this life because we long for more and we ultimately refuse to settle for less.
So we hear once more the exhortation that began in chapter 10: Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (10:19-25).
Delivered at Woodmont Hills, November 17, 2002
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