January 31, 2010

• Hebrews 11 - Condensed from John MacArthur

  

  The Substance of Faith

  Hebrews 11:1-3
  

  Code: 90-381

  The just shall live by faith,” is foundational teaching in Scripture. It is quoted back in Hebrews 10:38, and that passage is taken out of Habakkuk 2:4  What is the essence of faith?  Hebrews 11 presents the power of faith...the excellency of faith. When people in the Faith Movement talk about the power of faith, they're talking about faith as if it were a personal power that we possess to create our own future, our own reality, to change the world, to literally define and manufacture our own future. When they talk about the power of faith they mean that we can use our faith as a power to write our own future history. We can literally believe things into being. We have the power of faith that can create a healing, bring about a salvation or change how people can treat us. We have the power of faith that can change our economic situation, that can take us from poverty to wealth, that can take us from having little to having much, from being deprived to being prosperous, to being a failure to being successful, from being a nobody to being a somebody, from having only ambitions and hopes and dreams to experiencing fulfillment.

  Faith is not a power which you possess to create your own future. Faith is a God-given ability to trust the future that God has promised you. I don't want to be responsible for determining what my future is going to be, I'm more than happy to leave that in the hands of One who loves me perfectly and has ordained for me a future that is purposeful, fulfilling, satisfying, God-glorifying and eternally blessed. We're talking about faith, not the false kind of faith that supposedly can create your own future, but the true kind of faith that can produce in you confident trust in the future that God has promised you. That future is laid out in Scripture.

  When we talk about faith, we're talking about trusting in which God has said, not trusting that you can create something as yet unsaid, a future unwritten, unspoken, unrevealed, but rather to believe in that promise which is laid out in Scripture in all its glory and all its detail that has been given to every true believer. In fact, from a human viewpoint, of all the heroes of faith that are recorded in the eleventh chapter, had they the option, they might have written their story differently, because all their stories are filled with difficulties.  They would have written it differently than God wrote it. But the kind of faith that we're talking about is the faith that God gives a believer is the faith to trust the future that God has written because inherent in what God has written for us is His promise of ultimate blessing and eternal joy.

  It's more than just a chapter designed to encourage believers to continue to walk by faith.  In the first ten chapters the writer's point is that the New Covenant is superior to the Old Covenant, that Christ is superior to everything else. Jesus and His sacrifice is superior to the sacrifices and the animals in the old system.  Jesus is better than angels, the prophets, Moses, Aaron, Joshua.  He is from a better priesthood, a superior priesthood, He is the mediator of a better covenant and He is a better sacrifice. The message of the first ten chapters is, “Put your faith in Jesus Christ, He is in every sense superior.”  There are these periodic warnings not to fall back, not to go back into Judaism. There's one of them in chapter 2, there are more in chapter 3 and 4, another in chapter 6, another in chapter 10...don't go on sinning willfully after you have the knowledge of the truth, says chapter 10, or you will bring upon yourself a far more severe eternal judgment.

  The warning is, “Come all the way to the New Covenant, to Christ and to faith.” This is a big change because the Judaism that existed in the time of our Lord and thus in the time of the New Testament was a system of salvation by works, by merit. This had been ingrained into them from generations by their parents and their religious leaders.  The system had long forgotten that salvation was by grace, that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord, that Abraham believed and it was accounted to him for righteousness, and they had created a religious cult built on ethics, built on morality, built on religious ceremony. Salvation came to those who observed all those ethical standards, all those moral oughts and all those ceremonies.  Illustrations of salvation by faith from the Old Testament might get them across that barrier which seems to be so formidable for them and that is why the eleventh chapter of Hebrews is written. It is written because it is a necessity to prove to the Jews who are intellectually convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, that salvation is by faith and that people not only after Jesus but even before Jesus were saved by faith.

  Hebrews 10:38 states the key. “My righteous ones shall live by faith."  That is a direct quote from Habakkuk 2:4, “The just, or the righteous one shall live by faith.” The writer of Hebrews is going to penetrate their sort of Old Testament thinking by giving us a list of Old Testament saints whose lives were marked by faith. Verse 39 sums it up, “All these having gained approval through their faith did not receive what was promised because God had provided something better for us and apart from us they would not be made perfect.” They didn't receive what was promised, they trusted that it would come as it had been promised. That's the definition of faith you want to work with. Faith is confident trust in the future God has promised. Faith is not some kind of power by which you create your future, it is the power of God given to you to trust in the promises God has made in Scripture.

  First is the nature of faith:. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  The first thing we learn about faith is that it is trusting in what isn't visible, received or experienced. It is trusting in something not yet manifest. Faith, belief, that's a noun, the Greek word pistis, it is a noun, it means belief, trust, confidence, faith. It is a commodity that is possessed. Certainly believing can be a verb, but we're talking here not about some act of faith but we're talking about the reality of a settled faith. It exists as a commodity. It is a gift of God, Ephesians 2:8 says, not of works. It comes from God.  When God gives this commodity of faith, it is the assurance of things hoped for.  It doesn't mean that we see something we want and bring it into existence. It means that we put our confidence in something not seen, convictions of things not seen.

  Some of your translations will say, “Faith is the substance of things not seen.” Substance is a word that basically can be legitimately translated substance, essence. That gives it reality. Faith is substantial confidence in the reality of something not realized. Faith gives presence substance to something that is future. As this chapter will show us, when it unfolds, in Old Testament times there were men and women who had nothing but the promises of God to rest on, nothing but the promises of God to hope for. There was no visible evidence that messianic promise or the kingdom promise will come true. Yet the promises were so real and the revelation of those promises in Scripture so reliable that people built their entire hope on them. All the Old Testament promises related to the future.  Those people who exercised this faith, exercised faith in what was promised but that that they did not receive.

  What would that be? Eternal life? Heaven? Everlasting bliss, reward, joy, reunion which is promised in the Old Testament of the saints in the presence of God? The very presence of God? The very likeness of God? I will...David says, “I look for the day when I will awake in Thy likeness.” The glories of eternal bliss...they didn't see any of it here. They never even saw the ultimate sacrifice. They never knew who the Messiah was. They were people of faith but their faith was anchored in a reliable revelation from a God who cannot lie and so their faith gave substance to the future hope.

  We're on this side of the cross, but we understand this.  None of you has seen heaven and you don't know anyone who's been there and back except the Lord Himself. And yet you have basically put your entire eternal destiny on the foundation, on the fact that the Scripture is reliable and what God has promised you can trust, right? And what that has done is created substance in the present tense for a future promise.  Faith is so strong, it is a gift of God, it is the gift of God that allows us to trust the Scripture, the gospel in the Scripture and thus Christ as Savior. 

  Faith then is that assurance, or that substance in the present tense of things hoped for. But it has substance now. It provides assurance now so that you sing and you pray and you praise and you act and you live and you obey and you minister and you witness because this hoped for reality gives present weight to your life, substance.  It's against the grain of your own flesh.  So now that you believe these things and have put your trust in Christ and are now living a life based upon promises for the future that you haven't seen that have so much weight that they control your life, what do you do? You live your life as a Christian battling against the flesh that is your natural expression. Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just say, “Forget it, I'm just going to go with whatever I feel.” It's the way you used to live, like the godless Gentiles live...in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life.

  But you don't live that way. You restrain the flesh.  You limit the pleasures. You fight against your fallenness. You resist sin. You run from it, because you understand that there is a future reward and a future desire to come before the Lord and bring honor to His name by the life you've lived. So you literally have brought substance into your life by the things you hoped for in the future.

  You have this kind of hope that's so strong that it can change the way you live your life and that you live your life against the grain of your own fallen flesh because you believe in the truth of God's revelation. You believe that because God has given you the faith to believe in that revealed Word. You have such substance to this hope that you live against the grain of your flesh and the grain of the world. Everybody in the world is living a certain way and what are you trying to do? You're trying to live in a completely opposite way.

  Faith is not just the assurance of the substance, but it is also the conviction, elenchos of things not seen. It is the substance that becomes conviction. You can know something to be true, but until it becomes a conviction, you don't put it really into action. So we have substance that has led to conviction and a strong commitment.

  For example, what would make you build a boat in a desert because you were told it was going to rain when it had never rained in the history of the world? A conviction? Well it would have to be more than just some kind of hope because you would have to spend 120 years building the boat. Can you imagine building a boat as Noah did for 120 years in the desert and dealing with the mockery of his neighbors. What put his faith into action?  There was such substance to what he had been told, he was so confident in the revelation of God to him that it became a conviction that he could literally live his life on. That's what puts faith into action. He acted on it. And we're going to see...that's really the story of the chapter, how all these people acted on faith. Because of revelation came action, because of substance came conviction.

  Second is the testimony of faith. Verse 2, and here the writer introduces the emphasis of the chapter. “For by it, the men of old gained approval.” He's going to help these Jews who maybe are struggling a little bit with this idea of salvation by faith because they've come out of a works system, by pointing to the fact that this is in fact how the saints of old gained approval. This is not a new concept. The great heroes of the faith, the saints of old lived by faith. Abel believed God regarding sacrifice, acted on faith that what God said was true and what God expected was the path of blessing. He did what God told him because God told him this is what to do and I'll bless you. And he did it and was, of course, received and approved. Enoch believed God so much so that he didn't die. God was so pleased with him that one day he took a walk and walked right into the presence of God and skipped the dying part. Noah believed God and because of it God granted to him righteousness and God vindicated him, brought about what God had promised but spared him and his family. Abraham and Sarah believed God for a child and God fulfilled the promise. We'll learn about Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and everybody else, all who believed God and were approved by all who knew them. The record of the Old Testament stands as testimony to their faith. They trusted in what they couldn't see. They lived their lives based upon promises God made to them, and certainly God approved of that and they were rightfully honored by the people of the past and even remained the heroes of the faith.  God's Word made their hope real. And based upon what God had told them, they lived obediently by faith and are rightly honored as heroes.

  In Acts 7:54, it says, “When they heard this (the preaching of Stephen) they were cut to the quick.  They began gnashing their teeth at him. Being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven, saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” That's the first glimpse of heaven by a saint And he said, “I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”  The Spirit of God let Luke put it down in holy Scripture because that's eyewitness evidence of who is standing and waiting for us when it's our time to enter into heaven. But this is new. This is a whole new experience.

  They cried out with a loud voice, the people did, covered their ears, rushed at him with one impulse. When they had driven him out of the city, began stoning him and the witnesses laid aside their robes at a young man named Saul, later known as Paul, went on stoning Stephen as he called on the Lord and said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And falling on his knees he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.' Having said this, he fell asleep.” Everyone of the saints of old who lived in hope perhaps would love to have had that moment experience and maybe some of them did. It's not recorded. But I'm so glad for the testimony of Stephen that what he anticipated to be true was in fact true. Heaven was reality. The glory of God was there and Jesus was waiting for the faithful to come into His presence. Every one of us, every saint of old who has ever lived by faith would find great comfort in the testimony of Stephen.

  Third is an illustration of faith in verse 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 that are visible.”  This illustration takes us back and gives us a foundation for faith looking forward. 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. That looks back at creation. Creation is things seen in the universe, made out of things unseen. That's creation. Creation is ex nihilo, God made the whole universe out of nothing. What is seen was not made out of anything that was visible. So out of the invisible came the visible, out of nothing came everything.

  We understand that by faith because we weren't there. The world exists, the universe exists, and by faith we understand that God created it by His Word. Now where do we place our faith? In the revelation of God written in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 which tells us that God created the universe by His Word, right? “Let there be light, and there was light.” He spoke everything into existence and the record is in Genesis 1. So we have an opportunity to place our faith in something in the past as a foundation to place our faith in something in the future. We can look at the effect which is he universe, we understand that it exists, anybody has to understand that it had to have been created out of nothing, there had to be a starting point, there had to be a time when there was nothing. That time then ended when God created the universe. By faith we understand how that happened. Our faith is in the revelation of Scripture. By faith you understand that it happened, anyone who doesn't just hate God and hate Christianity has to say somebody did this. You say that when you look at a watch, don't you? Why not a universe?

  But the person who just understands that it happened doesn't know how, only the person who puts his faith in the Scripture understands how...by the Word of God. So by faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God. Why? Because that's what the Scripture says and that's a reality, isn't it? Scripture says God created it, we live in it and we can see the evidences of His creation. So the fact that we can look back and see that God described His creation, told us how He made it and has left His imprint on it and we are now living in that creation gives us the opportunity to have a foundation for believing in the future. What God said in Genesis brought about the universe and we now live in it and experience it and know its reality and we can trust that the same God who spoke this into existence by His Word has said that He has spoken another world into existence which awaits us and that we will one day experience that world. We experience this world which God spoke into existence, we will experience the world which He has spoken into existence in the glory of the supernatural realm. We can trust Him for that as He is the source of that in the same way He's the source of this.  We live now in a universe created by the Word of God, we see His imprint on it and that is the foundation by which we trust that God will in the future have waiting for us another universe in the glory of His presence, also promised by His creative power.

  

  Abel: A Primitive Faith

  Hebrews 11:4
  

  Code: 90-382

  Here we meet the first man who came to God by faith, Abel. Adam and Eve aren't examples of faith because they had the privilege before the Fall of sight. You remember it says in 2 Corinthians 5 that we walk by faith and not by sight, but Adam and Eve walked by sight. They walked and talked with God in the cool of the day. They had the presence of God, the Shekinah glory of God with them in the Garden.  Abel was born outside Eden after the Fall. His family being expelled from the presence of God, he himself was raised in that expelled situation. He had not seen a manifestation of the invisible God. Adam and Eve had seen and believed and I believe were saved, Abel had not seen and yet believed and that is why Abel is the first on the list of faith examples, the first man of faith.

  First of all, he offered a more excellent sacrifice than Cain. Secondly, he obtained testimony that he was righteous, testimony from God who gave that testimony and through faith though he is dead, he still speaks. So he is a model of faith in the sacrifice that he brought. He is a model of faith in the righteousness he received and he is a model of faith as a preacher of faith, even though he is dead, he still speaks. You can call this a sermon from a dead man.  Because he believed, he offered a better sacrifice. Because he offered a better sacrifice, God testified that this was evidence that he had been made righteous. Because he had been made righteous, declared righteous, he is for all ages a living voice, affirming the great truth of chapter 10 verse 38 of Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.”  He offered a better sacrifice. He was declared righteous by God. There was evidence that there was more than just a declaration, but the declaration was complete as righteousness was imputed to his account.  He then becomes a model of faith, a preacher of faith to all who know his testimony.

  Genesis 4 begins, “So Adam did know his wife in an intimate way and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. And she said, ‘I have gotten a man child with the help of the Lord.'”  The first child born whose name is Cain, Qayinis the root of his name, it means to get.  Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden. But there was a promise given to them before they left back in Genesis 3:15. “.And I will put enmity between you and the women and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise Him on the heel.” This is the promise that the woman would have a seed who would bruise the serpent's head. The promise essentially is that the seed of the woman would come, defeat the enemy who had interrupted fellowship with God and the implication and would then win back the right for men and women to have fellowship with God. The seed of the woman would be used for reconciliation, restoration and recovery.

  Before God ever acted in judgment, God displayed mercy before He banished sinners from Eden, He gave them this blessed promise that a woman would have a son who would crush the serpent's head and bring about reconciliation, the very restoration of fellowship that had been forfeited through Satan. Satan had brought the Fall of man and God promises that one would come that would bring about the fall of Satan. By a woman had come sin, by a woman would come the Savior. By a woman paradise was lost and by a woman paradise would be found. There would come the seed of the woman. This is a prophecy concerning Jesus Christ, of course, and the virgin birth because no woman ever had a seed, the seed is in the man. The seed of a woman is a very, very unique promise that there would be a woman who would have in her a seed. We know that to be Mary and the seed being our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

  Eve didn't understand all the full implications, and it's very possible that when she was pregnant, she assumed that this was the fulfillment of that prophecy. This was the one who would be the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent's head.  The reason we think that could be true is because when the son was born, she gave him the name Cain, "I have gotten." Or another way to translate that, “He is here,” some commentators suggest. So she may have been thinking he's here, I've gotten the promised seed.

  But, Cain turned out to be the first murderer and Adam and Eve, of course, could never have produced the ultimate deliverer. The ultimate deliverer had to be God and that's why the only one who could fulfill this would be the virgin-born Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit, carried in the womb of Mary, none other than the Holy Child, the Lord Jesus Christ. So it wasn't Cain after all, although she may have thought this was the one that was promised.

  Again verse 2, “She gave birth to his brother, Abel.” Again, Abel is an interesting name to give to a child. It really reflects a simple word, it's the word breath...breath. Certainly metaphorically it would mean brief, weak and sometimes is translated that way, it is the word Hebel and it is a fitting name, for this man's life was like James said, “A vapor that appears for a little time and vanishes away.”  Job spoke of life, Job 7:16, as but a breath. The Psalmist in Psalm 144:4 speaks of life as but a breath. Abel is a model of that. His life was just a very, very brief breath.

  Abel, it says in verse 2, was a keeper of flocks. That word flocks is big enough to include other than sheep. Cain, on the other hand, was a tiller of the ground. So we could conclude one was in animal husbandry, the other was in farming. Both were sinners, both were conceived by fallen parents, Adam and Eve. Both were born after the Fall. Both were born outside the Garden. This is human being number 3 and 4. The third and fourth people to live on the earth and they are functioning in the full capacities of full humanity.  When Cain and Abel arrived in the world, just as when Adam and Eve arrived in the world, they werevfully developed human beings with all their faculties in the image of God. I sometimes think that that faculty which is most unique to God is creativity, a faculty that doesn't belong to anything in the plant or animal kingdom...belongs exclusively to human beings. They were not howling, drooling, hairy, peanut-brained, wild people grunting around Eden, or even outside of Eden.

  That takes us then to verses 3 and 4 is where we get in to the real story. “So it came about in the course of time,” literally it says, “at the end of days.” And it's a kind of definite expression and I'll comment on that in a minute. “It came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the Lord of the fruit of the ground. Abel on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering.”  Abel is a model of faith and now we're coming to where that obedient act of faith occurred. He comes to worship God and he worships appropriately, demonstrating faith. Hebrews 11:4 says, he by faith offered a better sacrifice.

  In regard to the act of worship that is described here, there are some interesting components. First, there was a place where God was to be worshiped. “So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought his offering.” They brought an offering to the Lord. There had to have been a place identified. We know they are somewhere east of the Garden of Eden, verse 24 of chapter 3, and they are kept out of the Garden of Eden. Having been expelled from the Garden, however, God has established a place. I guess you could say this is the first Mercy Seat. It may well have been that it is being described to us in verse 24, “He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard to the way of the Tree of Life.” It may well have been at the east edge of Eden where the Lord set up the Cherubim with the flaming sword was the Mercy Seat, was the place of meeting. Maybe the flaming sword was the symbol of divine presence. Maybe that's where they went and God had provided an altar there. But somewhere, that's the likeliest place, God had provided a place where the sinner could meet Him.

  There was also a time for worship. Verse 3 gives a very specific phrase, “It came about in the course of time...at the end of days.” Perhaps it was the end of a certain week or the end of a certain month a certain set day for atonement to be made. God is a God of order. Apparently He had prescribed a specific period of time for them to come to the Mercy Seat, to the place where they would meet God and offer their sacrifices.

  There is a place and there is a time and there is a way. There is a way to worship. Abel understood the way and obeyed it. On his part in verse 4, he brought the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions and the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering. On the other hand, but for Cain who, according to verse 3, had brought an offering to the Lord of the fruit of the ground, he felt no regard. So there is a place and there is a time which God has identified as the time of atonement. And there is a way to worship. God is to be approached only by sacrifice.

  These two sons of Adam and Even had been definitely instructed that there was a place and there was a time and there was a way. How would Abel have known to bring an animal sacrifice if it had not been revealed? And why was Cain rejected when he brought other than that if it was not an act of self-will and disobedience? Neither Cain nor Abel could have known anything about sacrifice unless God had revealed that to them. And when Hebrews 11:4 says, “By faith Abel offered an acceptable sacrifice,” showing faith in the revelation of God. This is not some kind of nebulous faith. This is the faith that says, “I have heard God speak and I believe it is true and I will obey.” It was not a self-styled sacrifice. He had been told by God that God required a sacrifice. He believed that and he evidenced his faith by obeying God's revealed will. And that is why he is a model of faith. He heard the truth, he believed the truth, he obeyed the truth. He worshiped the way God had ordained worship to be done.

  There was a little preview of this that perhaps had come down to both these boys. You remember that back in chapter 3 when Adam and Even were naked in the Garden and had no permanent covering, verse 21 says, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” This was the first death in history. This is the first death in history, it's the death of an animal. And the one who slew the animal was none other than God and God slew the animal in order to take the skin and cover the nakedness of the two sinners.

  Here is the model of sacrifice and of covering. Certainly would have been well known to these two boys. It isn't some kind of late information that the sacrifice needs to be brought to God, rather than an offering of vegetables or fruit. They may have known it for a long time. Perhaps the story of God covering them had been told by their parents on many occasions.  This is not to say that God rejects all fruit offerings, grain offerings, vegetable offerings. Leviticus 19:24 says, “In the fourth year, all the fruit thereof shall be holy with which to praise the Lord.” There were times when fruit and grain was to be brought to the Lord. There were grain offerings, as you well know, in Leviticus, bloodless offerings. But the first and primary offering and the only one which could atone for sin was the blood sacrifice.  We see that Abel did what God required in bringing the right sacrifice that was required by God. This is an act of obedient faith. By faith then he brought a more excellent sacrifice than Cain. It was better because it was blood and it was better because it was required as a sacrifice for sin.

  In a real sense, it was a picture, of course, as we all know of the greater sacrifice that would be offered by Christ. Hebrews 12:24 says, “Jesus is the mediator of a New Covenant, sprinkled blood which speaks better than the blood of Abel.” The blood of Abel was the right sacrifice at the time. The blood of Christ is far superior to the blood sacrifice offered by Abel.

  Abel's was not just a blood sacrifice, but he brought, according to verse 4, the firstlings of his flock and their fat portions. This is long before the Mosaic Law comes and God says, “I want the lamb without blemish and without spot, I want the best that you have.” But from the heart, Abel acting in obedient faith does what God has told him to do and brings the very, very best of the animals that he has.

  Abel believed God and approached God on God's terms in the divinely appointed way. Cain didn't believe that he needed to bring a sacrifice, though it had been established by God that that was required. He thought he could approach God on his own terms, his own self-styled sacrifice could be brought, that which reflected his farming trade and skill. He didn't recognize the need for atonement. These boys knew that death and atonement and covering were required by God. It went back to the sacrifice that God had made to cover their parents and I think their parents probably told them the theology of that many times. Abel understood that he was sinful.  Abel understood that he needed an atonement, that he needed a sacrifice, that blood needed to be shed in order to cover his sins.

  Cain didn't acknowledge his sin, the need for blood sacrifice and atonement. Thought he could approach God without sacrifice, without atonement on his own terms. Jude 11 calls this the way of Cain...the way of false religion. Cain is the first purveyor of false religion. He's the father of all false religion, invented ways to God, invented schemes to please God, and they all fail.

  There's not a commentary here about the general character of Cain as over against the general character of Abel. It doesn't tell us anything about whether Cain was really a bad egg and Abel was a good guy. Because, you see, no matter how good you are, you can't be saved by any of your own efforts and your own work. It can only come if you recognize you're a sinner and desperately require a blood sacrifice and an atonement. So it's really immaterial whether Abel was a little bit of a better guy than Cain. No one is good enough.

  Cain is the father of false religion. Abel is the father, if you will, of true religion, recognize the sin, the need for sacrifice, comes to God desiring atonement, understanding blood which then, of course, looks forward to the coming of Christ and His shedding of His blood on the cross as an atonement for our sins. Cain then fails to acknowledge the fact of sin. He fails to acknowledge the need for sacrifice for sin. He fails to obey God and consequently he is rejected. He is rejected. Verse 5, “For Cain and his offering, God had no regard.”

  “So Cain became very angry, angry at God, angry at his brother, and his face fell.” It showed up on his countenance. “In his fury, the Lord comes to him.” All this may be going on right at the Mercy Seat, right on the eastern edge of Eden, right under the guarding Cherubim and the flaming sword. And Cain shows his fury on his face. “And the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen?'”

  The Lord is not looking for information. He wants to hear from Cain. He wants to touch his heart. And so in verse 7 He actually extends an invitation to him. “If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? Or if you do right, surely you will be accepted.”  Why don't you just do what is right? Why don't you just bring an animal sacrifice? Go to your brother, negotiate with him, purchase an animal, he may give you one, bring that animal. God gives Cain the invitation to obey. This is the Mercy Seat after all, this is an invitation to forgiveness, this is an invitation to joy, this is an invitation to life. If you do well, you'll be accepted. If you do what is right, if you do what you've been told.

  On the other hand, if you do not do well, if you continue in the path you're in, sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you, but you must mater it. You either master sin and do what's right or sin is going to eat you alive. It is crystal clear in this verse that these men knew what God required. God doesn't have to explain what they were to do, He just says do what you know is right. There is no ignorance here. Abel's sacrifice of an animal was not some kind of accident. Cain's was not some kind of accident in which neither of them knew what God wanted. Abel acted righteously because he acted obediently to the Word of God in faith, believing the Word of God and believing that if he came with a penitent heart, acknowledging his sin and knowing he needed a blood sacrifice for his sin, he would be accepted.

  Cain, on the other hand, was evil and wouldn't admit it, didn't think he needed a sacrifice for his sin, didn't believe the Word of God was important, didn't obey the Word of God, was rejected. But even at that point, it's amazing that God gives him this invitation and invites him to think it through and do what's right. 1 John 3:12, “Not as Cain who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil and his brother's were righteous.”  Cain was of Satan. Cain's life was evil. His deeds were evil. And this is a reflection of the evil of his heart.

  Does that mean when it says Abel was righteous in that passage that somehow on his own he could please God? No. Relatively he must have been a better guy, but that in itself, as I said, was not enough. He still needed to recognize his sin and need for a blood sacrifice as an atonement.  The message was this, you're sinners, sinners need to be covered. Sinners cannot cover themselves. God must provide the covering and the covering will be provided by death. That is what was revealed. And so God in His mercy at that Mercy Seat says to Cain, “Why don't you just do what is right? If you don't sin which is already like a lion crouching at the door is going to pounce on you and destroy you.”

  “Dear friends,” Dr. Barnhouse used to say, “At this point in the Bible, the highway to the cross began to be built.” The highway to the cross began to be built right here. It would be one lamb for one man. Later at the Passover it would be one lamb for one family. Then on the Day of Atonement it would be one lamb for the nation. And then at Calvary it would be one lamb for the world. This is where the life of faith really begins. It begins with the acknowledging of sin and the need of an atoning sacrifice.

  Abel bows to the truth that he's a sinner. The truth is he's under the sentence of death and that God has designed a substitute for His place. The truth is bring that offering and God will provide forgiveness.  Cain, on the other hand, is the first hypocrite, the first religious phony, refuses to obey the revealed will of God, cloaks his rebellion, however, in a religious activity, shows up in the presence of God with an offering. Sought to patronize God again. This is the way of Cain in Jude 11, the way of false religion. This is the way of the Pharisees and all other false religionists.

  The first thing we learn about Abel is that he brought a more excellent sacrifice because it was what God required. The second thing we learn about in Hebrews 11 verse 4 is that God testified that he was righteous. This is foundational in the gospel because it is when we come to Christ who is our sacrifice, when we recognize that we are sinners and that Jesus paid in full the penalty for our sin and we embrace that by faith, we believe that and we act on that, and, as it were, we come to the altar and embrace the sacrifice of Christ as our own sacrifice, being offered to God, it is at that moment that God gives testimony that we are then declared righteous. And that is exactly what happened.

  In Hebrews 11 you read there that because he offered to God a better sacrifice, a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, he obtained the testimony that he was righteous. Testimony from whom? God testifying about his gifts. And this would indicate perhaps that there was more than one. Maybe there was more than one such occasion of such offerings.  Since the only single sacrifice that satisfied God was the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ. Every other sacrifice had to be repeated and repeated and repeated.

  God did not respect Abel because there was something personally attractive about him. God respected Abel because of his offering, because he believed God's revelation about the necessary blood sacrifice. Abel was as much a sinner as Cain. He was as liable to eternal judgment as Cain. But he believed God, he obeyed God and that faith was counted to him for righteousness. Here you have the first time that we have a record in Scripture of righteousness being credited to the account of an obedient sinner. This is monumental. It is credited to his account. God gives testimony that this man, Abel, has attained righteousness. His act, an act of faith, was an act which brought a very righteousness of God to cover him. It is the stunning foundation of understanding the doctrine of justification. Abel honored God, brought the right sacrifice. God honored Abel, imputed righteousness to him. Imagine having God give testimony that you are righteous.

  If you've put your trust not in an animal sacrifice like Abel did because that was what God designed for then, but if you put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect sacrifice, God will give open testimony that you are now righteous. He will impute His righteousness to you, credit it to your account, cover you with the very robe of His own righteousness as Isaiah put it. I love that, 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He became sin for us that we might be made righteous in Him, that His righteousness might become ours, the righteousness of God in Him.”

  First of all, he offered the right sacrifice. Secondly then, he is credited with righteousness. First Samuel 2:30, God says, “Them that honor Me, I will honor.” And what greater honor could God ever grant to anyone then to bestow upon that person His own righteousness. Again we should be reminded of Philippians 3 where Paul says he spent all his life trying to achieve a righteousness of his own, and then he met Christ, he embraced Christ as his substitute, as his blood sacrifice. He embraced Christ as his offering on the Mercy Seat on the altar and he received a righteousness, he says, “not of my own, the very righteousness of God given to me.”  He received witness, is another way to translate that in 11:4. Affirmation from God, more than affirmation, declaration from God, proclamation from God. God affirms openly before all the hosts of heaven that righteousness has now been granted to this penitent sinner.

  Cain is given an opportunity to do what's right. He has really no interest in doing that. God is offering him mercy. God is saying, “Cain, come again to My altar. Offer the right sacrifice in obedient faith and you'll be accepted if you don't sin, which is crouching at your door like a beast is going to devour you.”  He makes his choice, verse 8. “Cain told Abel his brother,” simply means talked to. He went to Abel to talk to him. “And it came about when they were in the field...” The time is past. They've left this place of sacrifice and they're in the field. “That Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him.” As I said, this is the first human death, first crime, first murder. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  Some have suggested, “Well he didn't even know what he was doing because nobody had ever seen death.” Oh yeah, they had seen death. They had just seen death. He knew exactly what happens when you deliver a certain kind of wound to a living being because one had just been delivered at the place of sacrifice. This is not some “Oops, what happened here?” He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew what life was and he knew what death was. He had just seen it. If not, on other occasions. Cain yielded, however, to Satan. He is of the evil one, as I just read you from 1 John 3:12, so he yields to the evil one. He is of his father, the devil, who is a murderer from the beginning, John 8:44. He yields and he knows exactly what he was doing and he kills his brother.

  The Lord steps in. And these are such familiar expressions to us. “The Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel, your brother?' And he said, ‘I don't know.'” Now he's compounded his murder with a lie. “I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?”  “He said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground.'” The most important two words in there are “to Me.” God is personally, profoundly grieved, exercised, angered over this murder. And the voice of the very blood itself is crying to Him from the ground. Capital punishment has not yet be introduced. It doesn't come until chapter 9. For here the punishment is perhaps worse. “Now you're cursed from the ground. You've prided yourself on your farming, the tilling of the ground, you're cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you.” In other words, you're never going to be able to far successfully again the rest of your life. You'll never show up at another worship opportunity with any more of your own produce, you'll never have anymore. You will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, homeless, alone, a wanderer. And you'll never get away from what is chasing you.

  “Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is too great to bear. Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground and from Your face I will be hidden. And I will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me. Every rock would hide an enemy, every shadow, an avenger.'” He would have this aimless, wandering, useless life.  The sad reality here is there's no penitence. Cain only says, “My punishment is too great to bear.” No sorrow for sin. Nothing like, “Is it too late? Can I come again with the right sacrifice?” There is remorse. He wants to avoid the consequences. His guilt is just going to bite him and bite him and chew on him the rest of his life. And he's not going to be able to die, verse 15, “The Lord said to him, ‘Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold.'” Pass that around. “And the Lord appointed a sign for Cain so that no one finding him would slay him.”

  There is a degree of mercy in this, because there's always the hope that along the way somewhere this guy would come to his senses. He's the first apostate. He's the first purveyor of false religion. Did he recognize the existence of God? Absolutely. Did he recognize the power of God? Yes. Did he recognize the sovereignty of God? Yes. Did he recognize that God was to be worshiped? Yes. Did he recognize the God of the harvest? Yes. He did not recognize the God who required a blood sacrifice because he did not want to recognize his own sin. And as I said, his wickedness takes its final step in verse 16 when he goes out from the presence of the Lord, as far as we know never to return and settles as a wanderer in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

  What a lesson for these Hebrews in this congregation to hear if they're struggling with his faith the way or is it works.  If you're struggling with establishing a relationship with God that will get you into heaven by faith or by works, this is all you need. If you don't recognize your own sin and dependence upon the sacrifice that God has established in Christ as the only way of salvation, you're hopeless. You can't do it by your own effort

  There's one final comment to make about Abel, that he is a preacher of the value of faith, of the necessity of faith, of the excellence of faith. Through faith, though he's dead, he still speaks. In what sense does he speak? He speaks to us about the necessity of faith, believing God. Cain thought that he had silenced his brother.  But he hadn't. In fact, his brother's blood was speaking and it was speaking to God. So there is a sense in which Abel is even a preacher of judgment. Abel's blood is crying out to God for vengeance. Abel warns us that there is an avenger.

  And then he speaks to men...If you want to come to God, you come only by faith in His Word and obedience to what He asks and not by your own works. You come by faith which means, point two, you can't ignore what God has said. You have to believe it and act upon it.  Thirdly, you have to recognize the need for sacrifice to cover your sin. Though dead, Abel is a preacher. As I said, it's a sermon of a dead man. Preacher of a timeless sermon, the just shall live by faith and those who try to come to God in any other way will be destroyed.

  

  Enoch: The Walk of Faith

  Hebrews 11:5-6
  

  Code: 90-383

  “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. 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.”

  The design of this chapter is to convince the Hebrews that faith is the only way to approach God. They had for generations been exposed to a corrupted form of Judaism that had come to the conclusion that you earn your way to God, that you gain your salvation by effort, by ceremony, by works, by your morality. The writer of Hebrews is reminding the readers that they can rest completely on their faith for salvation.

  We need to go back to Genesis 5:21, “Enoch lived 65 years and became the father of Methuselah. Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah and he had other sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him.”

  Enoch had a son named Methuselah who, by the way, outlived him by many years, almost seven hundred. Methuselah’s name means in the Hebrew, “Man of the sending forth,” or “Man shot out.” It was a God-given name for a God-given prophecy. What God was saying in the name given to Methuselah was that he would not die until judgment was sent out.  Methuselah lived longer than anybody on earth, 965 years. From his birth, his very name was a prophecy of judgment. The wicked were warned of coming judgment. They were also warned by Enoch of coming judgment and Jude refers to that, we’ll look at that later. It’s interesting to me that in the name of Methuselah you have a prophecy that judgment is coming. But you see the grace of God in the fact that Methuselah lived longer than anybody else and so his warning extended for all 969 years. In the year that Methuselah died, the Flood came. God let him live longer than anybody else in order that the message of warning against judgment might come, a gracious thing on God’s part.

  His father, Enoch, as it says, lived only 365 years and he is identified as having walked with God. It says it in verse 22, “Enoch walked with God.” It says it in verse 24, “Enoch walked with God.” And it tells us that he walked with God for 300 years. Enoch lived in a very corrupt world, so corrupt that God drowned the entire civilization. And he says prior to the Flood, “All the imagination of man was only evil continually, and God regretted that He had even made man.” What you have in the story of Enoch is kind of a primeval pre-Flood spirituality lesson. God was not a distant sort of demanding deity which you appeased by sacrifices and ceremonies and morality. Spirituality in the very earliest years was a matter of walking with God. God was a companion. God was not a distant deity. This man was in daily, intimate communion with God.

  Another way to view this, that he walked with God, is to say that he was a saved man. He walked with God, which is the same as to say he pleased God, and God was pleased with him. He must have been a man who recognized his sin, like Abel. He must have been a man who acknowledged the need for sacrifice, like Abel. He must have been a man who offered a fitting sacrifice. He must have been a man who trusted in God in the truest and purest sense for his salvation and his forgiveness and his life. He walked with God.

  The term “walk” is a very important concept. It’s talking about step-by-step fellowship, daily communion. And it’s a way, THE way, really in the early chapters of Scripture that we have someone identified as reconciled to God. That’s what salvation means. This man was really unique because Noah walked with God, he escaped judgment. Because Abraham walked with God, he received blessing. Because Enoch walked with God, he escaped death. He was given the privilege of being an illustration.

  In the chapters of Genesis, God was revealing truth that there was eternal life, that men could leave this world if in right relationship to Him and enter into His eternal presence. Job had that confidence, didn’t he? Didn’t Job who lived in the patriarchal period say, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him?” Why? “Because I will awake and see Him and be like Him. They knew about resurrection. They knew about the afterlife. They knew that you could leave this world and go and be with God and God chose Enoch to be the illustration of that. He is the illustration of salvation’s great promise. And what is salvation’s great promise? The next life, leaving this veil of tears, this world of sin and entering in to the presence of the Lord, he illustrates that. Verse 24 puts it this way, “He was not...” he was and he wasn’t, “for God took him.”

  One day during his three hundred and sixty-fifth year, he was gone, disappeared, gone, no body nothing. Fifty-seven years or so after the death of Adam, sixty-nine years before the birth of Noah, about a thousand years into the history of the world he was taken to heaven. When it says God took him in the Hebrew, the word describes a sudden inexplicable disappearance and the explanation for his disappearance is given here, “God took him.” He is a model of faith that walks with God, being rewarded with eternal life because he walked with God.

  In Enoch, the true destiny of man is restored, a personal, intimate, communion with God. This is what God has always desired and provided. God has never been a distant, demanding transcendent God, He is also an eminent personal God. Enoch is a major teacher to us here. When one comes to God in the way that Abel came, recognizing sin and realizing the need for a sacrifice which anticipates the very death of Christ, when one comes realizing that he deserves death, and the substitute is killed in his place, when one comes realizing that he can’t earn his way in like Cain tried to do, he then enters in to that relationship with God and is a very personal, personal relationship. Enoch must have understood sacrifice for sin, he must have understood repentance, but he also understands personal communion with God. He entered through the sacrifice, a means of sacrifice pointing to Christ, and he is a classic timeless illustration of the walk of faith that one day ends in entrance into glory.

  Going back to Hebrews 11:5, first of all, he wasn’t found because God took him up, for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God, which is the same as saying he was walking with God.  Then comes the lesson as to what it means to walk with God, or what it means to please God. Verse 6, “Without faith it is impossible to please Him.” The only way to walk with God, the only way to please God is by faith. You can’t please God, you can’t be reconciled to God, you can’t walk with God, you will not enter into the glories of eternal life apart from faith. That is a statement that ought to be underlined in everybody’s mind, without faith it is impossible to please Him. You cannot count on your religion. Romans chapter 2 tells us that, that the Jews who were very religious, the Apostle Paul says, gained nothing by that external religion.  Only faith pleases God.

  “For by grace are you saved, through faith, that not of yourselves, the gift of God not of works lest any man should boast.” So the only way to come to God is to believe.  We know that Abel did that, as did Enoch. Abel believed what God had said. Abel responded to the command that God had given for a proper sacrifice. Abel brought that sacrifice and thus exhibited his faith and thus entered the life of faith. And Enoch picks the story up and walked that walk of faith, continuing to put his trust in God.

  So corrupt, so polluted is man’s fallen nature, even in the first generation after the Fall, that he cannot of himself do anything that is pleasing to God. Romans 8:8 says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Faith alone pleases God. Enoch believed God. Enoch put his trust in God as his savior, his God and thus he was reconciled to God and received by God.

  What does it mean to put your faith in Him? Well first, “He who comes to God must believe that He is.” That is a great statement. It’s a simple statement, but it’s profound. “He who comes to God must believe that He is.” That is not just saying, “Oh I believe there’s a God. I’m very spiritual.” But that HE is who HE is, the only true God. Not just any God will do. Not just some God will do. Not just the notion of God will do. That’s not sufficient. You must believe that He is the God whom He is.

  How do you know the God who is God? By virtue of His revelation. He has revealed Himself, even this early in human history again and again. People knew who He claimed to be and Enoch believed that. It is not enough for anyone to believe in the concept or the reality of God. You must believe in the God who is God and for us, that even is further defined. You must believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the one who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. You must believe in the true and living God who has revealed Himself incarnate in Christ. That is why you can’t be saved apart from Jesus Christ because that’s an incomplete view of God. It’s very popular today to say, “Well, if you just believe in the God of the Old Testament, if that’s all the information you have, that’s enough.” No, because that’s not all that God has revealed Himself to be. He is a trinitarian God in the fullness of His revelation, who manifests Himself in Jesus Christ. The New Testament writers say He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s where the testimony, the witness, as verse 5 puts it, of Enoch’s reconciliation with God begins. He believed in the true God as He had revealed Himself...a God of holiness and righteousness, a God who hated sin...that would have been eminently clear, a God who required a sacrifice, death for sin, a God who had made it clear that men can’t earn their way in. He believed all of that. He believed God to be the God that God is.

  Enoch would have known that God was the Creator, the one who created everything and sustained everything. He would have known that God was righteous and holy. He would have known that God was the source of morality and right and that God was a God of vengeance and judgment. He named His Son with a prophecy of judgment. He knew all those things and that’s part of knowing the true God.

  The full picture comes when Paul says to them in Mars Hill, “Overlooking the times of ignorance in the past, when the revelation was not complete, it was true but it wasn’t complete, God overlooked the times of ignorance. But now, declares to men that all people everywhere should repent because He’s fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.  You cannot come to God if you do not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ who is God in human flesh and whose deity was manifest and validated by the resurrection from the dead.

  So the first thing that marks Enoch is that he believed in the true god as He had revealed Himself. And again, the revelation is progressive. There’s more of it after Him through the Old Testament. And the full revelation comes in Christ in the New Testament. We saw that in the beginning of Hebrews, chapter 1 verse 1, “God spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days has spoken to us in His Son.” That is the completion of he full revelation.

  Secondly, Enoch believed that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. That is to say that He is the Redeemer, that He is the Savior. He believed that God rewards those who pursue Him. He believed that God was a personal, forgiving, loving, gracious God who would provide salvation to those who sough Him. Enoch did not believe in some distant cosmic cause. He believed in a personal caring God who wanted to be reconciled to Him in a personal way, a loving God with whom he could fellowship and to whom he could be restored.  Enoch believed in the God who is God as He revealed Himself and he believed that that very God was a Savior of sinners who would embrace a penitent who came by faith and sought Him.

  David said to his son, Solomon, in 1 Chronicles 28:9, “If you seek Him, you’ll find Him. But if you forsake Him, He’ll cast you off forever.” That’s basically it. Psalm 119:10, David says, “With my whole heart have I sought Thee.” Proverbs 8:17, “I love those who love Me and those who seek Me early will find Me.” Jeremiah 29:13, “You shall seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”

  No other religion has a God who is a rewarder. All other religions have a God who is a punisher, who is indifferent, who is diffident, who is distant, who is to be appeased, whose primary attitude is one of anger. But the true and living God is a rewarder of those who seek Him, even though they are sinners and even though they cannot commend themselves, they cannot do anything to achieve reconciliation with Him, they cannot on their own please Him. Still as Psalm 58:11 put it, there is a reward for the righteous. Or Proverbs 11:18, “To him that seeks righteousness shall be a sure reward.”

  God is a Savior. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life, John 3:16. And I ought to add verse 18, “He who believes in Him is not judged. God did not send His Son into the world to judge the world but that the world through Him might be saved.” God is a Savior by nature. First Timothy 4, “God is the Savior of all men, in some sense, especially those who believe. God is the Savior of all men.” He puts His salvation will on display temporally by not giving the sinner what he deserves when he deserves it, by His patience, common grace. He declares Himself to be a God who withholds judgment by nature. He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

  In fact, He’s a lavish rewarder. Matthew 6:33 “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added to you.” Equally wonderful is Ephesians which declares this, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ.” He is a lavish rewarder of those who come on His terms. He grants forgiveness, He grants a new heart. He gives us the Holy Spirit, eternal life, blessing, mercy, grace, peace, joy, love, heaven, power over evil, it’s all there.

  John 6 says, “Whoever comes to Him, He will not turn away.” But you have to come through Him. “I am the way, the truth and the life,” John 14:6, “No man comes to the Father but by Me,” Acts 4:12 tells us that there’s not salvation 8in any other name than the name of Jesus Christ.  The walk of faith begins with believing that God is who He is and that He is a personal Savior who will reward those who seek Him. He was pleased with Enoch, not because of his works, but because of his faith in who God is.

  There are some components to what it means to walk with God. First, it assumes reconciliation. Amos 3:3, “How can two walk together unless they’re agreed?” Which is picked up by Paul to his letter to the Corinthians where he says that, “How can two walk together unless they’re agreed? How can, you know, God have fellowship with Satan? That’s not possible.” So two walking together presupposes agreement, presupposes harmony, presupposes reconciliation, therefore presupposes salvation. Enoch is a saved man. I think that’s the way to say it. I think he’s been saved from his sin. He’s been given salvation. He walks with God and that implies that God is no longer his enemy, he no longer is in rebellion, he is reconciled to God, God has not been conformed to him but he has been reconciled to God. He has by God’s grace met God’s absolute condition and they walk in agreement. To borrow the language of Ephesians 4, “No longer self-centered, no longer vain thinking, no longer ignorant, no longer shameless, no longer dead to God.”

  The second thing that comes to mind when you talk about walking with someone, is corresponding nature.  I can’t walk with God unless I possess some faculty which we share in common and that’s the marvelous reality of what salvation does, it not only reconciles us to God, but in that reconciliation God disposes to us His own nature, we become new. Light has no communion with darkness, to go back to Paul’s language. No sinner can walk with God, they have no common life. I can’t be pals with a goldfish, it’s impossible. There’s a difference in nature. It eliminates that possibility. And perhaps you need to go back and read 2 Corinthians 6:14-16 where all these things are laid out.

  Thirdly, walking with God also presupposes moral fitness. God doesn’t just walk with anybody, and again that’s 2 Corinthians 6 “Don’t be bound together with unbelievers, what partnership has righteousness and lawlessness?”  God is absolutely righteous and sinners are absolutely unrighteous or lawless. So I can’t imagine that a lawless person or an unrighteous person is going to walk with God unless there’s something dramatically that’s happened to change is moral character.  God never deviates out of the path of holiness. He doesn’t take a side trip over to you living in unholiness.  In Him is light, 1 John, and in Him is no darkness at all. He never does evil. He’s too pure to look on evil, the prophet said. He never deviates out of the way of holiness. 

  You may think of the idea of imputed righteousness as a New Testament concept, but it would have to be an Old Testament concept because Enoch or anybody else who walked with God, Noah, or Abraham, or any of the others, would have to be covered with righteousness or God wouldn’t commune with them. God demands that all who are in His company surrender to that righteousness.

  Enoch walked with God for 300 years.  You don’t roll out of bed and end up pleasing God. It’s intentional. It’s something you pursue. It’s a passion. That’s where you get now into the disciplines of grace. The New Testament often calls it walking in the Spirit. And if you break down how we walk in the New Testament, we’re told to walk in the Spirit. Third John 4, we’re told to walk in truth. Romans 13:13 we’re told to walk in honesty. Ephesians 5:2, walk in love. Ephesians 5:8, walk in light. Ephesians 5:18, walk in wisdom. Ephesians 2:10, walk in holiness. This is the worthy walk of Ephesians 4:1. This is sweet communion with God. And we have a pattern for that and that’s none other than our Lord Jesus, right? First John 2:6, He that says he abides in Him ought himself to walk even as He walked.” And Jesus walked in perfect communion with His Father...perfect communion with His Father. This is our faith walk and Enoch was a model for this.

  There’s something else to be said about Enoch. When you’re living in a corrupt society that’s declining toward a devastating judgment in which the whole world is obliterated, except for eight people, and you’re a godly person, you’re going to be concerned about what’s happening around you.  We find out something about Enoch in Jude, where it tells us that he was a preacher. If he was the best man of his age, he would be well served by being the preacher and God would be well served as well. Verse 14 of Jude, and Jude has been writing about false teachers, false prophets, and he says in verse 14, “It was also about these men,” meaning false prophets who are already around in Enoch’s day, already Satan had his operation going full blast. False prophets were everywhere and Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam. He is the seventh generation from Adam according to the genealogy. “Prophesied, or preached saying, ‘Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment upon all and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in ungodly way and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” He was a classic prophet.  In one sentence he used “ungodly” four times.

  This quote does not appear in the Old Testament. It is something Enoch prophesied clearly, he prophesied this because the Holy Spirit led Jude to write it down a legitimate prophecy that came from Enoch. There was a lot of oral tradition, there were lots of oral tradition passed down and passed down and passed down and Enoch was a hero to the Jews. He was a man who walked with God. He was a man who walked right into heaven.  He was a man who should have been at the pinnacle of godliness in their annals. They greatly revered him. They protected the statement that he made that defined his prophecy and eventually through the centuries, it was passed on orally and then it was written down and it was written down in what we call a pseudepigraphal book called 1 Enoch. The Jews were familiar with it. The affirmation here indicates that it was an accurate quote, not everything recorded was accurate, but this was.

  What did he say for 300 years? He said, “The Lord is coming and He’s coming with many thousands of His holy ones and He’s going to execute judgment and it’s going to fall on all the ungodly with all their ungodly deeds done in an ungodly way and all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” He was a judgment preacher.

  That’s where the best of the godly ultimately end up.  Here was a man whose character and walk with God showed up in the power of his preaching and his preaching was judgment. Why? Because judgment was coming. It was bound up in his own son’s name, Methuselah. It came to pass in the Flood. But the truth of the matter is, that’s not a prophecy of the Flood, that’s a prophecy of the final judgment when the Lord comes with many thousands of His angels. That’s a prophecy of the return of Christ. That’s a prophecy of the end of human history.

  He was looking long, long down the road, wasn’t he? He preached judgment was coming. He never saw that judgment. He never saw the Flood. He certainly never would see the final judgment, but he knew it was coming and he preached it.  The judgment is coming but the New Testament believers will be caught up into the air before the judgment hits. He’s kind of an illustration of a pre-Tribulation Rapture and that’s going to be the experience of a generation of believers in the world just prior to the final holocaust of judgment when the Lord returns, He’ll catch up the believers from all over the world.

  I Thessalonians 4:13, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep so that you’re not grieved as those who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.” Don’t worry about those that died, they’re going to be there in glory. “But for those of us who remain until the end, the coming of the Lord, the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, trumpet of God, the dead in Christ will rise first, the bodies will come out of the graves of those who have died, to join their spirits all ready in glory and then we who are alive and remain will be caught up, just like Enoch, they’ll be a whole generation of Enochs. In a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, and hear with the voice of the archangel the trump of God.” There will be millions of Enochs and they’ll disappear from the face of the earth and then the judgment will come.  In a very real sense then, he’s a model of the promise of heaven and even the promise of special deliverance from judgment. How important for us to see in him primarily the model of what it means to walk with God.

  

  Noah: A Preacher of Faith

  Hebrews 11:7
  

  Code: 90-384

  "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."

  Noah is the next in the list of faithful men whose lives were marked by faith. I remind you that James said, “Faith without works is dead.” What he meant by that is true faith is supported by action.  Noah's action of faith is remarkable. The Bible everywhere and always teaches that men come to God by faith alone and then go on to live in faith, that simply means to take God at His Word and trust in that Word as true. Never by works or self-effort, ceremony or moral achievement do you reach God.. You always come to God by faith. It has always been so, it has never been any different.

  “By faith, Noah being warned by God..” He had nothing to go on but what God had said.  God told him something was going to happen that had never happened in the history of the world. Was Noah going to believe this? Was he going to be committed that what God said was in fact true?

  Genesis 6:13  “Then God said to Noah, ‘The end of all flesh has come before Me for the earth is filled with violence because of them and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.”

  God comes to Noah and tells him He’s going to destroy the entire earth. About 1500 or more years have passed since the creation, the story of man on earth had just gotten worse and worse since the Fall. Sin is running rampant. It is an ever-increasing escalating offense to God and so God delivers a decree that He’s going to destroy the whole earth and then goes on to say specifically by water He is going to drown the human race, sparing only Noah and his family and no one else. As in verse 18, “I will establish My covenant with you and you shall enter the ark, you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.”

  This is the most remarkable judgment event in the Old Testament, the destruction of the entire human race, with the exception of eight people. History tells us that God will judge sinners. The Bible tells us that God will judge sinners. And He does and He judges every sinner one at a time. It is appointed unto man once to die and after this, the judgment. Every sinner faces the judgment of God, one sinner at a time. But periodically there are these massive judgments. For long periods of time, God leaves sinners to their own devices and the fulfillment of their own desires, and then suddenly and devastatingly intervenes in human history in cataclysmic fashion. This in human history is the greatest of all cataclysmic judgments. It is the second most astounding event in the Old Testament, the first and most astounding event in the Old Testament is the creation, the creation of the entire universe in six days. This is next to that as a monumental event

  We are going to look at what God said He was going to do, what He asked Noah to do and how Noah demonstrated his faith.  What brought about this judgment by God?  Genesis 6:5. “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He made man on the earth and He was grieved in His heart. The Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things to birds of the sky, for I am sorry that I have made them.’”

  God saw that the iniquity, the wickedness of man was great on the earth. It was so sweeping that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. This is chronic rather than spasmodic. Every thought, every idea, every motive, every imagination and therefore every deed, the result of every thought was an expression of the fallenness of man, the depravity of man.

  Verse 11 adds, “The earth was corrupt in the sight of God and the earth was filled with violence.” By the way, the Hebrew word for violence is chamas, used of abuse of people and general rebellion. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, translates that as adikia, unrighteousness. Verse 12, “God looked on the earth and behold, it was corrupt for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.” You’ve probably noticed the onlys and the alls, there’s a sweeping condemnation of judgment.

  Verse 6 tells us that the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth and He was grieved in His heart. This is a kind of anthropomorphic statement. God doesn’t undo anything He does and He doesn’t do things that He wishes He hadn’t done in the truest sense, but this is to express an anthropomorphic emotion that God regretted what He had done.  This is a kind of Hebraic way to express consummate grief.

  In verse 7, the Lord says, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land from man to animals to creeping things to birds of the sky for I’m sorry I made them.” Blot out... is a very strong Hebrew word, machah, precise, graphic language, it is a word that expresses the idea of erasing something, removing it all together. I will erase man from the planet, a promise of wholesale death and destruction.

  In verse 13 God speaks to Noah and tells him, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. Behold, I’m about to destroy them with the earth.”

  There’s one incident in the beginning of this chapter, the opening four verses, that tells you how bad it was, that people literally welcomed demons to come into them, men welcoming demon-possession, cohabitating with women and the fruit of that was satanic alliances, horrendous children that carried on the wickedness to its extreme levels.

  God speaks in verse 13 for the first time personally to Noah. He will speak to him three more times, chapter 7 verse 1, chapter 8 verse 15, chapter 9 verse 1.  The message that He gives to Noah is this message of massive, massive judgment.

  It must have been so staggering for Noah to hear this. There were millions of people in the world by this time. We can’t know the exact number but I’ve heard everything from eight million to a hundred million. The world is densely populated. In the first place, people lived for nine hundred plus years and you can produce a lot of children in that amount of time. Just to believe that this is actually going to happen is certainly an act of faith. There must have been something in him that would sort of parallel the skeptics that Peter tells us that when they hear about the Second Coming say, “That’s never going to happen, all things continue as they were from the beginning.” The same kind of skepticism must have existed in the mind of Noah, at least at one point when he talked to himself, but everything goes along normally the same way. How can this possibly be?

  If that’s hard to swallow, try this on. Verse 14, “Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood. You shall make the ark with rooms and shall cover it inside and out with pitch.”  God hasn’t told Noah how He’s going to destroy the world yet.  He just says in verse 13, “The end is coming. I’m going to destroy the whole human race.” Noah doesn’t know how. So He gives him a command without an explanation. The explanation doesn’t come until verse 17, “I’m bringing the flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall perish.”

  God says to Noah, “Build a big box, ark, tebahin Hebrew. The word is used throughout the flood narrative and it really means box, or chest. It’s not shaped like a boat, it’s not shaped like a ship. It has no propeller, no pilot, no sails, no rudder, no captain and no navigator. It’s a box.  This word is used only one other time in the Old Testament and in Exodus chapter 2:3 through 5 to describe the box that baby Moses was put in, to float down the Nile. God used a box to save Moses so he could save Israel. God used a box to save Noah so Noah could save the human race.  In both cases, the box was a refuge from death to provide a future in one case for Israel, and another case for the human race. The Ark of the Covenant is a different Hebrew word all together.

  God then says, “Make a box,” back to verse 14, “make it of gopher wood.” We don’t have any idea exactly what that is. There’s some suggestions as to what it is. It appears nowhere else in Scripture. It may have been a kind of a cedar pine which was plentiful. Now remember, Noah was not a ship builder and this wasn’t a ship, this was a box. This is an immense task, he can’t do it on his own, very likely, even with three sons helping him. He would have to had to hire multiple carpenters and design people to effect this thing and to move around the pieces of this giant box. And He says, God does, “You shall make rooms, compartments, or dwellings.” Likely they numbered in the thousands. “And then cover it inside with pitch.” And that is a kind of calking substance. Pitch, by the way, is related to the Hebrew verb to smear, smear it, seal it so it doesn’t leak.

  Then verse 15, it gets very interesting. “This is how you shall make it.” Now if he’s thinking of a box just for him and his family, hey, that would be an 8 by 10 would do. He doesn’t know what the box is for. “This is how you are to make it. The length of it is three hundred cubits, the breadth, or width is fifty cubits and the height is thirty cubits.” That’s 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high. This is not a design for speed or easy guiding, but for stability.  When you come to modern ship building in the nineteenth century, the ratios of six to one are the same as the ratio for the ark.  Nobody would have understood this kind of design, another indication of the divine nature of Scripture.  And because it’s a rectangle and doesn’t have pointed ends and rounded sides, it is one third larger in capacity than a similar sized ship with a hull. The gross tonnage, 1415 thousand tons. The internal space, a hundred thousand square feet. The volume, 1.5 million cubic feet. It’s a massive boat.

  Some have calculated that the capacity was equal to five hundred and twenty-two boxcars. A boxcar can carry 240 sheep so you could carry in this box a total of 125 thousand sheep. The reason people calculate that with sheep because sheep would be a sort of average sized animal...some smaller, some larger. So it could handle as many as 125 thousand animals.

  Thousands of compartments are built in this massive box to house, at this point, no one knows not what, but it’s certainly sufficiently large to carry what the Lord finally tells him it’s going to carry, two of every species of animal in the world. And then enough space for Noah and his family and some additional animals for sacrifice and food. Only supernatural revelation could so design a ship of that size, of that dimension to contain that population of animals.

  When God gives Noah the command to do this, it is 120 years until the Flood. This is what you would call a long-term project. Did he start building immediately when God commanded him? It’s very likely he started thinking about building, and then he had to figure out how to build. And then he had to try and find some people who could design a building like that, a box like that. We don’t really know how long it took to build it but the assumption could be he probably started very early and began to put the design together and thoughts together and then to assemble the components and begin to build.

  There are people who think that the Flood story is a fictional invention. It’s pretty hard sell because of the precision with which the dimensions of this ship are designed. Now what God told Noah to do was to build a flat-bottom barge with no rudder. And you would ask yourself, “What in the world would I be doing that for?”

  God gives him more detail. “You shall make a window,” verse 16, “for the ark. Finish it to a cubit from the top.” Now the best way to understand that is probably that the roof overhangs the box and just below the roof there’s an opening all the way around for much needed ventilation...as you would imagine. The origin of the word used here for window, tsohar, is very obscure but it seems to connect with sources that mean light. The thing would be dark if there wasn’t some light coming in. Though it is very likely that below the overhanging roof there was an opening between the beams that held the roof up. An opening 18 inches wide between the roof and the sides of the ark just under the roof and interrupted only by the posts, providing ventilation and light, set back under the roof so that the rain wouldn’t come in. Set the door on the side of it, he is told. “Set the door on the side of it and you shall make it with lower and second and third decks.” One door.

  In this box, Noah doesn’t know it, he’s going to spend a year. He’s going to spend a year floating over a drowned planet.  This is a cruise without a stateroom, without a porter in the most primitive conditions imaginable. This is a year in a stable. But there’s enough room here with three different floors and thousands of compartments for everything.

  Why am I doing this? Verse 17, “Because I’m going to bring the flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life; from under heaven everything that is on earth shall perish.” I love this beginning, “Behold, I, even I..” Supernatural judgment is coming.  I’m going to drown the world.

  The word “flood of water” is a technical term, mabbul, that is used only in Genesis 6 through 9. It is as if God picked a word exclusively to describe the Flood. It has one other use in Psalm 29:10. His purpose is to destroy all air-breathing creatures, everything excluding those in water who will survive. Everything that is on the earth shall perish.

  This is a worldwide Flood. And if we had time we can go through the rest of the story and see how it has to be a worldwide Flood because all humanity on the face of the earth dies. Genesis 7:23, “He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the earth from man to animals to creeping things, to birds of the sky, they were blotted out from the earth and only Noah was left together with those that were with him in the ark.”

  We also know that it was a worldwide flood because of the depth. It couldn’t be a local flood because it covered Mount Ararat and Mount Ararat is more than 17,000 feet high. Simple mathematical calculations will tell you that if the flood rises to above 17,000 feet, it doesn’t go down quickly. It spreads over the planet. We know it’s a worldwide flood because its duration is 371 days, a year. And it is the reason why I have on my desk a seashell found about two miles east of my house in Santa Clarita. What’s a seashell doing in Santa Clarita? What are sea animal artifacts doing all over the Grand Canyon? And why do you find a buried mastodon in the tundra in the northern edge of Russia frozen and when uncovered, dug up and the content of his stomach examined, his stomach is full of tropical plants? This is a universal flood.

  The Bible is clear when it discusses the theology of the Flood, that this is a universal flood because it compares it to the coming destruction. Second Peter 3 it tells us that in the way that God destroyed the world by water, He will destroy the world by fire. And that is a universal destruction in both cases.

  There are many indications that this is a worldwide flood. And the most obvious one is that is exactly what the Bible says, only eight people survived. There’s a promise in verse 18, “I’ll establish My covenant with you,” this is the first time covenant appears in Scripture, it is a covenant with Noah and his family, to spare them. “And of every living thing and all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark.” Now he’s starting to get the details of why the box is so big. “Keep them with you alive, male and female, of the birds after their kind, of the animals of their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground of its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.”

  God is going to gather them. This is an astounding responsibility. This is a great opportunity to exercise a little doubt, wouldn’t you say? “ Are you kidding me? A flood? What is that?” There had never been one. “Rain? What is that?” There never had been any. Up to this point, a mist watered the earth, there was a canopy around the globe. It was all a tropical environment. There were no seasons as we know them. There were no ice caps on poles. It was one universal climate under a common kind of canopy, mist. And that’s why you find mastodons on the upper edges of the Arctic Circle with tropical vegetation in their stomachs.

  Noah was living in a wilderness. There’s no water there. This is a remarkable opportunity for a little bit of sensible doubt, I would think. I suppose if it were any of us we would have said, “Could you go over that again? Rain? Flood? Float? Boat? Two of every kind of animal?”

  That’s what makes it so remarkable in verse 22 when it says, “Noah did according to all that God had commanded him. So he did.” That is a monumental act of faith, an absolutely monumental act of faith. And because of that, of course, he was spared. Why him? Go back to verse 8, “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” 

  Verse 9, “Because Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time and Noah walked with God.” This is a remarkable man, not to be underestimated. This is a man who believed what God said was true, which tells me he believed in sacrifice like Abel did. Which tells me that he believed that he was a sinner and needed a sacrifice for his sin and he needed to receive grace and forgiveness from God. This tells me that he knew what it was. And it says it here as it did with Enoch, that he walked with God. He was in true righteous communion and fellowship with God. He was a righteous man and God made a promise. That’s what a covenant is to this man. And he head the promise and he obeyed the promise.

  Let’s go back to Hebrews 11 and consider what the writer tells us.  “By faith, Noah being warned by God about things not yet seen.” What are things not yet seen? Cataclysmic world judgment, by means of, secondly, a flood, as a result of, thirdly, rain. Did Noah know the world was corrupt? Absolutely. Did he know that he was different than everybody else? Absolutely. Did he understand that God was holy and righteous and a God of judgment? Of course he did. He’s not living in the dark, by the way, folks. Not at all, you don’t want to underestimate this man. There was a lot that he knew. Remember now, we’re 1500 years into human history and God has revealed Himself and he knows his God and he walks with his God and he trusts his God.

  Being warned by God about things not yet seen, he acted.  One, he obeyed God’s Word when it was way beyond anything he could experience or conceive or comprehend. It says, “In reverence he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household for 120 years.” Over that period, he built a massive 15,000 ton ship in the middle of the wilderness, for one reason, because God told him to do it and God told him the flood would come and the judgment was inevitable and he obeyed.

  This is the essence of faith. Faith doesn’t have to understand, it doesn’t have to comprehend. Faith reaches out for something that is beyond experience, beyond comprehension.  We walk by faith and not by sight.  We’ve entrusted our eternity to God. We’re living in faith, trusting Christ for a heaven we’ve never seen, to escape a judgment we’ve never seen. The Bible says that all sinners will go to hell. The Bible says that there will be a holocaust of divine judgment on the earth in the future by fire. We believe that, we have not seen that. But we live in faith and by faith we obey the gospel which is the ark of safety for us. God has provided for us an ark to rescue us from future judgment and we have gone into that ark, the ark is Christ.

  Secondly, his faith not only showed up in his obedience but it showed up in his preaching. He obeyed God’s Word and he announced God’s judgment. You might say, well he believed it but it was so bizarre he really didn’t say much about it because he was afraid people would think he’s crazy. But no, it says also in verse 7 that by his obedience in building this massive box in the middle of the wilderness because it was going to rain and there was going to be a flood the likes of which no one had ever experienced, he condemned the world. That very act was a constant statement for 120 years that judgment was inevitable. And that is why it says, “Noah was a preacher of righteousness, and God preserved him with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.” Noah was a preacher of righteousness.

  As long as he built the box, he was preaching coming judgment. He was declaring coming judgment. And God was so patient, right? A hundred and twenty years, 120 years of patience, as Genesis 6 says, God preaches this message through the building of the box. It must have been the topic of everybody’s conversation constantly. “Crazy Noah.”

  We also saw the patience of God because, you remember, Enoch lived 65 years and became the father of Methuselah whose name means “sent out,” “shot out.” The name Methuselah was a prophecy, a divine revelation.  God was connecting that child with the time when His judgment would fall, when He would send His judgment. And the year that Methuselah died is the year the Flood came.  Methuselah lived longer than any man, 969 years, showing the grace, mercy and patience of God.

  People knew things. The institution of sacrifice had been in place since Abel. They knew that sinners need to come to God not offering their own merit, their own achievement, their own works, but recognizing their own sin and that they are worthy of death and understanding that God will provide a sacrifice in their place. They knew the seriousness of sin because they knew Cain. Cain’s life overlapped. He lived for centuries and the mark of Cain went with Cain and everybody understood the curse of sin, the horror of being cursed by God. Cain was a living illustration of how deadly sin is.

  Adam lived 930 years and told his tragic story of the Fall probably every day of his life. And then there was the preaching of Enoch who was a preacher of righteousness, according to Jude 14-15.  There was the ministry of the Holy Spirit, “My Spirit will not always strive with man,” which means the Spirit was striving with sinners, doing His work of conviction.  There was the preaching of Noah. All these lives overlapped. As long as Methuselah lived, he would talk about his father who three hundred years after he was born, after Methuselah was born, took a walk with God one day and walked right into heaven. And how many people did Methuselah tell his story of a father who walked with God and lived in such a way that he didn’t even die? And Methuselah’s father, Enoch, was an illustration of what will happen to every believer who will some day enter into the presence of the Lord and conquer death.

  The generation of Noah’s day had to spurn sacrifice and atonement, they had to reject repeated warnings and repeated messages of judgment and righteousness. Divine revelation had to be despised and rejected in this mad dash into corruption. And yet God waited and waited 969 years, in the case of Methuselah and 120 years in the case of Noah. But Noah’s faith is marked by his obedience in doing exactly what God told him to do and his willingness to be a preacher of righteousness and give the message that went along with the work he did, proclaiming the inevitable coming, devastating, worldwide judgment in the drowning of the human race. He was preaching that the only escape is righteousness. How amazing and how many converts did he have? None.

  The third thing that is said about him is he obeyed God’s Word, he preached God’s judgment, he received God’s righteousness. He became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.  That sounds like a Pauline concept, doesn’t it? That sounds so New Testament. He became an heir of the righteousness which is by faith. He believed God and because he believed God’s Word, God granted him righteousness, imputed righteousness to him. That’s what it means in Genesis 6:8, “Noah found favor, or grace, in the eyes of the Lord. He was a righteous man, blameless in his time, Noah walked with God.”

  Genesis 7:1, “Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Enter the ark, you and all your household, for you alone I have seen to be righteous before Me in this time.” He is an Old Testament illustration of justification by faith. In covenant relationship with God, he believed God and God accepted his faith and granted him righteousness. He is a righteous man. He is blameless before God.

  We know that Noah is not perfect. When you get in to chapter 9 you find that he was guilty of a sin. He was caught naked and drunk. Noah’s not a perfect man before men, but he is a perfect man before God because by faith, righteousness was credited to his account.

  We understand that as a New Testament truth but this is telling us it’s an Old Testament truth. If you read Romans, you will read in chapter 3 that by the works of the Law no flesh is justified. If you read Philippians 3, as I quoted it earlier, Paul says, “I went about to establish my own righteousness until I found the righteousness of God granted to me by faith in Jesus Christ.”

  The great sweeping doctrine of justification is that to the one who believes God, in Noah’s case, he believed all that God had revealed. In our case, we believe all that God has revealed and that means that we believe the full message, all the way through His Son Jesus Christ. When you believe that message from the heart, God will grant righteousness and cover you with his own righteousness and view you as blameless. You will, having been captured into the ark of safety who is Christ, be delivered from all future judgment.

  Peter wrote in his epistles that Christ is the ark of safety who protects us from judgment.  He says, “In the future there’s going to be another judgment, the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in which the heavens will pass away with a roar, the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, the earth and its works will be burned up.” There’s coming another holocaust of proportions like this and even greater. The only ark is faith, faith in the Word of God all the way to the complete revelation in Jesus Christ.

  

  Abraham: An Exemplary Faith

  Hebrews 11:8-19
  

  Code: 90-385

  The writer of Hebrews wants to get his point across that the New Covenant and the ministry of the Apostles, and the preaching of the gospel isn’t in competition with the things that the Jewish people had heard.  In order to make his point to these Jewish people to whom this letter was originally sent, he goes back and picks up the story of heroes of the faith in the history of Judaism. Abel, we’ve already looked at, Abel and the life of faith. Enoch and the walk of faith. Noah and the work of faith. And we have seen in each case that their relationship with God, their salvation, if you will, was a result not of works but of faith. They believed the Word of God. They obeyed the Word of God, trusting in God to fulfill what He had promised on their behalf.  We come to the next major character on the scene in the book of Genesis and it is none other than Abraham, and that’s where the writer arrives in chapter 11 and verse 8, “By faith, Abraham...”

  We’ve come to a man who lived from, let’s say, 2165 B.C. to about 1990 B.C., so we’re two thousand years now past creation. In Abraham’s day, a new era of human history begins. Before this, God has maintained a sort of general relationship to the whole human race, coming out of the Flood, a kind of general relationship to everybody, until a very, very significant event occurred and that event was the building of the Tower of Babel.  When men built the Tower of Babel which was really a manifestation of human pride and idolatry, that relationship, that general relationship that they had had with God, God had been generally available to them, was shattered permanently. Mankind was scattered and splattered over the face of the planet and the languages were all changed so they couldn’t talk to each other, they couldn’t communicate with each other. That was the price for revolting against God. God was openly available to them, they revolted against God and they were scattered. And God abandoned them and this was the first illustration of Romans 1. God gave them over.

  This was the origin of heathendom, the Tower of Babel. So now you have a world of people who have no connection to God, they have languages in which there are no revelations of God. There are no written revelations. There are no traditional revelations that are passed down. Man is really alienated. He has been given over to his idolatry. When he knew God, he glorified him not as God and Romans 1 kicked in for the first time and it has cycled all through all of human history ever since. God abandoned them to immorality, to homosexuality, to a reprobate mind.

  Mercifully, God has a plan to reveal Himself, but not in a broad sense, but in a very specific sense through one man and the people who come from the loins of that one man, Abraham. Abraham becomes the father of the people of Israel and Israel becomes the nation that is the repository of divine revelation. God’s plan is to send His Word but not in some general way, but rather in a specific way to this people called Israel, the children of Abraham, and they will hear His Word, they will possess His Word, they will inscribe His Word in a written fashion and they will proclaim His Word to the nations of the world. They’re going to be the evangel to proclaim that salvation is available, that sinners can be reconciled to God through faith.  He then becomes the central figure in salvation history. Certainly he is a model of faith and that is critically important if salvation is going to be by faith and it has to be modeled in Abraham because Abraham is the central contact point between God and the revelation of His redemptive plan.

  His life becomes the pattern for all who come to God by faith to follow. It is completely a life of faith. Stephen knew that. In Acts 7, Stephen was stoned for the message that he preached and his confession of Christ, “Hear me, brethren and fathers, the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran and said to him, ‘Leave your country and your relatives and come into the land that I will show you.’ Then he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran, from there after his father died, God had him moved to this country in which you are now living. But he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot of ground.” So here when preaching a message of salvation, Stephen begins where you always have to begin, he begins with Abraham.

  In Romans 4:1, the Apostle Paul wanting to defend justification by faith, writes, “What shall we then say that Abraham our father, according to the flesh, has found? What about Abraham? How is he saved? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God for what does the Scripture say?” And then he quotes Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness.”

  The promise in verse 13 of salvation by faith comes to Abraham and all those who come through the righteousness of faith. Stephen a Jew, Paul a Jew understood the primary place that Abraham played in the history of salvation by faith. Against this is the basic thought of Judaism that a man had to earn his way to God, as we have seen, this is the basis of their whole Judaistic works system. They had decided that Abraham had a relationship with God and that Abraham was chosen and that Abraham was blessed because Abraham was better than everybody else. Abraham was chosen because he was the best, the most moral, he was the best of all the pagans.

  That’s not what the Bible teaches. And to destroy this, the Holy Spirit here and elsewhere, as we saw through Stephen and through Paul in Romans, goes back to Abraham to reset the record, to establish the fact that Abraham is a man who came to God and lived with God by faith.  Another illustration of this comes from Paul’s letter to the Galatians 3:7. “Therefore be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham.” It is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham, for even so, Abraham believed God..quoting Genesis 16:6 again..and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Therefore be sure that it is those who are of faith who are the sons of Abraham. It’s a matter of faith. The end of the chapter, the end of chapter 3, “You are all sons of God,” verse 26, “through faith in Christ Jesus.” Verse 29, “If you belong to Christ then you are Abraham’s descendants.”

  A number of these passages go back to that statement in Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness.” Throughout his life, he believed God. That’s what set him apart. He lived by faith. He accepted the Word of God and acted on it.  What we see in Abraham is analogous to our own faith experience.

  What components characterized Abraham as a man of faith?  Let me give you five features of faith that show us the completeness of Abraham’s faith.  First is the pilgrimage of faith.  ”By faith Abraham,” verse 8, “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.".

  “By faith Abraham when he was called obeyed.”  A better way to translate it would be, “Abraham, while being called, was obeying.” This is indicative of the immediacy of his response. And it is faith because he went out not knowing where he was going. He was told that he would be receiving an inheritance. He didn’t know where or what it was. Not knowing, epistemi(?) which we get our English word epistemology which has to do with knowledge, means to put one’s attention to, it means to fix one’s thoughts on. The bottom line is, he was clueless, he had no concept, no idea of where this calling was taking him. How strong is this faith? Strong enough that when he has no idea where he’s going and he is leaving everything familiar and everything he knows, he never even bothers to think about it...not knowing, not contemplating, not giving his attention to, not musing, or fixing his thoughts rather obedience that is so speedy, so consuming that it has no thought of anything other than obedience.

  It is not because he saw a brochure of Canaan or that somebody showed him what the shore was like at the Mediterranean which would be a lot better than the Tigress Euphrates rivers meandering through the fertile crescent in Mesopotamia where he lived. It wasn’t because somebody showed him a picture of a great estate that he would have, as I read you in the language of Stephen, he never ever owned anything even when he got to the promised land.

  This is a pilgrimage of separation.  Abraham was an unregenerate pagan. He was where he was with the people he was talking the language he was because he had been the product of the scattering of the people who were thrown all over the place from the Tower of Babel. He is not a secret believer in the true God. We don’t have any evidence of that. The Scripture never says he was any better than anybody else. “Listen to me,” says Isaiah 51:1, “you who pursue righteousness, you listen to me. You want to pursue righteousness? You seek the Lord? Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who gave birth to you in pain. When he was but one I called him, then I blessed him and multiplied him.”  If you want to understand salvation, you look back and realize that you were dug out of a rock by the sovereign power of God.  You were quarried out of the rock of paganism, Heathendom.

  Joshua 24:2 says that the father of Abraham whose name was Terah, served other gods. He was not just a pagan, he was a polytheistic, not monotheistic.  He belonged to a pagan culture. He lived in a pagan city by the name of Ur in Chaldea until he was 70 years old.  That is about 140 miles from where Babylon would later be built. But God appeared to him. And this again is so analogous to the mighty work of salvation when God appears to the sinner and quarries him, as it were, out of stone. Here’s how it happened, back to what Stephen said, Acts 7:2, “The God of glory appeared to our father, Abraham.” God showed up and said to him, “Leave your country and your relatives and come into the land which I’ll show you,” and he left.

  What marvelous grace. There is no other explanation for God choosing Abraham than sovereign intention, sovereign purpose. The God of glory condescends to come to a pagan in the midst of hundreds of thousands of pagans living in what used to be the Garden of Eden before the Flood. A man sunk in sin, a man in the pit of iniquity, a man immersed in idolatry and God singles out Abraham and gives him a command to test whether he will believe in Him. Will he believe God enough to obey and go to the land that God promises to give him, even though he doesn’t know where it is or what it’s like?

  Nothing is said about his morality, that is irrelevant.  God doesn’t come along in sovereign grace and save the moral people. In fact, in Romans it says in the very section that’s talking about Abraham that God justifies the ungodly.

  Abraham responded with faith. He believed God and a separation took place. He left. He was in the act of obeying when God was still in the act of calling him.  He left the land of his birth. He forsook his home, his estate. He severed his family ties. He left loved ones behind. He abandoned comfortable things, familiar things to embrace total uncertainty. This would, for the most part, been an impossible thing for somebody to do. But the life of faith is willing because the life of faith is made willing in the day of divine power. If you want to embark upon the pilgrimage of faith, you make a break with idolatrous things, you make a break with the world, you make a break with familiar, sinful patterns.

  Jesus says this, doesn’t He?  “Hate your father, your mother, your sister, your brethren, even your own life. Take up your cross, follow Me.” A life of faith demands a break with everything that is familiar, everything that is old. It’s a new world and even though you don’t know what it is because you don’t really inherit it until you leave this one. It starts with a willingness to separate from everything that is familiar and visible. This is where every Christian’s pilgrimage begins, when you separate from the world. When you, as Paul described it in 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, that the church at Thessalonica could be characterized as those who turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, “To wait for His Son from heaven.” We turn from idols, we turn from the world to wait. We haven’t received our inheritance. We’ve been told what it is and we’ve acted in faith on that.

  In that sense Abraham is a figure for us, he is an analogy that we can see, a man of faith separates himself from the world to go toward an inheritance which he is promised but which he will not see or inherit until a future that is at that point unknown to him. John says, “Love not the world, the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” He’s saying essentially the same thing. Or at the end of Galatians, Paul talks about being crucified to the world and the world to him. In other words, when he came to Christ, he died to his interest in the world. The world no longer had any grip on him. Or in the words of James, “Friendship with the world is enmity with God.” You make your choice. You make the decision to let the world go. Peter writes it this way, “Do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy also in all your behavior. You let go of those things. Paul says, “You set your affections on things above and not on things on the earth.” You no longer are connected or yoked together with unbelievers in the common familiar way you always used to be. And that’s the pilgrimage of faith and we certainly saw that in Abraham.

  Hebrews 11:8 “He went out not knowing where he was going.” This is what Paul calls in Romans 1:5 the obedience of faith. No idea where he is going. This is a pilgrimage of faith. That is faith. You don’t know where you’re going. You’ve never seen where you’re going. You’ve never experienced where you’re going. That’s where we are, folks. We walk by faith and not by sight.

  This journey of Abraham took a long time. He spent five years in a town called Haran which was in the wrong direction, basically going to the land of Canaan would have been south and west, and he went north and spent at least five years in the land of Haran waiting for this to unfold. But his faith never ever wavered. That’s where the pilgrimage of faith begins.

  Let’s look at the patience of faith, verses 9 and 10. “By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, in a foreign land dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise. For he was looking for the city which has foundations whose architect and builder is God.” He is an alien and doesn’t even own any land. He’s just a nomad. He has gathered up everything he owns and all the people he owns and while he was in Haran, he accumulated a mass more of them.  He probably accumulated wealth and along the way accumulated perhaps more servants to work with him, but he is an alien. He is in the land of promise but he’s an alien. He never really takes possession of anything. It’s like living in a foreign land. He’s a tent dweller, along with Isaac and Jacob who followed him to whom the same covenant promise was made and reiterated. He sojourns, literally paroikeo, oikeo means to live in a house, para-alongside. So he kind of lived alongside, to dwell beside. He’s a foreigner living alongside the people who live in the land. It is promised to him but it is never really possessed. You can read more about that in Genesis chapter 23. And those who came after him shared that same kind of life, Isaac and Jacob, the heirs of promise.

  It wasn’t very long until all their family was hauled off into Egypt, and the people of Abraham’s loins were there for 400 years. So he is separated from his old life. He’s in a land that he really doesn’t yet possess. He is a stranger in the world. He is living in a tent. He is a nomad. I think this too is simply analogous to how we live as believers. Some day this world will be ours, right? There is coming a day when the Lord Jesus establishes His millennial Kingdom on the earth, when the earth is renovated from east to west and north to south, when the curse is reversed and there will be glory that fills the earth and Christ will reign. And a lion will lie down with a lamb and the desert will blossom like a rose. And all the things that the prophets talked about will come to pass on the earth and we will inherit the earth. But right now, we’re just tent dwellers here. We don’t really see the possession of our inheritance. We are pilgrims living alongside the people in this world without ever taking possession of what is promised to us.

  God’s promise never seen by him in his life, he never owned land, wandered through Israel, Canaan as a tent dweller, but never abandoned his faith in a future promise. I think the hardest time of all is the time in between. At the time when the pilgrimage begins, some excitement, God came to me, God in His glory came to me, the true and living God came to me, a pagan man. He spoke to me. And by His power; I believed what He said and it was all so wonderful, it was all so glorious. It was all so empowering. He scooped up everything he had and began the pilgrimage. The glow and the glory of that moment may be driving him at the beginning, but then there’s that in-between, as he goes to Haran, as he sits there for at least five years until he was 75 years old. Doesn’t see the promise. And then migrates all the way back southwest to the land of Canaan.

  He goes into he land and is never anything other than a stranger there. But this is the patience of faith. This is the challenge. This is the challenge for us as well. It’s analogous for us to remain faithful and to keep our faith strong and joyful and full of anticipation in the long period between the glorious moment of our salvation and the ultimate moment of our glorification. He didn’t give up his hope, he continued in hope, he continued in faith, he continued to hold the promise of God high. It drove him. It motivated him. It pressed him forward.  The man of faith is not the man whose faith is always blazing, but whose faith like a light is steady and relentless when there’s nothing to do but wait, when maybe there’s pain in life and disappointment in life, and fear sets in and faith is sustained.

  Abraham never grows impatient, never tries to grab a little of the world’s goodies, like Lot.  Lot wanted to pitch his tent toward Sodom and live with the world. His story is a monumental tragedy. The faith of Abraham didn’t fail. The faith of Isaac didn’t fail. The faith of Jacob didn’t fail. That’s the patience of faith. That’s the faith that endures and that’s the true kind of faith. Enduring faith is the only real saving faith.

  Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 1:4, “We ourselves speak proudly of you among the churches for your perseverance and faith in the midst of all your persecutions and afflictions which you endure.” As we mentioned this morning, endurance is the vindication, the assurance of a real genuine faith. Back to James 1, “Count it all joy when you counter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” And wouldn’t you coming out of that endurance rejoice that you had a faith that can endure anything and thus you know it is a real saving faith?

  This kind of faith is really deaf to fatal doubts, it is dumb to discouragements, it is blind to impossibilities and thus it continues to persevere through absolutely everything. And what is the motivation for this? Go back to verse 10, “He was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Both the word “city” and “foundations” has a definite article. He was looking for THE city which has THE foundations. Abraham looked for the city which was built by God. So how much did God disclose to him? When God came to him, God must have told him who He was and what salvation meant, that there was not only a land to which he would go that God would give him but that there was a city that God Himself would build that God would lay the foundations and be the architect and builder and this was the heaven of heavens.

  He could be patient in the land of Canaan. He could be a nomad there. He could wander for all the years that he did because his sights were set on the heavenly city. Ezekiel 48:35 says, “The name of that city will be The Lord is There.  He did what Colossians 3:2 says we have to do, “He set his affections on things above and not on things on the earth.” He was patient with things below, and he had lots of struggles below. He was patient with all of it because his mind was not fixed on satisfaction that comes in this life, he was looking for something far beyond this.

  What a contrast to Lot. Genesis 13:12 says about Lot, “Abraham dwelt in the land of Canaan which was where God had told him. Lot pitched his tent, in Sodom.” Lot wanted the earthy. Abram wanted the heavenly. If you are looking continually at the things of this world, this life, if you are focused on trials and troubles, struggles or success, money, fame, pleasure, you become absorbed like Lot and it’s a damning and destructive absorption. If you focus on heaven, on God’s promises, then you can live in any circumstance in this life. He endured.

  Thirdly, you look at the life of Abraham, you see the power of faith, verse 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. 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.”

  In Genesis 12, the Lord says to Abram, in his his initial call, “Go forth from your country, from your relatives, from your father’s house to the land I’ll show you, I’ll make you a great nation, I will bless you.” It’s not just a place, it’s a people. “I’ll make your name great, you’ll be a blessing. I’ll bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I ‘ll curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” So there is this promise that there is going to be a blessing not only of a land to be possessed, but a people to be born out of his loins. This is the promise of God.

  He is waiting for a place and he is waiting for a people. Now the problem is, he and his wife are old and they’ve never had any children.  But here we see the wonderful power of faith. Faith sees the invisible, faith sees the impossible, that’s the power of faith. It trusts in God to do what humanly cannot be done. And when there is that kind of faith present, God acts on behalf of that faith.

  Sarah is Abraham’s wife. She’s a good wife. I’ll give her credit for that.  I Peter 3:5-6 says, “She called her husband lord.”  She got that part of the marriage. But there is nothing in the Scripture that ever talks about her faith. In fact, if you look at the story of Sarah, she demonstrates anything but faith. She’s just full of doubt. So when you look at this verse, you have to ask the question...how can it say “by faith even Sarah herself received ability to conceive?” There’s nothing in the Scripture that says anything about Sarah’s faith. The phrase here, and I want to just do this for you because it’s important, the phrase here literally that phrase that says, “received ability to conceive,” is literally katabolen spermatos. Katabolen means to throw down, hence the depositing of the seed, male seed. This is telling us then that she received the deposit of the male seed, even beyond the proper time of life. She then can’t be the subject of the sentence because she’s the recipient, she’s the indirect object of the sentence. The seed is the object and it’s given to her.  The verse would be better placed in this kind of language, “By faith He...cause the pronouns are assumed here...By faith he with Sarah received the power to lay down seed, deposit seed even beyond t he proper time of life since He counted him faithful who had promised.”  In other words, what it is saying is that by faith God gave Abraham the power to impregnate Sarah. The faith is not Sarah’s, the faith is Abraham’s because he believed.  He is a man of faith.

  How strong is his faith?  Romans 4:19, “Without becoming weak in faith because this promise was so impossible,” go back to verse 17, God says, “I’m going to make you a father of many nations, even God who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which doesn’t exist,” that’s what it’s going to take, going to have to give life to this dead body, “In hope...verse 18...against hope, he believed.” I mean, it was just no way humanly. He believed without becoming weak in faith...verse 19...he contemplated his own body now as good as dead since he was about 100 years old and the deadness of Sarah’s womb, yet with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith giving glory to God and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform.” And then it brings in that statement from Genesis 15:6, “Again it was credited to him as righteousness.” Here’s the man who was justified, who has righteousness imputed to him, this man who has an unwavering, undying faith in the face of absolute possibility.

  Hebrews 11:12, “Therefore there was born even of that 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.”  That’s part of the promise recorded in Genesis 15:5, Genesis 22:17, Genesis 32:12. And that’s, of course, a hyperbole in one sense, but it simply means that the people who are going to come out of his loins are innumerable, all the millions of Jews born because of the faith of that one man.

  That vigor that God gave him to produce that child, didn’t just produce that child, produced another child, Ishmael with Hagar, and when Sarah died, according to Genesis 25:2 he took a wife named Keturah and by now he’s over a hundred years ago and this is post-flood and he has six more sons. God gave an enduring power to that body which was as good as dead.

  What do we say about the power of faith then? That it is the power of faith that accomplishes the impossible. God makes promises that cannot be fulfilled on a human level and fulfills them to those who believe in Him. For us it’s not so much the miracle power as it is the power to be used by God in the miracle of conversion, in the miracle of spiritual ministry, of life-transforming help in the use of the gifts of the Spirit, in the use of the power of the Spirit in the one-anothers of the fellowship of the body. Faith is the ignition switch to spiritual power that makes us useful and allows God through us to do the 30-, 60- and a hundred-fold kind of harvest. God releases power to do what seems to be impossible.

  Fourth is the perseverance of faith...the perseverance of faith. “All these died in faith.” What do you mean “all these?” It goes back to the three that have been mentioned in this section, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Covenant promise to Abraham was repeated to Isaac in Genesis 26, it was repeated to Jacob in Genesis 28 that they would receive a land and a heavenly city, they would have an earthly inheritance and a heavenly one. They all died in faith without receiving the promises. But having seen them with the eye of faith, having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth, for those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking the country of their own, and indeed, if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one. And there again we find the perseverance of faith. It’s very much like the patience of faith. Faith is patient to endure and endure all of the lack of fulfillment in this life because it has its focus on the promise that lies ahead. They never saw it.

  Verse 39, “All these heroes of faith gained approval through their faith and didn’t receive what was promised.” That’s the whole story of the chapter because God provided something better for us so that apart from us they wouldn’t be made perfect or complete or whole. The promise was sure because God could be trusted. And they persevered in this faith, looking to that heavenly city .

  Fifth is the positivity of faith. Maybe that’s a better thing because it gave them confidence. They had never had the fleeting thought to return, verse 15. They desire a better country, that is a heavenly one. This deposited in their heart a future so bright, so wonderful, so glorious that even though they were strangers, xenos meaning a foreigner. They were a parepidemos, persons who stay temporarily. They got it, they understood that. But so bright was the promise of God, so trustworthy was the Word of God that they anchored their endurance and their perseverance in the future and it gave them a positive faith to endure anything. We see this with the Apostle Paul, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” How? “Because I know there’s something better waiting for me.” “Far better...he says...to depart and be with Christ. But I can endure anything as long as He wants me to stay here.” This is the absolute confidence in future glory. Job had it “Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” Psalm 27:4, “One thing have I desire to the Lord, that will I seek after...I love this...that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” That’s Old Testament hope. That’s the hope of believers.

  Verse 16 ends with a stunning statement, I think one of the most stunning statements in the book of Hebrews. “Therefore because of this faith, this positive faith, this powerful faith, this patient faith, this pilgrim faith, God is not ashamed to be called their God for He has prepared a city for them.”

  This is stunning. I’m pretty sure I give God plenty of reason to be ashamed to be called “My God.” I can just imagine that Satan goes into heaven as he did in the case of Job and he’s always before the throne of God accusing the brethren, and he brings up my name and brings up the names of any and all of us who are so utterly unworthy and says to God, “How in the world can you want to be associated with such people? Wouldn’t You like to distance Yourself from them? It is bad for Your reputation.” God says, “I’m not ashamed to be called their God and I’ve prepared a city for them and in that city I’ve prepared a room for them in My house and I’m going to bring them here and I’m going to glorify them and I’m going to make them like My Son and I’m going to put them on My throne and I’m going to bless them forever and ever and ever.”

  Sometimes I think we are ashamed to call God our God, but God is never ashamed to call us His children. What an amazing thought. I can’t think of a higher honor, can you? Is that the ultimate honor? God’s not ashamed to be identified with me before holy angels? I am the God of John MacArthur. Oh.... So they lived and died in the unrealized promise of faith and God gave them the supreme honor, God was honored to be identified with them.

  Finally is the proof of faith,  the real test, supreme test, not just obedience, but obedience with sacrifice. By faith Abraham...verse 17...when he was tested offered up Isaac. “Was that not the ultimate test?” “And he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son, it was he whom it was said, “In Isaac your descendants shall be called.” Now God comes to him in Genesis 22, and says to Abraham, “I want you to go up to the mount and I want you to put your son on the altar. I want you to sacrifice your son on the altar to Me.”

  Did Abraham know about sacrifice? Absolutely...everybody knew about sacrifice, everybody understood that was in a relationship with God by faith, everyone understood they were sinful, that there needed to be a sacrifice, expiation, propitiation for their sins.  But to sacrifice Isaac, the heir through whom all the promises would be fulfilled? How are you going to have descendants like the sand and the sea if you kill the heir through whom they will all come?

  Genesis 22, “God tested Abraham, He said, ‘Abraham.’ He said, ‘Here I am.’ Take your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, go to the land of Moriah, offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I’ll tell you.’” Abraham had killed animals many times, offered many offerings to the Lord, built altars and did that. But his son? “He responds, Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, he split wood for the burnt offering, arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from the distance. Abraham said to his young men, servants who came, ‘Stay here with the donkey.  I and the lad will go over there and we will worship and return to you.’”

  He thought Isaac was coming back?  He absolutely thought that. He knew that. That’s how confident he was in the promise of God. How far would he go? “Took the wood of the burnt offering...in verse 6...laid it on Isaac his son, Isaac carries his own wood, as it were, kind of a picture of Christ carrying His cross...took in his hand the fire and the knife. The two of them walked on together. Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, ‘My father,’ he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ ‘Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’” You see, they knew about the need for sacrifice. They knew what Abel knew and Enoch knew and Noah knew and all true believers knew. “Abraham said, ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together. They came to the place in which God had told them, Abraham built the altar there, arranged the wood, bound is son Isaac, laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.’” You say, “Why would he do that?

  Go back to Hebrews 11:19, “Because he considered that God was able to raise people even from the dead.”  How did he know that? Because he had been as good as dead, and God had given life to him and life through him to this son.  It’s monumental faith. All is dreams were in Isaac. All the promises were in Isaac. He loved Isaac. He waited so long through this long pilgrimage for the first sign of the promise. He knew he had sinned so terribly with Hagar and could have thought that maybe God was changing His mind. He also knew that God’s law forbid a man to kill his son, or to kill anybody for that matter. He also knew that God hated human sacrifice and always it was an animal. And he also knew what Genesis 9:6 said that whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. You kill somebody, you’ll die. Why would he do this? Why would he raise the knife? Because his trust was so great that he knew if God had to, He would raise Isaac from the dead. That’s the faith of Abraham. He considered that God was able to raise people, even from the dead, from which he also received him back as a type.  Who was it who put His life on the altar and came back from the dead? Christ, a figure...it’s the word parabole, a parable, an analogy, a picture of Christ. Only Christ really died, Isaac did not die.  That’s faith in all its fullness. That’s faith having passed the final test.

  

  The Patriarchs: An Enduring Faith

  Hebrews 11:20-22
  

  Code: 90-386

  “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.”

  From any of these people we could learn lessons about faith in the face of death, coming to the end of your life never having received what God had promised.  But in the patriarchs' case it’s unique, because the promise was of an earthly kingdom and land and blessing and salvation. But they all died not having received the promise. Matthew Henry wrote many years ago, “Though the grace of faith is of universal use throughout all our lives, it is especially so when we come to die. Faith has its great work to do at the last to help believers finish well, to die in the Lord as to honor Him by patience, hope and joy, so as to leave a witness behind them of the truth of God’s Word and the excellencies of His ways.”

  With all the weaknesses that marked the lives of Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, they died in faith and in confidence that the promise would be fulfilled even though they had not yet received it. They were men who believed at the very end of their life that God who had not yet fulfilled His promise would fulfill that promise even after they were gone. God is greatly glorified when any believer leaves this world with a flag flying at full mast in confident faith. Any believer brings honor to God when the Spirit triumphs over the flesh, when the world is consciously left behind and there’s an eagerness to grasp the realities of eternal heaven. Any believer who dies with a heart blazing with hope brings honor to the Lord and a great testimony to the life of faith.

  We see these three Old Testament men, who are like us in that they are believers and they have been justified and given salvation. They’re unlike us in that they don’t have the full gift of the revelation of God so their lives are not as complete in terms of the sanctification aspect as those of us who know so much more.  We can conclude, I think, from the worlds of our Lord that though the Holy Spirit was with them, the Holy Spirit was not in them and that distinction is a distinction in degree to which the Spirit of God empowers believers on this side of the day of Pentecost. But they did demonstrate a God-given, a God-sustained faith, sufficient to enable them to face death and to face death triumphantly. Psalm 37:37 says, “Mark the perfect man and behold the upright.  The end of that man is peace.”

  When a mature, godly, upright man comes to the end of his life, what marks him is peace.  We would have to say that Isaac and Jacob and Joseph were far from perfect. Their lives were murky and muddy and cloudy and sometimes downright dark. There was always a flicker of the sunlight of faith and certainly it showed up at the end.

  Go back to Hebrews 11:13. “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.” In other words, they saw at a distance in the future the fulfillment of promises not realized in this life. In verse 16 they were looking for a better country, that is a heavenly one.  God was not ashamed to be called their God and He had definitely prepared the city for them.

  Abraham didn’t see the fulfillment. Abraham was a wanderer and a nomad his whole life. Isaac was the same. Isaac, the son of the promise of God, was a nomad and a wanderer. His son Jacob was to spend is life as an exile out of the promised land in Egypt. He never saw the promise. He never saw the great nation constituted. He never saw the blessings that would come to the world. Jacob’s son, Joseph, obtained greatness but that greatness was still the greatness of a stranger in a strange land. Joseph again in the land of Egypt. They all lived by faith in a promise they had never seen. They never doubted the promise, however, they never doubted that it would come true. They died in every case not in despair of unfulfilled dreams, but in the confident hope that a promise would be truly fulfilled because it had come from God whose Word was always true. They never saw it. They died, in a sense, defeating death by dying not in despair but in hope and passing on the promise that what they hadn’t seen could be promised to the next generation because in God’s good time it would eventually come.

  This is a magnificent kind of faith in a primitive time. If we would listen to them if they could come and talk to us, they might say something like this, “God made a promise, God promised a people and a land and blessing and salvation and God never breaks a promise. We may not live to see the promise but it will come.  We are links in the chain of its ultimate fulfillment. That’s how they viewed their lives, and the Jewish readers of the book of Hebrews need to know they are men of faith.

  According to verse 6 of this chapter, the only way to please God is to be a person of faith. Without faith it is impossible to please Him. So if you want to please God and therefore receive His salvation, be reconciled to Him, it is a matter of faith. Faith alone brings us into a relationship with God and these are examples of that kind of faith. Some people crumble in the face of death, but not those who have a real faith, a God-given faith.

  Let’s look at Isaac, verse 20. “By faith, Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau even regarding things to come.” Abraham had not received the promise and the promise of God given to Abraham originally in the Abrahamic Covenant is reiterated to his son, Isaac, but Isaac does not receive the promise either. Abraham had been promised the land, the nation, the spiritual blessings to the world. He never saw any of it at all and he didn’t die in despair, but in faith, confidently passing on the promise to his son, Isaac, knowing Isaac would be the next step in the divine plan that would lead ultimately to fulfillment. Isaac does the same thing, passes it to Jacob. Jacob does the same thing, passes it to Joseph. They all knew that in the language of Hebrews 10:23, “He who promised is faithful.”

  There is quite a section on Abraham there, but only one verse on Isaac. We would like to have a lot more information here, it would be easy for us if there was some given in this location. However, the writer assumes that everybody who is a Hebrew reader of this letter knows the story of Isaac because it is such a familiar story to all Jewish people.  Isaac lived the longest of the four patriarchs. He lived longer than Abraham, longer than Jacob and longer than Joseph. But less is recorded about him than any of the others. Basically his life is squeezed into Genesis 25-27.  He was not spectacular, but an ordinary guy sandwiched between two extraordinary people, Abraham and Jacob. He lived a relatively quiet life and was probably best known for his spiritual weakness and his somewhat passive nature.

  Let’s go back to Genesis 26:1:  “There was a famine in the land,” that’s in the land of Israel, land of Canaan. It’s not yet belonging to Israel, there is no nation yet. They’re not going to come back there till 40 years after 400 years of exile in Egypt. There’s a famine in the land where the family of Abraham is nomadic living and they have to go somewhere else to get some food. So Isaac, who is now an adult, went to Gerar.”  Gerar was not a really good place to go because Gerar was a Philistine city sitting on the border of Egypt and Egypt was not a good place to be. So the Lord appeared to him and said, “Do not go down to Egypt, stay in the land of which I shall tell you.”

  This is a concession on God’s part. You shouldn’t even get that close to Egypt, but if you’re going to be in Gerar, stay there. Don’t go beyond that place. Verse 3, “Sojourn in this land and I’ll be with you and bless you for you and your descendants I will give all these lands and I will establish the oath which I swore to your father, Abraham,” and here he repeats to Isaac the Abrahamic Covenant. “I’ll multiply your descendants as stars of heaven. I’ll give your descendants all these lands, to your descendants all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because Abraham obeyed Me, kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes and my laws.”

  Here is the reiteration of the Abrahamic Covenant to Isaac who is the next in line in the generations that will be the source of the fulfillment of the Covenant. Isaac was obedient, verse 6, he lived in Gerar. He never went across the border. So in one sense, that is commendable that he stopped at the border and didn’t go where God told him not to go.

  However, his weakness showed up immediately, verse 7, “When the men of the place asked about his wife, he said, ‘She is my sister,’ for he was afraid to say, ‘My wife,’ thinking the men of the place might kill me on account of Rebecca, for she is beautiful.”  Where did he learn to conduct himself like that? From his dad, right? His father, from Abraham.  Abraham did it twice.  Genesis 12 records that he did it and then he did it again in Genesis 20. Abraham was afraid that somebody was going to take Sarah away from him because Sarah was also very beautiful. And there was a famine in the land, Genesis 12:10, Abram goes down to Egypt, he goes past Gerar all the way to Egypt. He says to his wife, verse 11 of Genesis 12, “See now, I know you’re a beautiful woman and when the Egyptians see me they will say, ‘This is his wife,’ and they’ll kill me and they’ll let you live. Please say that you’re my sister so that it may go well with me because if  you say you’re my sister so they can do anything they want to you without killing me.” “Pharaoh’s officials saw her and praised her to Pharaoh and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. Therefore he treated Abram well for her sake and gave him sheep and oxen and donkeys and male and female servants, female donkeys and camels.”

  “The Lord struck Pharaoh in his house with great plagues because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Pharaoh called Abram and said, ‘What is this you’ve done to me? Why do you not tell me she’s your wife? Why did you say she’s my sister so that I took her for my wife. Now then, here’s your wife, take her and go.’”  That is one of the low points of male action on behalf of one’s wife. For self-protection he let some stranger ravage his own wife.

  Well, it happened again in the twentieth chapter of Genesis. “Abram journeyed from there to the Negev and settled between Kadesh and Shur and sojourned in Gerar...same place. Abram said of Sarah, his wife, ‘She’s my sister,’...here we go again, I’m surprised she didn’t slap him knowing what could come, more worse...So Abimelech the king of Gerar came and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream in the night and said, ‘Behold, you’re a dead man because of the woman you’ve taken for she’s married.’ Now Abimelech had not come near here...fortunately...and he said, ‘Lord, will You slay a nation even though blameless? Didn’t he say to me she’s my sister and she herself said he’s my brother? In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands, I’ve done this.’” It’s like fornication is okay but I’m not going to commit adultery.

  When we come to the account over here in the twenty-sixth chapter, Isaac behaves in precisely the same way. Verse 7, “When the men of the place see that she’s so beautiful, they’re going to want her.” And so verse 8, “It came about when he had been there for a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines looked out through the window and saw and guess what? Isaac was caressing his wife Rebecca.” Guess what, you don’t do that with your sister. I love the King James Version, it says, “Isaac was sporting with his wife.”  “Abimelech called Isaac and said, ‘Ho, ho, wait a minute, certainly she’s your wife, I watched how you conducted yourself with her. Why did you say she’s my sister? Well because I might die on account of her. Abimelech said, ‘Why have you done this, one of the people might have easily sinned with your wife and you would have brought guilt upon us.”  It seems to me that the pagans disconnected to this family had more moral character than the members of the family of Abraham. “So Abimelech charged all the people saying...in verse 11... ‘Whoever touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.’”

  Isaac goes down and he lives on the edge of where he’s not supposed to go and then he lies, he’s an absolute, outright coward. But God is so gracious to him. Look at this in verse 12, “Isaac sowed in the land,” and metaphorically it means that God blessed him incredibly. This is really good in the Hebrew. This is a play on words in Hebrew and verse 13, “The man became great, continued to become greater until he became the greatest.” It’s really a Hebrew expression for being great.  He had flocks and herds and a great household so that the Philistines down in that area of Gerar envied him. God pours out blessing.  Isaac is comfortable there. Abimelech says to him, “Get out of here, you’re too powerful for us, you intimidate us. Isaac departed from there and camped in the Valley of Gerar.”

  He went a few miles away and settled there. He wouldn’t leave. Verse 18, “Isaac dug the wells of water which had been dug in the days of his father, Abraham, who was in the same area. The Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham and he gave them the same names which his father had given them.  But when Isaac’s servants dug in the valley and found there a well of flowing water, the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with the herdsmen of Isaac’s saying the water is ours, it’s our land, it’s our valley. So he named the well Esek, which means conflict because they contended with him. Then he dug another well, they quarreled over that so he named it Sitnah which means hostility. He moved away from there and dug another well and they didn’t quarrel over that so he called it Rehoboth which means a broad place and a place where everybody can get along.” But he settles there.

  At last in verse 22, “The Lord has made room for us. And then he went up to Beersheba.” And then comes the word from the Lord. “The Lord appeared to him the same night and said, ‘I am the God of your father, Abraham. Do not fear for I am with you, I will bless you, multiply your descendants for the sake of my servant, Abraham.’” Here’s the repeat of the Abrahamic Covenant given to him, and here’s where for the first time really clearly we see the demonstration that this is a man of faith. Verse 25, “So he built an altar there and called upon the name of the Lord and pitched his tent there.”  He took up his place in the very location where the Lord had come to him and given him the promise and the covenant. “And there Isaac’s servants dug a well.”

  The next section talks about how they made peace with the people of Gerar. Therein is the indication of the faith of this man. But I want to take you back to one previous incident, back in Genesis 25. Apparently the women in the family of Abraham all seemed to have problems having children at first. In the case of Isaac, his wife had a problem. Rebecc had gone about 20 years without ever having a child. Verse 21, here’s another indication of the faith of Isaac. “Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife because she was barren and he Lord answered him and Rebecca and his wife conceived.” And then you have the wonderful story of the twins in her womb, right? The children struggled together within her and she said, ‘If this is so, why then am I this way? Does it have to be this hard?’” She is probably saying, “I would trade this for the 20 years of tranquility. “So she went to inquire of the Lord,” this is an indication again that they worshiped the true and living God. “The Lord said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, two peoples will be separated from your body.’” Through Jacob would come the Jewish people, through Esau would come the Edomites, the Arabic peoples, two great peoples will be separated from your body, one people will be stronger than the other and the older shall serve the younger. The older was Esau, the younger was Jacob but they were reversed when it came to the birthright.

  Here is an indication that they followed the Lord because they prayed to the Lord and the Lord heard their prayer. Then this prophecy comes which the Apostle Paul in Romans 9 makes a point of, that before they were ever born, the Lord chose Jacob and said, “Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated.” That there was bound up in this promise a sovereign act. Two nations, one stronger than the other, one serving the other. Here you have a very good early indication of divine sovereignty, the purpose of God to give grace to one line, one person and withhold it from another. And Paul in Romans 9 says, “You can’t question God’s right to do this. God, after all, is God.” God has a right to dispense His blessings according to His own sovereign will. God is creator of all things, has an unlimited right over all His creation. It was and is His own good pleasure that He created the world at all. There was nothing that had any claim on Him to call it into existence, or has any further claim on Him for any benefit. When the world was in chaos, no part of the matter had any claim above the rest. That was which was left...for example...inert, had no reason to complain that it wasn’t given vegetative power, nor vegetables, that they were not given animal life, nor animals that they were not given human reason, nor our first parents that they were created inferior to angels. Nothing He created had any claim on its maker. That’s why Paul said He had the same right or power over all as the potter has over the clay to make one vessel unto honor and another to dishonor. Nor can anyone say, “Why have You made me thus?”

  If man has no claim on God when he is innocent, has he acquired some right by the Fall? I don’t think so. So here is the indication of God’s sovereign purpose, He chose Abraham, He chose Isaac, He chose Jacob and through them would come the Messianic line.

  Verse 23 again, “The Lord appears and gives him this covenant. He builds the altar there. He makes a pact with the Philistines in the area of Gerar and they have a peaceable relationship in that place.” His son, Esau, at 40, verse 34, marries Judith, the daughter of Beeri the Hittite and Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite.” Bad choice. First one is enough, secondly, these are pagans. And they brought grief to Isaac and to Rebecca.  It doesn’t take us long to establish the character of Esau. That’s why Hebrews 12:16 calls him a profane man. The Greek word “profane” means “outside the threshold.” What does that mean? Outside the house. The walkway, the common walk. He was a very common earthy man. And so in the case of Esau, things went bad at the birth, they went bad through the whole story of Jacob and Esau.

  In Genesis 27, Isaac was old.  “It came about when he was 137, etc. his eyes were too dim to see. He called his older son, Esau, and said to him, ‘My son,’ and he said to him, ‘Here I am.’ Isaac said, ‘Behold now I am old and I do not know the day of my death.’”  He’s getting a little bit melancholy here. He lived 43 more years, but his is an indication of how he felt about Esau. God said, “The older will serve the younger,” and the older was Esau, that was the prophecy. God said, “That’s how it’s going to be.” And if you go back to chapter 25, for a moment, verse 24, “When her days to be delivered were fulfilled, there were twins in her womb and the first came forth red all over like a hairy garment.” That would be a huge disappointment. “And they named him Esau,” like wolfman. “Afterward his brother came forth with his hand holding on to Esau’s heel so his name was called Jacob, relating to that. And Isaac was 60 years old when he gave birth to them. Now the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the field. Jacob was a peaceful man living in tents.”

  There’s a great distinction between the two. Isaac loved Esau, he liked that ruddy man because he could deliver a good steak. Isaac was a pretty basic kind of guy when it came to things in life and he liked Esau because he brought in the good meat, because he had a taste for game. “But Rebecca loved Jacob.  When Jacob had cooked stew, Esau came in from the field and he was famished and Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me have a swallow of that red stuff there for I am famished.’ Therefore his name was called Edom, meaning red. But Jacob said, ‘Sell me your birthright.’” Wow, how hungry to you have to be to do that? Well you don’t have to be any more hungry than he was, you just have to be both hungry and treat your birthright with disdain.

  “Esau said, ‘Behold, I’m about to die, so of what use then is the birthright?’ I’m going to die of starvation. And Jacob said, ‘First swear to me,’ so he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew and he ate and drank and rose up and went on his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.”  There is a man of the world who has no view of the future. It is also true that Jacob didn’t need to do that. God had promised in the prophecy that he would be heir that though him would come the reiteration of the Abrahamic Covenant, he would be the chosen son. He didn’t need to gain the birthright by this very unkind act. It was unnecessary. It fomented all kinds of problems in the family, all kinds of deception, all kinds of lies, all kinds of animosity and hatred that was absolutely unnecessary. It is true Esau had no thought for God, he was passionate about earthly things, impulsive, incapable of estimating the true worth of anything that didn’t immediately appeal to his fleshly senses. He preferred the animal to the spiritual and thus is profane.

  The prophecy that Jacob would receive the birthright was true. God would have made it happen. Jacob didn’t need to do it this way. In chapter 27, old Isaac knows about this sale of the birthright but he still favors Esau. So in verse 3 he says, “Take your gear, your quiver and your bow and go out in the field and hunt game for me. Prepare a savory dish for me such as I love and bring it to me that I may eat so that my soul may bless you before I die.” Come on, he lived another 43 years, he just wants a steak and he wants it now. “And Rebecca was listening while Isaac spoke to his son, Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game to bring home, Rebecca hatches her plot.”

  Isaac has ignored God’s Word in the prophecy. Isaac has ignored the fact that the birthright has been exchanged. Isaac has ignored the profane character of Esau. He has ignored his marriages to pagan idolatress women. He ignores all that just because he likes him, because he provides what satisfies his appetite.

  Rebecca is not going to let this happen. “She says to Jacob, ‘Behold, I heard your father speak to your brother, Esau, saying bring me some game and prepare a savory dish for me that I may eat and bless you in the presence of the Lord before my death. Now therefore, my son, listen to me as I command you. Go to the flock, bring me two choice young goats from there that I may prepare them for a savory dish for your father such as he loves, then you shall bring it to your father that he may eat so that he may bless you before his death.’” The idea, the father, was you bring me the meal, I’ll give you the fatherly blessing, the right of primogenitor, the right of being the heir. “Jacob answered his mother, Rebecca. ‘Behold, Esau, my brother, is a hairy man and I’m a smooth man. How do we pull this off? My father will feel me then I will be a deceiver in his sight and I’ll bring upon myself a curse and not a blessing.’” He doesn’t mind lying and cheating, but he doesn’t want to just expose himself to a curse.

  “His mother said to him, ‘Your curse be on me, I’ll take your curse, my son, just do what I tell you.’ So he went out and got the animals, brought them to his mother. His mother made savory food such as his father loved. Rebecca took the best garments of Esau, her elder son, which were with her in the house, and put them on Jacob and she put the skins of the young goats on his hands.” Now that will tell you how hairy Esau was, folks. Wow. She put the skins on his hands and on the smooth part of his neck. “And she gave the savory food and the bread which she had made to her son, Jacob.” Remember now, Isaac can barely see, as we read at the beginning of the chapter. “And so he comes in. He came to his father and said, ‘My father,’ and he said, ‘Here I am, who are you, my son?’ Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau...I am Esau,’ or whatever he did. ‘I have done what you told me. I get up, please, sit and eat of my game that you may bless me.’” He hadn’t shot any game, this was domesticated goat but with the right spices and his mother knew how to do it. “Isaac said to his son, ‘How is it that you have it so quickly, my son?’ And he said, ‘Because the Lord your God caused it to happen to me.’” Oh boy, now bring God in on it. One lie follows another lie and another lie.

  “Isaac said to his son, ‘It’s just so quick, how did it happen?’ ‘Well, the Lord did it.’ And Isaac said to Jacob, ‘Please come close that I may feel you, my son, whether you are really my son, Esau, or not.’” A little bit of incredulity on the part of Isaac. “So Jacob came close to his father, felt him and said, ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ He did not recognize him because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau’s hands, so he blessed him.”

  Amazing, he passed on the blessing to him. In that society, that was everything. “And he said, ‘Are you really my son, Esau?’” He’s struggling with this. “And he said, ‘I am.’ So he said, ‘Bring it to me and I will eat of my son’s game that I may bless you.’ And he brought it to him and he ate and he also brought him wine and he drank and his father Isaac said to him, ‘Come close and kiss me, my son.’ So he came close and kissed him and when he smelled t he smell of his garments, he blessed him and said, ‘See the smell of my son is like the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed. Now may God give you the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth and an abundance of grain and new wine. May people serve you and nations bow down to you. Be master of your brothers and may your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed by those who curse you and blessed be those who bless you.’”

  In effect, as he passes on this blessing, he is investing the promise of the Abrahamic Covenant in this man Jacob, thinking he is Esau. Verse 30 then, “It came about as soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob and Jacob had hardly gone out from the presence of Isaac, his father, that Esau, his brother, came in from hunting. He also had made savory food and brought it to his father and said to his father, ‘Let my father arise and eat of his son’s game that you may bless me.’ Isaac his father said to him, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘I am your son, your firstborn Esau.’”

  This is one of the real spiritual indications in Isaac’s life. “He trembled violently. He trembled violently.” This is conviction. He knew what he had done. “When Esau heard the words of his father, he cried out...verse 34...with exceedingly great and bitter cry and said to his father, ‘Bless me, even me also, O my father.’ And he said, ‘Your brother came deceitfully and has taken away your blessing.’ And he said, “Is he not rightly named Jacob, for he supplanted me these two times? He took away my birthright and behold, how he has taken away my blessing.’ And he said, ‘Have you not reserved a blessing for me? Give me something.’”

  So down in verse 39, Isaac, his father, turns and says to him, ‘Behold, away from the fertility of the earth shall be your dwelling and away from the dew of heaven from above.’” You’re going to have a hard life. “‘By your sword you shall live, and your brother you shall serve. It shall come about when you become restless that you will break his yoke from your neck.’” You’re going to free yourself up from your brother, you’re going to be a rebel, you’re going to be an enemy, you’re going to live by the sword.  The fallout of this is obvious, in verse 41. “Esau bore a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him. And Esau said to himself, ‘The days of mourning for my father are near and then I will kill my brother, Jacob.’”

  Here’s a guy named Isaac who is in the list of heroes of faith, how did he get there with this kind of stuff? And the answer is, that there was a time when he prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife and indicated his confident faith in the Lord, there was a time and that is so very important, it’s the most important little piece of the story. In a sense, I save it for now.  Genesis 26:24, “When the Lord appears to him and says, ‘I am the God...that is to Isaac...of your father Abraham, do not fear, I’m with you, I will bless you, I will multiply your descendants the sake of my servant Abraham.” We see the demonstration of Isaac’s faith in the next verse. “So he built an altar there and called upon the name of the Lord and pitched his tent there.” He took up his residence in the place where God had appeared. He built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. That is a statement for really expressing your faith in the Lord. You might even conclude that that was the point of a real true conversion.

  In spite of the horrors of the life these people seemed to live and the lies and the deception that is going on...and by the way, it continued. Do you remember what the fallout of this was? First of all, Jacob never saw his mother again. He was alienated from his brother and lived in mortal fear that his brother was going to kill him. But eventually he met again with his brother and his life was spared.

  How did he demonstrate his faith? The writer of Hebrews says he demonstrated his faith concerning things to come. All that can be said about this man in the listing that occurs in Hebrews chapter 11 and defines him as a man of faith, is that he believed God for what he did not receive. He blessed Jacob with the true blessing, gave a secondary blessing to even...to Esau, even regarding things to come. This is the essence of faith, when he faced the end of his life and hadn’t received the promise and hadn’t received the land, and hadn’t received the nation and hadn’t become a blessing to the world, he nonetheless passed it to the next generation knowing it was yet to come.Yes he tried to do things his way, but as soon as he perceived the providential hand of God crossing his natural will, and his natural affection, instead of murmuring and rebelling, he yielded, he submitted to the Lord, he didn’t reverse the blessing and this is an evidence of his faith. He finally succumbed to what was right.

  Genesis 28:1, “Isaac called Jacob, blessed him, charged him, said to him, ‘Don’t take a wife from the daughters of Canaan, don’t do what your brother did, go to Paddan-aram, to the house of Bethuel, your mother’s father, and from there take to yourself a wife from the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother.’” Get somebody that’s from the family, a relative. “May God Almighty bless you,” and here’s a repeat of the promise, “Make you fruitful, multiply you so that you may become a company of peoples. May He also give you the blessing of Abraham to you and to your descendants with you that you may possess the land of your sojournings which God gave to Abraham.”

  So in the end, Isaac rolled over, accepted God’s providential purpose through all the sinful machinations of that bizarre set of circumstances and he died in faith that the promise would be fulfilled and that his son, Jacob, was the next link.

  Verse 21, “By faith, Jacob as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.”  For Jacob was like his father Isaac, not the shining of the sun on a calm and clear day. His life was murky and muddy and cloudy and dark and foggy and all of those things. But he walked by faith, like Isaac. He encountered many struggles, many challenges, victories came hard for him. The fog in his life was thick, sin was heavy, but his faith never waned.

  Genesis 28:10, “Jacob departed from Beersheba, went toward Haran, came to a certain place, spent the night there because the sun had set. He took one of the stones of the place, put it under his head and lay down in that place. He had a dream and behold, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. The Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, and the God of Isaac, on the land in which you lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants.’” Here’s a reiteration of the Abrahamic Covenant to the next in the genetic flow, the genetic line, the descendants. “Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth. You’ll spread out to the west, the east, the north, the south and you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” Almost verbatim the Abrahamic promise. “Behold I am with you. I will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.”

  “And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place and I didn’t know it.’ And he was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place? This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.’ So Jacob rose early in the morning, took the stone that he had put under his head, set it up as a pillar, poured oil on its top and he turned it into an altar, a place commemorating the encounter with God. He called the name of it Bethel, that’s house of God, previously the name of the city had been Luz. Jacob made a vow saying, ‘If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take and give me food to eat and garments to wear, I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God.’ The stone which I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house and of all that You give me I will surely give a tenth to You.’”

  Here is indication of his faith. He wants the Lord to be his God. He wants to give generously. He is dependent on the Lord, and we see that in chapter 32. He is terrified of his brother, Esau. Jacob in Genesis 32:9, “O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac, O Lord, who said to me, ‘Return to your country and your relatives and I will prosper you...  I am unworthy of all the loving kindness and all the faithfulness which You have shown to Your servant, for with my staff only I cross this Jordan and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him that he will come and attack me and the mothers with the children, for You said I will surely prosper you and make your descendants as the sand of the sea which is too great to be numbered. We’re not going to be able to do that if Esau shows up and massacres us all.’”

  When you look at the life of Jacob, you see a lot of problems in his life, obviously, all the duplicity, all the lies, all the deception...yet he is anxious for the Lord to be his God. He is anxious to give to the Lord. He seeks the Lord in his hour of desperation. And he trusts the Lord to be the source of his life and the source of his protection.

  The time came for Jacob to pass away and he passes on the birthright, he passes the birthright on to Joseph.  Genesis 48:  “It came about after these things, Joseph was told, ‘Behold, your father’s sick.’ So he took his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim with him.” Joseph had two sons.  We talk about the twelve tribes of Israel, don’t we? Well when they came into the land, the twelve tribes were allotted land, there actually were 13 tribes of Israel because one of the tribes was Joseph but his portion was split into two parts, Ephraim and Manasseh and the Levites, the tribe of Levi, had no land. They were the priestly tribe. So Joseph appears with is two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. They will...they will be critical to the purposes of God; that is why many times the prophets refer to Israel as Ephraim.

  Jacob, who has his name changed to Israel, collects his strength, sat up on the bed. “Jacob said to Joseph, ‘God Almighty appeared to me at Luz back at Bethel in the land of Canaan, blessed me. He said, behold, I’ll make you fruitful and numerous and make you a company of people, give you this land to your descendants for you for an everlasting possession.’” Had he seen it? No. Had he seen a great nation? No. Had he seen people like the sand of the sea? No. It was a promise he died believing that promise was true.

  “Now your two sons that were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt are mine. Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine as Reuben and Simeon are mine. But your offspring that have been born after them shall be yours, they shall be called by the names of their brothers in their inheritance.” And he goes on...and the key thing is the promise that is pronounced there at the very beginning. It is passed on through him to the next generation namely, Ephraim and Manasseh. I’m not going to read all the rest of this but go down to verse 12, “Joseph took them from his knees and bowed with his face to the ground. He took both of them, Ephraim with his right hand toward Israel’s left, Manasseh with his left hand toward Israel, or Jacob’s right and brought them close to him. Stretched out his right hand, laid it on the head of Ephraim who was the younger, his left hand on Manasseh’s head, crossing his hands. Although Manasseh was the firstborn, he blessed Joseph and said, “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day,” and there’s another indication of Jacob’s true faith, “the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads and may my name live on in them and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and may they grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.”

  “When Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on Ephraim’s head, it displeased him and he gasped his father’s hand to remove it from Ephraim’s head to Manasseh’s head. Joseph said to his father, ‘Not so, my father, for this one is the firstborn. Place your right hand on his head.’ But his father refused and said, ‘I know, my son, I know. He also will become a people, he also will be great. However, his younger brother shall be greater than he and his descendants shall become a multitude of nations.’ And he blessed them that day saying, ‘By you, Israel will pronounce blessing saying, May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.’ Thus he put Ephraim before Manasseh so Ephraim becomes another name for Israel as Israel becomes another name for Jacob. Israel says to Joseph, ‘I am about to die, but God will be with you and bring you to the land of your fathers.’”

  There’s Jacob’s faith, he had heard from God, he couldn’t change his mind, you couldn’t move his hands, he died in faith never having seen the results. That leaves us only Joseph and what does it say in verse 22 of Hebrews chapter 11? Simply stated about Joseph, it tells us that he also while dying, when he was dying made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel and gave orders concerning his bones. He’s dying now, he has not received the promise. The promise now is very old, it’s very old. It’s 200 years since it was given to Abraham. Nobody has yet seen it. They’ve all died without seeing it fulfilled.

  Joseph in verse 22, is in Egypt, he and his father’s household lived 110 years. Joseph saw the third generation of Ephraim’s sons. Joseph said to his brothers in chapter 50:24, “I’m about to die, but God wills surely take care of you and bring you up from this land.” He promised you that land, we’re still in Egypt, they’re all nomads, they’re all wanderers, they’ve never been in the land, they’ve never possessed the land, they’ve never had the Kingdom, they’ve never been a blessing. They’ve never experienced deliverance and salvation as a people. They aren’t yet a people. “I’m about to die but God will do what He promised, He promised an oath to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. And Joseph made the sons of Israel swear saying, ‘God will surely take care of you and you should take my bones from here.’ So Joseph died at the age of 110, was embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt.” Wow. Died a stranger, never having received the promise.

  The writer of Hebrews tells us that these are people of faith. Their whole lives were built around this promise that had been given to Abraham and passed on to these three other patriarchs. Everything in their lives focused on the confidence they had that God would do what He said He would do because God could be trusted. They never saw it. I mean, this is faith at its highest level, is it not? These aren’t people who live at a low level. Sinful? Absolutely. Duplicitous, deceitful? Absolutely. Weak, vacillating, sometimes immoral? Absolutely. Living in a primitive time without the full revelation or the full riches of the Spirit that we know today. They struggled perhaps in ways that we don’t and maybe that’s why there was a little more tolerance of those things as Scripture indicates in the past. But what may be true about that part of their lives doesn’t cancel out what’s true about the commitment they made to trust God. They could not be deterred from giving the blessing to whom the blessing belonged. Abraham would not give it to Ishmael, it went to Isaac. Isaac would not give it to Esau, it went to Jacob. Jacob would not give it to Manasseh, it went to Ephraim. They all died never having seen it. They died as strangers, wanderers, nomads, a couple of them in foreign lands.

  That was the evidence of their faith. They believed God for what they couldn’t see, all the way to death. Unless you think that’s something very unusual and heroic, that’s how you believe, too, because the heaven that holds you to Christ is a heaven you have never seen. That’s what it means to live by faith.

  

  Moses: The Decisions of Faith

  Hebrews 11:23-29
  

  Code: 90-387

  “By faith, Moses when he was born was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the King’s edict. By faith, Moses when he had grown up refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to endure ill treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith, he left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the King, for he endured as seeing him who is unseen. By faith, he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood so that he who destroyed the firstborn would not touch them. 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.”

  In every case of the Old Testament heroes,we have seen that those people all had a right relationship with God through faith. Faith defined their relationship.  The assumption of the Jews would be that Moses is the model of the Law. In fact, the Law was even called the Mosaic Law.  The Jews would assume that if anybody was a model of legalism, it had to be Moses. Moses was the ultimate archetypal legalist, so it is a stunning thing to say that Moses operated in the spiritual realm, not by Law, but by faith.  The way that the writer of Hebrews lays out the faith of Moses is to show you how his faith acted, the choices that it made. His life is marked by choices related to his faith.

  Moses shows us how faith acts in terms of the decisions that it makes. Life is a series of choices that we make. We make either good choices, or bad choices, it’s a series of decisions.  Sin is always a bad choice. Our lives are marked by either making the right choice or making the wrong choice.  Every day and every circumstance poses another opportunity for us to make a choice.  Either you grasp an opportunity for the glory of God and choose the way of God, the way of truth, the way of righteousness, or you choose the way of the flesh, the way of the world, the way of Satan.

  Deuteronomy 30:19 says, “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life that both you and your seed may live.” Joshua 24:15, “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Or 1 Kings 18:21, Elijah said, “How long do you halt between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him. If Baal, then follow him. And the people answered not a word.”

  Abel chose God’s way, the more excellent of sacrifice, his brother didn’t. Abel was blessed and his brother was cursed.  Enoch chose God’s way to walk with God. The rest of the world didn’t and it was destroyed, with the exception of eight souls.  Noah chose God’s way. The rest of the human race drowned in his generation.  Abraham chose God’s way, to live a life of faith. And the people in whose land he dwelt did not and were tragically destroyed.Isaac, Jacob and Joseph chose God’s way to believe in God for what they couldn’t see. And they died in hope.

  Moses made the right choice and chose God’s way. He chose to believe God, to believe the revelation of God, the Word of God, to live a life of faith. And his faith is demonstrated in his decisions, decisions that related to things he rejected and things he accepted.  What does true faith reject? Verses 24 to 27, first thing that true faith rejects is the world’s prestige. Look at verse 24, “By faith, Moses when he had grown up refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.”

  Moses had by the providence of God been put in a basket covered with pitch and set in the Nile River to float away. His mother did that because there was a decree to kill all of the Hebrew babies. In order to save his life they simply let him float away, cared only for by the providence of God. Had he been one of the Hebrew babies to be killed by Pharaoh, there would have been no story of Moses and God’s history would never have been what God ordained it to be. There was no way he was going to die, God providentially ordered the circumstances, his parents hid him, put him in a basket after they had hidden him for a while, put him in the river, he floated down the river just happened to be that he floated right into a bathing party where the daughter of Pharaoh was bathing and he became the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.

  Exodus 2:5 touches on what happened, “The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile with her maidens walking alongside the Nile. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid and brought it to her. When she opened it, she saw the child and behold the boy was crying and she had pity on him and said, ‘This is one of the Hebrews children.’”

  There was no mystery to the fact that this was a little Jewish boy. She had pity on him, however, it says in verse 6. “Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter,” she just happened to be strolling along the river, Miriam, the sister of Moses, making sure somebody had an eye on him as he floated along. “Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women that she may nurse the child for you?” “Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Go ahead.’ So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this child away and nurse him for me and I’ll give you your wages.’ So the woman took the child and nursed him.”

  It is incredible that he is now officially adopted as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, but she can’t nurse him and so she wants him to be properly nursed by a Jewish mother. And it just so happens that her daughter, Miriam, is going along watching for her little brother and she sets it up so that he can be nursed by his own mother.

  Verse 10, “The child grew.”  It was maybe as many as 12 years before that child was brought back. “The child grew and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son.” That would mean that he had had all the proper training. Some might argue that it was only until he was weaned and it would be more likely that he was maybe three years old, or so. But I tend to think that as long as his mother could hang on to him, she would hang on to him and give him the proper training in the things of God which would inform the later decisions of his life. If she gave him to Pharaoh at the age of three, or four, or five, it would be unlikely that he would have any idea of the Word of God, or the knowledge of God. If she kept him until ten or eleven or twelve, he would have learned of the promise to Abraham. He would have learned of the reiteration of that promise to Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. He would have learned the history of Joseph, that Joseph had died in hope...in hope of the promised land, knowing that there would come a time when God would lead His people out of Egypt and lead them to the promised land. And that God had promised to send a deliverer for Israel, and an ultimate deliverer, and an ultimate hope and an ultimate Messiah, one who would have the scepter, Genesis 49:10, one who would be the ultimate prophet.

  He would have learned that the people were hoping for the time of their deliverance and their entrance into the promised land. They were hoping for the coming of their Messiah, the one who would bruise serpent’s head. He would have been trained in everything that God had revealed, up to that time, a great Covenant promise to Abraham reiterated to the other patriarchs.

  After all of that training in what had been revealed by God, up to the time of Moses, she took him back and took him back to be the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He became her son. Not her baby, not her child, but her son...another indication that he was perhaps at that age that I suggested. She named him Moses because I drew him out of water.

  Verse 10 says, “The child grew.” And verse 11 then says, “Now it came about in those days when Moses had grown up,” forty years between verse 10 and 11. The years of Moses maturing, which according to Acts 7:22 were the years in which he learned all the wisdom of Egypt. So he started out with a foundation in his life and the foundation in his life was the truth of God revealed up until that point. So he knew the truth of God from his parents.  Now he’s learning the wisdom of the Egyptians.

  What is going to take hold of his heart? Is it going to be the wisdom of the Egyptians or the truth of God? Would the formal education in Egypt, the inculcation of Egyptian wisdom, Egyptian idolatry?  He would have learned hieroglyphics, he would have learned the hieratic scripts. He would no doubt would have been involved in copying the texts, that was part of the formal education. He would have learned multi-languages. He would have learned the languages of surrounding nations, the various languages of the Canaanites so that he could interact with them and trade. But would he have lost what he had as a foundation of his life, the Word of God?

  When he reached the age of maturity, he faced the crucial decision.  He is now to become fully absorbed into Egyptian culture. When he had grown up, he has to make a choice. What is his choice going to be?

  Hebrews 11:24, “By faith, when he had grown up, he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.” He rejected the world’s prestige.  What could be any more prestigious for somebody living in the world to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, to be the grandson of the Pharaoh, the greatest ruler on the planet at that time? The most sophisticated culture, the most sophisticated society, highly advanced, he had the privilege as he knew what they were of prestige. He had seen them for the decades that he had been there. He understood the honors of being a prince in Egypt. He understood the status.  He understood the comforts. The understood the servants that he would have, the power that he would have, the wealth that he would have, the privileges that he would have.  This is the biggest decision of his life so far. Should he hold on to the world’s prestige or should he forsake it for the call of God?  He knew that God had called him. That is indicated in Acts 7 because Stephen in preaching that wonderful sermon that he preached gives the history of Israel and incorporates the story of Moses.  Stephen says in verse 21, “Pharaoh’s daughter took him away and nurtured him as her own son. Moses was educated in the all the learning of the Egyptians. He was a man of power in words and deeds. When he was approaching the age of forty, it entered his mind to visit his brother and the sons of Israel. And when he saw one of them being treated unjustly, he defended him and took vengeance for the oppressed by striking down the Egyptian. Killed him. And he supposed that his brother and understood that God was granting them deliverance through him but they did not understand.”

  He already at that time begun to realize that God was going to use him to be the deliverer. He knew God had called him. Somewhere along the line, God had disclosed that to him. You’re in the position you’re in because you’re going to be My deliverer for Israel. And so he kills an Egyptian to defend his people and there is where he makes his decision.

  Exodus 2 describes the very same thing. That is the moment in which he rejected the prestige and the honor and everything that came with being a prince in Egypt. He threw it all away and took his place with the slaves. He rejected the prestige that Egypt had to offer, that the world had to offer because he knew God had a better Kingdom, a better reward and a higher calling for him. This is an act of faith. Why? Because if you operate on sight, you’re going to take what you’ve got.  Power, prestige, money, fame, all of that that is his as a prince in Egypt, he exchanged what he had for what he didn’t have and couldn’t see. This was an act of faith. Prestige, honor, power and fame are seductive realities. Most people live all their life chasing those things and they wouldn’t even leave the chase to live a life of faith. He wasn’t in the chase, he had them all and he gave it up.  He went from being in the palace to becoming a slave. He identified with the slaves because they were God’s people and because God had a plan for them and he knew what the plan was, the plan was for a land and for a promise, a Kingdom and salvation, everything bound up in the Abrahamic promise. God was going to reward His people with things far greater than what Egypt could offer.

  Moses trusts God to reward and fulfill and accomplish his purpose in his life. He literally rejects what he has in hand, the prestige and power of Egypt and he takes the reproach of his people, choosing rather to endure ill treatment with the people of God.  Verse 28 it talks about the reproach. This is the choice that faith makes. To put it in our common context today, faith rejects the world, it rejects all that the world has to offer...the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, 1 John 2 describes it. The disciples said in Matthew 19:27, “We’ve forsaken all to follow You.” That’s this. “Deny yourself, take up your cross, follow Me,” in the words of Jesus. This is the first act that we see in expressing faith on Moses’ part. Faith is willing to deny itself, to deny all that it possesses. It will break with everything to do the will of God and to put itself in God’s hands.  If someone will not let go of the things of the world, they cannot come to God.

  Secondly, Moses rejected the world’s pleasure.  Verse 25, “Choosing rather to endure ill treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin.” The old Authorized said, “Pleasures of sin for a season.” Sin is fun. Sin is pleasurable, hamartias apolausis, the enjoyment of sin. There was plenty of it in that Egyptian culture. You could indulge all your lusts at will, especially if you were the prince.  No sensory desire would be unfulfilled, no lust would go unmet. Moses had to be willing to turn his back on all the pleasures of sin, and they were replete in the position that he was in in Egypt. He was called to give it up, to give all of it up to become, as it were, a slave with his people.

  Moses chose to reject the pleasures of sin which are momentary and passing to do the work of God because it produces dividends that are lasting.  Moses made the right choice, that’s the choice that faith makes. It puts its trust in God and says, “I’m willing to let go of the world.” It puts its trust in God and says, “I’m willing to let go of the pleasures of sin.” And what do we get? The Bible says, “Pleasures forevermore, eternal joy.”

  Moses made a conscience choice to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin. Instead of having everything he wanted, he virtually put himself in a position to have nothing. That’s what faith does. That’s the real deal. That’s consistent with what our Lord said, isn’t it, about self-denial, take up your cross. About the fact that if you’re still hanging on to the world and the deceitfulness of riches, you’re going to choke out the seed. God has called us to holiness and Moses responded to that. And he had all the sin that his heart could imagine at his command and he walked away from it.

  The third thing that Moses turned from was the world’s plenty, verse 26, “Considering the reproach of Christ, greater riches than the treasures of Egypt for he was looking to the reward.” He considered, in the Greek, he judged, he made a judgment. This is not a rash conclusion, but a very careful consideration. He had prestige, pleasure and treasure to the max at his fingertips.  But true, saving faith rejects all of those things. He considered the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt for he was looking to THE reward. The implication there is to the final, divine, eternal reward.

  What does he mean by the reproach of Christ?  It would be a reproach that was similar to that which Christ endured. Although Moses didn’t know about Christ, didn’t know Christ, he knew there was a promise of a coming deliverer. But we know and the readers of Hebrews know that he was willing to take a reproach to move from having everything to basically having nothing, from being honored to being treated with scorn and disdain, as was Christ. He who was rich, became poor, speaking of Christ.   He bore a reproach, the kind of reproach that is characteristic of Christ who was infinitely rich, infinitely privileged, infinitely satisfied in the presence of God and set it all aside to the do the will of God, to come down to suffer ill treatment on behalf of the people of God. He is, in that sense, like Christ.

  Moses rejected the world’s pressure.  There was serious pressure on him.  Verse 27. “By faith he left Egypt not fearing the wrath of the king, for he endured to seeing Him who is unseen.”  If you ask how could he be willing to give up all the treasures of Egypt to become a reproach, it is because he considered that the pathway to greater riches than anything Egypt had to offer. How could he then, in verse 27, not be afraid of Pharaoh? How could he do what he did, kill an Egyptian? Which would go back to the Pharaoh and his life would be then on the line, they would come after him. He would have to flee for his life. And that’s exactly what he did, you remember, he fled to Midian where he had to stay for forty years. How could he not feel the pressure of what was liable to happen to him under the powerful Pharaoh when he took the life of an Egyptian? Answer, he endured because he saw the One who was invisible. He knew his life was in the hands of the invisible and eternal God.

  Verse 27, “By faith he left Egypt,” kataleipo, can refer to a simple departure, but it really is a deeper word, especially here, some commentators have said it means a forsaking, or a heart renunciation. In the Greek both here in Hebrews 11 and also in Luke, they forsook all to follow Jesus. It has the idea of not just simply physically leaving Egypt but renouncing Egypt. He rejected Egypt as having any power over his life. He rejected the power that Pharaoh supposedly had over his life. He rejected the fear of man, to borrow the words of Proverbs 29:25.

  We have the faith of one who does not fear the wrath of the king because he knows his life is in the hands of God. How bold and fearless is he? In Exodus 5 after forty years in Midian, he comes back and walks right in to Pharaoh’s palace, goes up to Pharaoh and says, “Pharaoh, let my people go.” That’s fearless, isn’t it?  His boldness is amazing.

  Forty years he had been living in the land of Midian as a shepherd and now he walks back in to Pharaoh’s palace, with no army or weapon. Egypt’s court is ready to arrest him. He’s facing a proud, haughty, pagan monarch who reigns over the greatest empire in the world and everybody knows, it’s been passed down that this man who was once the prince in the palace murdered an Egyptian and has been gone for forty years. In boldness, he walks right in to the face of Pharaoh and makes his demands. He tells Pharaoh he better respond or it’s not going to go well.  It doesn’t take long. First the waters turn to blood, then the frogs come, then the dust and the gnats and then the dog flies and the blood-sucking insects, then the death of domestic animals, then the ashes, the dust, the boils, the hail, the fire, the locusts, the darkness and verse 28 would indicate the final plague, the death of the firstborn. He goes nose-to-nose with Pharaoh and warns him about all of this.

  This is a man of faith. Where did he get this kind of faith and courage? He endured as seeing Him who is unseen. Seeing Him who was invisible. He saw a greater King with the eyes of faith.  He believed God.  The man made the right decisions. He chose to reject the world’s prestige, to reject the world’s pleasure, to reject the world’s plenty, and to reject the world’s pressure.  What I love about it is when you might assume that Moses would be a model over the legalists, Moses is a model of a man of faith who believed the Word of God. And thus he was accepted by God.

  Let's make some suggestions since we know what true faith rejects and at the same time obviously what it accepts, it accepts the Word of God even though the fulfillment is yet unseen. But let’s look a little deeper into what it means to accept the Word of God. Let’s ask the question, “What does true faith accept?”

  First, true faith accepts the Lord’s plans. Hebrews 11:23 “By faith Moses when he was born was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.” It was after that period of time that they floated him down the river and then got him back and kept him for years. His father’s name was Amram and his mother’s name was Jochebed.

  Pharaoh had made a decree to kill these Hebrew boys and they fearlessly hid the child and they protected the child. And the only thing he tells us about it is this, because they saw he was a beautiful child.  But that’s every parent’s thought.  Nobody’s got an ugly child. Everybody’s child is the most beautiful and most intelligent. What is this?

  The word “beautiful” is an interesting word. In Exodus 2:2 it appears in the record there, “The woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months.” And in Acts, it also describes him in similar language as to what we would assume was his looks, or his form. But certainly there’s more than just that. He was a lovely child, it says in Acts 7:20, this is Stephen, lovely in the sight of God. Beautiful in Exodus and even beautiful in Hebrew means lovely in the sight of God.  Now we’re getting to something far more important.

  Literally asteios to Theo, goodly unto God, fair unto God, beautiful unto God. It isn’t just that his parents thought they had a cute baby and wanted to protect him because he was just such a cute baby. God had set His sights on this child. They knew this child was God’s child, that he was fair in God’s eyes. It was not their human attraction to his looks or form that caused them to hide the newborn. Of course they loved him but all other parents love their children. Of course they thought he was a beautiful child, all other parents think their children are beautiful. But this was a child who was special to God, fair to God. They knew that the child had a divine destiny. They trusted God then that they could protect that child and they could put that child in a basket and let that child go and God would bring about the destiny that He had planned for that child.

  This is how faith acts, not just with Moses, but we back up to Amram and Jochebed and we learn that faith accepts the plan of God, or if you will, the promise of God, and the purpose of God. They were so confident in the providence of God that God had a purpose for this life, that this little boy of all little boys was special to God. We don’t know how they knew that, but certainly it had been declared and indicated to them.  Moses’ parents are models of faith who trusted the plan of God.

  Do you think that after Pharaoh’s daughter found the little baby and Miriam said, “By the way, if you’d like a Hebrew mother to nurse the baby, I know of a perfect one,” and the baby went back to Jochebed and stayed there for years and was developed, don’t you think that the responsibility of Moses was clarified to him in those years that his parents said, “You’ve been specially called by God.” And so, by the time he went back to Pharaoh’s court as a teenager, if so, or early before his teen aged years, he had already known that God had a special plan for him? This is maybe where the unfolding of that calling originally began and maybe was reiterated to him as he grew through those forty years in the whole time he was being exposed to the Egyptian wisdom, he never deviated from what he knew was his calling. And so his faith was like his parents and that is what is behind th fact that he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, he refused the prestige, he refused the prominence, he refused the treasure, the power, the pleasure, the pressure. None of it had any affect on him because early on it was pretty clear to everybody in the family conveyed to him, I’m sure, that he was special to God. He knew it. He believed it. And he acted on it.

  Exodus 2:11, “It came about in those days,” that is when Moses reaches his forties, “He had grown up, went out to his brethren and looked on their hard labors and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren, so he looked this way and that,” checking to make sure nobody’s looking, “and when he saw there was no one around, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” The Bible doesn’t say this is the right thing to do, it’s not the right thing to do, it’s a sinful thing to do, but it does indicate that he was willing to make the choice to pay the consequences to be identified with his people.

  “He went out the next day and behold, two Hebrews were fighting with each other and he said to the offender, ‘Why are you striking your companion?’ But he said, ‘Who made you a prince or a judge over us? Are you intending to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?’” Now he knows the word’s out. “He was afraid and said, ‘Surely the matter has become known.’” But isn’t it interesting, he went out the next day and he acted like he was in charge of people’s behavior. Why? Why did he presume to do that? I think he had been well informed of the plan. He didn’t know how the plan was going to unfold and it unfolded the way God wanted it to unfold. The slaying of the Egyptian was an important turning point in his life and the deed cannot be condoned, but it did express his deep and profound identification with the purpose of God and the people of God and his total rejection that everything that Egypt had to offer. But even his own people rejected him because they were afraid that the Egyptians would come and kill them all.

  “He was forced to leave the land for forty years, live in the land of Midian while God shaped him into the leader He wanted him to be.” For those forty years, he knew he was Israel’s deliverer. I’m confident of that. He bore the reproach of an anointed one. He knew what he was to do.  When the time came, and he had been prepared by God, he waited forty years and then went back, commissioned that a burning bush sent back boldness personified. Walks into Pharaoh’s presence, pronounces divine judgment on him, calls hm to let the people of Israel go. True faith accepts the Lord’s plan.

  Secondly, Moses accepted the Lord’s provision. “By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood so that he who destroyed the firstborn would not touch them.” The last plague was the angel of death was going to come and kill all the firstborn unless the blood is splattered on the doorposts and the lintel. You can read about it, Exodus 22, Exodus 12. Moses did it because he knew that was God’s provision for their deliverance.  He didn’t try to make it on his own. He didn’t try to develop his own strategy. He accepted God’s provision, “You will be spared if you do this.” Took God at His Word.

  Moses accepted the Lord’s plans, and the Lord’s provisions, and the Lord’s promise. “By faith...verse 29...he and all the people of Israel, as many as two million, passed through the Red Sea as thought they were passing through dry land and the Egyptians when they attempted it were drowned.”  It is really a stunning act of faith to stand there as you lead the people of Israel out of Egypt and to see this massive body of water part, just leaving a pathway through the middle. In Exodus 14, the people felt trapped, they’re up against the sea. Pharaoh’s breathing down on them. They’re full of fear. They look at the waters the army coming behind and Moses gives them a command. He says this, “Stand still and see the salvation of Jehovah.” That’s a lot of faith. I mean, he was believing God for a massive miracle.

  He had some experience with miracles admittedly, in the plagues. But faith takes God’s Word, God’s promise and moves right into the fury. So if you’re waiting for a ferry boat, forget it. God’s going to do something miraculous and that’s what He did. He split the Red Sea and they all walked through on dry land. And when Pharaoh tried to follow, you know the story, right? His entire army was drowned.  The story of Moses is not the story of Law, it’s the story of faith. Faith makes all the right choices.

  

  Joshua & Rahab: A Conquering, Courageous Faith

  Hebrews 11:30-31
  

  Code: 90-388

  
   

  Those who were related to God are related to God because they came to Him by faith and they continue to live by faith. Life may be difficult. What God requires may be bizarre, it may be against the grain of your own nature, your own will. It may be contrary to culture. It may seem unreasonable. It may cause suffering. It may bring human mockery upon your heart. It may mean separation from the world. It may cost you your ambitions. It may even cost you your life. But you do it because God said to do it. That’s what marks the people of God. They obey God. That’s what a relationship to God is about, it’s about obedience. You obey His call to salvation and repentance and faith. You obey His call to a life of obedience. It has always been that way.

  As we come to the text before us, in Hebrews 11:30, we have marched our way up to the walls of Jericho, historically. Here we see the courage of faith.  It can be said that the validation of faith is what it will endure. If it’s true faith, it will obey at any price. It will demonstrate courage in the face of any opposition, any threat, any suffering. True faith does not draw back. It does not fold up. It does not collapse.

  Any kind of faith in God, any kind of professed faith in Christ that crumbles under certain pressures is not a true faith. This is demonstrated to us in the teaching of our Lord in the sermon on the soils where He describes some people who on the surface look like they’re open to receiving the message and the seed goes in to what He calls the rocky soil and for a little while it springs up and it looks like a wonderful response and even classifies it as the fact that the Word, or the Word of the gospel is received with joy. But then, He says, when the sun comes out, the roots on that kind of soil can’t penetrate to go down deep and get the water because there’s rockbed right below the surface, and so the sun burns the plant and it dies, never having borne fruit. And Jesus says the sun symbolizes thlipsis, pressure, persecution.

  Or it may be that kind of soil that’s full of weeds and thorns, never letting go of the love of the world, the love of this age, the love of riches and eventually that chokes out the Word. There are all kinds of temporary believers. Then there are pressures that come upon all of us that inevitably reveal who’s real and who is not.

  Let’s look at some of those who were tested and demonstrated the kind of courage that true faith possesses. Verses 30-31, “By faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled 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.”

  We’re moving in the history of the Old Testament, out of the Pentateuch and into Joshua. First we’re reminded of the walls of Jericho, teichos in the Greek, referring to an outer wall, the great massive city wall that surrounded the city of Jericho.  Jericho was tightly shut because of the sons of Israel. They had been told that the children of Israel were near by. Their numbers were massive, some would estimate that originally when they came out of Egypt there were as many as two million. We don’t know exactly how many were left by the time they were ready to enter the land of Canaan but they were formidable.

  Jericho had already been spied out, and was now on lock-down because of the sons of Israel. No one went out, no one came in. “And the Lord said to Joshua, ‘See, I’ve given Jericho into your hand with its king and its valiant warriors. You shall march around the city, all the men who are circling the city once, just do that for six days. And seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of ram’s horns before the ark, then on the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times and the priests shall blow the trumpets. It shall be that when they make a large blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout and the wall of the city will fall down flat and the people will go up every man straight ahead.”

  Natural human skepticism would say. “Could you go over that again?”  We’re going to march around the wall once a day for six days and on the seventh day we’re going to march around the wall and the seventh time we’re going to shout at the top of our voice and the walls are just going to fall out flat? Obedience to this command would be an act of faith.  It seems such a strange thing.

  They did it and the chronicle is given of each day and then you come down to verse 20, the people shouted, the priests blew the trumpets. When the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted with a great shout, the wall fell down flat so that the people went up into the city, every man straight ahead and they took the city. They utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword. It was a massive slaughter.

  Moses is gone. Joshua is the new leader. They have crossed the Jordan and in crossing the Jordan they are now sandwiched between the Jordan and Jericho and Jericho is kind of a frontier fortress, guarding the southern part of Canaan. And this is their first obstacle and is the test of their faith. Are they going to believe God when God tells them what He wants them to do? Jericho was a strong city, it was barred, it was fortified to take it. It seemed an impossible task, it was fortified on purpose because it was the guardian city of the southern part of the land of Israel. It is one of the cities that scared the spies and caused them to say, in Deuteronomy 1:28, “The people is greater and taller than we, cities are great and walled up to heaven.” They were punished for that, and had to wander in the wilderness for four decades because of their unbelief.  Jericho had to be captured. It was the gateway to the land and this time the people obeyed and it fell exactly as God said it would. God commanded them six days, go around each day, on the seventh day go around seven times, the seventh time it will collapse. That’s exactly what happened.

  Maybe they seemed a little embarrassed while all the Jerichoites up on the top of the wall watched them walk around and then leave six days in a row. It appeared ridiculous. Surely they were puzzled as well as frustrated. This didn’t seem a right approach at all. But they obeyed the Word of God. They learned not to disobey because the consequences were so severe.

  God delights in slaying the pride of men, not only the pride of the Jews who probably thought they could conquer Jericho just by their sheer force, even though they had no army and they had no weapons, but even more so, God delighted in slaying the pride of men with regard to the Philistines.

  There are four degrees of faith. There is faith which receives. “And the empty-handed beggars come and receive what God has to give.”  Then there’s faith which reckons. It’s the simplest faith to receive the gift, it’s the next level of faith to reckon that God has made promises and we can count on God to fulfill His promises. At the point of salvation, you have a kind of a beggar faith, he comes to receive the gift, she comes to receive the gift. The next level of faith begins to understand that with this gift are massive promises that stretch into the endless eons of eternity, full of promise. Faith reckons that God will fulfill those promises. Then there is faith that risks. Because these promises grip the heart and are held with confidence, faith begins to dare to be obedient in any circumstance. And then lastly, there’s faith that rests. Throughout suffering it is unmoved.  Faith always rules the life of a true believer.

  For centuries the children of Israel had been a nation of slaves in Egypt and for 40 years nomads in the desert, their great leader was dead. They were without a military experience, they were without an army, devoid of artillery, no weapons but the living God was for them and they had come to believe in Him and faith gained the victory.

  The demonstration of faith is always obedience. Faith and obedience are inseparable. When it says to come to the Christ and put your faith in Him, that’s a command and if you do that, that’s an act of obedience. “This is My beloved Son, listen to Him.” The proclamation of the gospel is in itself a command, repent, believe, that’s command mode. And any person who embraces Christ in an act of repentance and faith is obeying the gospel. That’s why the Bible talks about that and Romans 1 talks about the need to obey the gospel. The gospel is a command, it is a command to repent and believe. Salvation comes to those who obey. Everything after that in the life of faith is obeying what God has commanded. How do you know when someone’s a Christian? Anybody who’s a Christian obeys the Word of God, that’s the pattern of their life. Perfect obedience? No. It’s not the perfection of their life but it is the direction of their life.  Faith is demonstrated in obedience. The kind of obedience that has courage, the kind of obedience that will occur no matter what the price, no matter what the cost. It endures. It expects triumph. It expects victory.

  We have then a more personal illustration in verse 31. “By faith, Rahab the harlot did not perish along with those who were disobedient, after she had welcomed the spies in peace.” Interesting that the word “disobedient” is there, it’s the opposite of faith demonstrated from the same Old Testament account, by the way. The Holy Spirit chooses the next illustration of faith, conquering faith, courageous faith and it belonged, of all people, to a prostitute. A prostitute in the hall of fame? If there were any Jews still believing you got in the Kingdom of God by works, it would be hard to figure out how Rahab got in to this list. She sort of blasts the sensibilities of the Jews in the community who are still hanging on to the notion that salvation is given to those who earn it. She’s a Canaanite, not even a Jew. She’s a Gentile. She’s an Amorite. And the Amorites, their whole seed was devoted to utter destruction being cursed by God.

  But Rahab believed God.  One of the staggering realities about Rahab is she ended up in the Messianic line.  There were in Jericho unbelievers who perished, disobedient. People of Jericho didn’t believe, they didn’t obey. This implies that the truth of God had been deposited in their midst. They must have received the Word of God to believe or not to believe, to obey or not to obey. Some translations say they believed not, but the word used is apeitheo which means disobedient. They must have heard the truth about the true and living God. Maybe they heard the story about them being delivered out of Egypt. Maybe the message from the spies had been given to some people and been spread. They sought no mercy, grace or forgiveness from this God. They had no interest in obeying Him whatsoever. As a result, the whole city was wiped out, all the animals, all the people died by the edge of the sword. Except Rahab.

  Why? “Rahab welcomed the spies in peace.” Welcomed, dechomai, to welcome with hospitality. Her story is worth looking at.  Joshua 2, “Joshua sent two men as spies into the land. ‘Go view the land especially Jericho.’ They went, came into the house of a harlot whose name was Rahab and lodged there. It was told the king of Jericho, saying, ‘Behold, men from the sons of Israel have come here tonight to search out the land.’ And the king of Jericho sent word to Rahab saying, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, have entered your house for they have come to search out all the land.’” They’re coming to spy on us because they’re going to conquer us.

  “But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. And she said, ‘Yes, the men came to me but I didn’t know where they were from.’ It came about when it was time to shut the gate at dark that the men went out. ‘I don’t know where the men went. Pursue them quickly for you will overtake them.’”

  Was that the truth? No, it was a lie. Was it necessary? No, it’s never necessary. Would God have protected the spies if she had told the truth? Absolutely. We would have just had a different story of how God protected the spies. This doesn’t justify the lie, but we can commend her for her courage in the case of hiding them. She chases away the people who are looking for them, telling them that they have to hurry because they’re out of town and they’re going to have to run if they want to catch them. In the meantime, verse 6, she had brought them up to the roof and hidden them in the stocks of flax which he had laid in order on the roof. So the men pursued them on the road to the Jordan, to the fords.” They’re chasing them and, of course, they’re back in Jericho on her roof underneath the flax. “As soon as they who were pursuing them had gone out, they shut the gate. Now before they lay down, she came up to them on the roof and said to them, ‘I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that the terror of you has fallen on us and that all the inhabitants of the land have melted away before you, for we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came into Egypt and what you did to the kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, Sihon and Og, two amazing stories, whom you utterly destroyed. When we heard it, our hearts melted, no courage remained in any man any longer because of you for the Lord your God, He is God in heaven above and on earth beneath.’”

  She believed in the true and living God and she believed fully in all the revelation that was available to her. “‘Now therefore, please swear to me by the Lord since I have dealt kindly with you that you also will deal kindly with my father’s household and give me a pledge of truth and spare my father, mother, brother, sisters, all who belong to them, deliver our lives from death.’ So the men said to her, ‘Our life for yours, if you do not tell this business of ours, it shall come about when the Lord gives us the land we will deal kindly and faithfully with you.’”

  She sent them away, as the rest of the story tells. They, verse 16, are told, “‘Go to the hill country so that the pursuers will not happen upon you. Hide yourselves there for three days until the pursuers return, then afterward you may go on your way.’ The men said to her, ‘We shall be free from this oath to you which you have made us swear, unless when we come into the land you tie this cord of scarlet thread in the window from which you let us down and gather yourself into the house, your father, your mother, your brothers and your father’s household.’” In other words, they’re not going to know who these people are to spare their life unless they’re all collected in one place and that house is identified, because there are going to be many of them sweeping in. “‘If you tell this business of ours, then we’re free from the oath which you made us swear.’” She said, “‘According to your words, so be it.’ so she sent them away and they departed. She tied the scarlet cord in the window.

  Go over to chapter 6 verse 21. This last verse is enough in the record of the destruction. Verse 21, “They utterly destroyed everything in the city, man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword.”

  That’s a devastating thing to think about. “Joshua said to the two men had spied out the land, ‘Go into the harlot’s house, bring the woman and all she has out of there, as you have sworn to her.’ So the young men who were spies went in and brought out Rahab and her father, her mother, her brothers, and all she had. They also brought out all her relatives and placed them outside t he camp of Israel. So they burned the city with fire and all that was in it, only the silver and gold and articles of bronze and iron they put in the treasury of the house of the Lord. However, Rahab the harlot and her father’s household and all she had Joshua spared and she has lived in the midst of Israel to this day, for she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.”

  Jericho the city was rejected and destroyed, Rahab and her family were spared. What about the destruction of the Canaanites? Can you legitimize that? Well historians tell us that the destruction of this Canaanite city and all Canaanite culture was a great boom to the welfare of humanity from a purely social perspective, they were so debased.  God punishes sin and He has a right to punish it whenever and wherever He desires. And He punishes those who do not believe in Him and do not obey His commands. But in the case of Rahab, she acknowledged faith in the true and living God. She believed and staked her life on it. She put herself in a dangerous, dangerous position, hiding spies on the roof. She staked her life on the fact that this was the true God.

  She had a kind of adventurous courage to fling her lot with this deity about which she had only heard from second-hand sources. But she believed in the true God and because of that, she was spared.  According to Matthew 1:5, she is placed into the line of Messiah.  She’s the mother of Boaz, the husband of Ruth. She is then the great, great grandmother of King David. How wonderful. Rahab shows the faith that has the courage to stand in the midst of dire danger. That’s what faith does. It doesn’t crumble because the circumstances are threatening or difficult. True saving faith, true faith that grips God does what is right, obeys God no matter what the price.

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  A Conquering, Courageous Faith, Part 2

  Hebrews 11:32-40

  
  Code: 90-389

  Well we have the opportunity tonight to look again at Hebrews chapter 11....Hebrews chapter 11. We have come to the end of this great faith chapter. It is monumental for a number of reasons. It is a monumental case laid for a relationship with God based on faith and not works. It is monumental as well because it gives us a kind of summary of the Old Testament. It kind of sweeps us through from the family of Adam all the way through the prophets which brings us virtually down to the New Testament. It is somewhat like the sermon of Stephen early in the book of Acts where he summarizes the history of God’s working in Israel. Here similarly there is this summary, the emphasis is on the necessity of faith to have a true relationship to God.
  
  Let’s read the verses that we’ll be looking at tonight. Verse 30, “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled 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. And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 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. Women received back their dead by resurrection and others were tortured not accepting their release so that they might obtain a better resurrection. And others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes also chains and imprisonment. 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. Men of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. And 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, or complete.”
  
  Now as you know, if you’ve been with us and if you haven’t, I’ll try to give you enough of a summary to catch you up, the Holy Spirit in this wonderful epistle to the Hebrews is making a concentrated effort to convince the readers and anybody else who will read this through history, of the necessity of faith as the only way to God. There are only two possibilities. Either you come to God by faith alone, or you don’t. Fair enough? And if you don’t come by faith alone, then you come by some other way and you’re left with some form of works system. You either are saved by faith alone apart from works, or you’re saved by some degree of works. The Bible rejects all works as a way of salvation and leaves us only with the concept of faith. Faith is believing what God has said simply because He has said it. And in particular, believing Him about what He says about a relationship to Him, that it is available to those who repent of their sin and put their trust in His grace and His mercy.
  
  Even in the Old Testament people to be saved had to acknowledge their sin and then come to God and plead for the mercy and the grace which He promised to offer the penitent sinner. At any point in redemptive history, salvation is always by that kind of faith. Even before the cross they were believing God that He would give forgiveness, and mercy and grace to the sinner who repented and believed in Him. Even though they did not yet know the reality of the cross. On this side, our faith embraces the work of Christ in His death and resurrection but it is still faith.
  
  Now here is the dilemma. In the New Testament period, as you know, the gospel breaks on the scene in Israel. Most particularly it is antithetical to the religious establishment and the established religion. Judaism by the time of our Lord and really long before that had become a works system. It had been embellished with all kinds of manmade rules by the hundreds and people were under the illusion that you work your way to God. It’s not apart from faith but it’s faith plus your own efforts. You believe in God, you believe in what God has said, but that doesn’t complete the transaction. You have to accomplish certain things, achieve certain things, morally, spiritually and even ceremonially.
  
  When the gospel of grace and the gospel of faith came along, the Jews heard it as if it was an alien message because they had been so well trained on works. To come along with this idea that salvation is by faith alone and that reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sin and entrance into the Kingdom of God and the hope of eternal heaven is a matter of faith and nothing more, seemed to them to be a corrupted message. They were convinced that your works and keeping of the law, therefore a kind of legalistic system, was the way into God’s Kingdom. And so, when the gospel came along, they were offended by it. And the more invested they were in the works system, the more offended they were and the most invested were the leaders of the system in Israel and therefore they were the most hostile to Jesus and the gospel of grace and faith.
  
  Well, of course, the New Testament unfolds the significance of salvation and reconciliation with God by faith alone. There are still some Jews who are having trouble getting the point. And the writer of Hebrews understands that because this letter is written to a community of Jews, presumably somewhere in perhaps in the land of Israel. It is to show them that the way of faith is not an alien message, it is not a new message, it is a very old message. To be reconciled to God, you must abandon your works and you must come by faith alone. Faith willingly admits inability and comes to God believing that He is merciful and will save the penitent sinner who believes in Him and in His grace and mercy.
  
  Now how can the writer of Hebrews prove the point that salvation has always been by faith and never by works? Answer, go back to the very beginning of redemptive history, a biblical history of human history and look at what we find.
  
  He starts with the family of Adam in verse 4, and talks about the faith of Abel. And then in verse 5, the faith of Enoch, two familiar characters in the early chapters of Genesis. Still in the early chapters of Genesis in verse 7 he talks about the faith of Noah. Still in the early chapters of Genesis he talks about the faith of Abraham and gives a rather extensive treatment to Abraham’s life. And then he talks, starting in verse 20, about the faith of Isaac. And in verse 21, about the faith of Jacob. And in verse 22 about the faith of Joseph, those are the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. And they take up the book of Genesis.
  
  And then you come in to the book of Exodus and he refers to the faith of Moses. And, of course, Moses’ story sweeps through the book of Exodus. Moses then also becomes the author of the Pentateuch, the opening books of the Old Testament. Then he comes, having left behind the patriarchs in Genesis and Moses in the book of Exodus, and the rest of the Pentateuch, he moves to the next group starting in verse 30. This group of people moves us into the book, if you will, Joshua and Judges and begins the trek through the books of history and the Old Testament. And he points out here that by faith the walls of Jericho fell, by faith Rahab, you remember the harlot in Jericho, was not terrified by the threat against her life if she hid the spies, but believed in the true God against very, very challenging potential circumstances.
  
  And then he moves on from there to what we’re going to look at today in verse 32 and following, and that’s where we left off. Here we sweep through the...basically the history of the Old Testament all the way to the end. We start with the Judges, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah. We touch on the kings, David. We touch on the first of the prophets since Moses really, Samuel. And then we sweep through the prophets with just an identification of the prophets and then following that there are all kinds of statements made about the kind of suffering that they endured and in every case their faith stood the test.
  
  So, the point of the writer is to show us that redemptive history has always made clear that salvation is by faith. The intensity of the chapter is starting to ramp up, however. When we look at Abel and Enoch and Noah and we look at Abraham and we look at Moses, we look at Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, we look at the children of Israel, at the walls of Jericho, we look at Rahab, there are significant events going on in which they demonstrate their faith.
  
  But when we get in to chapter 11 verse 32, there’s a level of intensity that is added because their faith is now tested in the crucible of a life and death situation...a life and death situation. And what I read you from verse 32 to verse 40 indicates that this is life and death kind of faith. This is where faith is tested at its highest level in the crucible of severe threats.
  
  Now backing up a little bit, before we go in to the text, years before this letter was written, the gospel of Christ had come to this group of people. We don’t know how many years. We don’t know what group of people it is. It’s a group of Hebrews, obviously. But years before the letter was written and we don’t even know who wrote the letter, the gospel came to this group of people. And if you go back to chapter 2 and verse 3, we learn there how the gospel came to them. Verse 3 of chapter 2, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? After it was at the first spoken through the Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard.”
  
  In other words, this gospel was given to this community of Jews by the people who were with Jesus. This is a first-hand, eye-witness account of the gospel passed on to these people. And they weren’t just people who were with Jesus, verse 4 says, their testimony was accompanied by signs and wonders and various miracles.
  
  Now who would they then be? Who would the preachers be? Well according to 2 Corinthians 12:12, signs and wonders and miracles are the signs of an Apostle. So here is a community of believers who have been with Christ, who have been commissioned by Christ, who in fact are the Apostles of Christ, who have come to this community of Jews and preached to them the gospel of Christ and the preaching has been attended by signs and wonders and miracles and manifest gifts of the Holy Spirit. These people then were the recipients of a powerful presentation, to be sure. Some in this Jewish community, wherever it was, this Jewish town, some had believed. Some believed and opened their hearts and received the message of the Apostles and received Christ as Lord and Savior. And we can even assume that their...their experience with the Apostles was after the cross and after the resurrection. So they heard the full message of the New Covenant gospel. Some of them believed it. Some of them fully, genuinely embraced it and formed a church, an ekklesia.
  
  There were others who were impressed, intellectually convinced, who understood the gospel to some degree, who were drawn to it, who were attracted to it, who associated with the church. This would be consistent with what our Lord said, that the wheat and the tares would grow together, right? You would have believers and non-believers in the same environment that would be very difficult to separate. There are people who are interested, but not genuinely converted. So there were these people associated with the true believers who had not truly left their works system behind. They had not come all the way to faith in Christ.
  
  Well, this little group of Jews that formed this church, this community both genuine believers and those associated and interested non-believers, apparently came under persecution which we know to be the case. Right? Jesus said it, “In this world you’ll have tribulation. Don’t be surprised if they treat you the way they treated Me. Don’t be surprised if they hate you, they hated Me.” So we understand that persecution certainly broke out against these community of believers very early, even in the age of the Apostles. In fact, even to the point that the Apostles were martyred.
  
  So in this group of Christians and associates became persecuted, that raised the stakes on being a Christian. The true believers had the faith that endures. The true believers were hanging in there. But the superficial non-believers, those who were merely associated and attracted by not genuine were in danger of leaving. They could be described, I think, pretty easily by the rocky soil or the weedy soil of our Lord’s soils parable. There was an appearance of life but it wasn’t going to last, especially when the persecution started. They were in danger then of going backward, back in to their Judaism. And so throughout this letter there are repeated calls to them not to do that. And I just read you one. Back in chapter 2 verse 3, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” In other words, don’t neglect, you’ve come this far, don’t neglect this salvation...which was preached by the Apostles, confirmed by miracles. That’s the first warning.
  
  They’re warned again in chapter 3 verse 7. “Just as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear His voice, don’t harden your heart as when they provoked me as in the day of trial in the wilderness where your fathers tried me and tested me, saw my works for 40 years.” In other words, don’t be like that recalcitrant unbelieving group of Israelites who were stuck in the wilderness for 40 years because of their unbelief. Verse 12, “Take care, brethren, Jewish brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God, you want to be a true partaker of Christ...verse 14...holding fast, firm to the end.”
  
  So these are warnings. There are more such warnings in chapter 4, the most familiar warning comes in chapter 6...in chapter 6 verse 4, “For in the case of those who have once been enlightened,” that’s to have your mind illuminated to know the information... “and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come.” Now let’s just stop there.
  
  What is this? Who are these people? Who is he describing? Who has been enlightened? Who has tasted the heavenly gift? Whose been made a partaker of the Holy Spirit? Whose tasted the good Word of God and the powers of the age to come?
  
  Well please notice, none of those terms are ever used anywhere in the Bible to describe salvation. None of them. It doesn’t talk about regeneration, new birth, conversion, justification, salvation, sanctification. These are the words used to describe the experience of those who heard the Apostles and saw their miracles and signs and wonders. In that sense they were enlightened. In that sensed they tasted the heavenly gift. They tasted the powers of heaven. They were made partakers of the power of the Holy Spirit, coming through the Apostles and the signs and wonders and gifts of the Spirit. They tasted the good Word of God and they tasted the powers of the age to come. That is all those miracle powers which one day in the age to come, the Millennial Kingdom will be in full display. They were tasters, not consumers...can we put it that way?
  
  The warning comes then in verse 6, “If you have then fallen away, it’s impossible to renew them again to repentance.” In other words, if you have heard the apostolic gospel, if you’ve heard the message of Christ, you have understood it, you are enlightened, you have seen the power display by the Apostles and the power of the Holy Spirit, all of that is in your experience and you turn your back, you can’t be renewed to repentance. Why? Because you can’t have any more exposure, revelation than that. So the warning is, don’t turn your back on it. You’ll become an apostate if you reject full revelation and you’ll be guilty of again crucifying the Son of God and putting Him to open shame.
  
  There’s another warning in chapter 10 and verse 26. “If we go on sinning willfully and the willful sin here is unbelief, if we go on sinning willfully, we Jews, after receiving the knowledge of the truth,” if you know the truth, you know it fully, you’ve seen it, you’ve seen the display, the undergirding display of the Holy Spirit miracle power that attests to the validity of the message preached by the Apostles, if you go on in your sinful unbelief willingly, “then there is no longer any sacrifice for sins.” There’s no other salvation, right? What else can be done? Nothing. You have nothing left, verse 27, but a terrifying expectation of judgment in the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.
  
  And listen to this, verse 29, “Your punishment will be worse. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God and regarded as unclean the blood of the Covenant by which you were sanctified and has insulted the Spirit of grace?” Your punishment will be worse because you had full knowledge and rejected it. And for that person, verse 31 says, “It’s a terrifying thing to fall in to the hands of the living God.” You don’t want to know the full truth and walk away from it.
  
  In chapter 12, the last one I’ll refer you to, in verse 25, “See to it that you do not refuse him who is speaking, for if those who did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape who turn away from Him who warns from heaven and His voice shook the Earth then but now He has promise saying, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the Earth but also the heaven.’” If you don’t listen to the Word of the Spirit of God and the Word of the Son of God through the Apostles, all that awaits for you is judgment.
  
  Now, with that we can go back to chapter 11. The truly saved, let’s pull it together, the truly saved were in danger of trying to lessen their persecution by drawing back into old Judaistic patterns, customs, worship, maybe even reconnecting with the priests. They are reminded all through Hebrews that Jesus Christ is a better priest who offered a better sacrifice and who is the mediator of a better Covenant. Don’t go back to the old priesthood, the old ceremonies, the old sacrifices, the old worship. That’s the message to the truly saved. Don’t go back and pick up those pieces of the old religion.
  
  The message to the non-Christians is come all the way to Christ...come all the way to Christ. Chapter 6 says, “Let us go on to perfection,” perfection is a term used to refer to salvation by the writer of Hebrews. Come all the way to Christ. Now, how does one come to Christ? By faith. And so that’s what the emphasis is in chapter 11. This is to help the Christians, the true Christians hold on to the reality of faith by seeing it as the only way ever to come to God from Adam’s family on, and this is to encourage the non-Christians who are a part of that community and feeling the pull back away from Christ, turning their backs on the gospel to come all the way to faith because faith is the only way. The way of law and legalism and works will only condemn and damn.
  
  And since this community apparently is under persecution, this last part of chapter 11 becomes maybe the most applicable to them. We have talked about all kinds of aspects of faith. We have talked about how faith walks. We’ve talked about how faith works. We’ve talked about many of the features of faith. But the last segment we’re looking at now is on the courage of faith. Faith, true faith stands the test of persecution. It stands the test of life and death situations. So the word to have in your mind in this last section, particularly verses 32 and following is the courage of faith...the courage of faith.
  
  Courage in struggle, courage in suffering, courage in waiting...waiting, because remember now, as the close of the chapter says, they hadn’t received what they had put their faith in.
  
  So let’s just break it down. Let’s talk about the courage in struggle that’s illustrated here. Verse 30, the struggle at Jericho, we already talked about from Joshua chapter 6, the struggle of Rahab, Joshua chapter 2, and chapter 6. Both the story of Jericho and in particular the story of Rahab demonstrate that faith conquers in a struggle, that faith is courageous. As the New Testament puts it, it is a faith that endures. That’s how Peter opens up his epistle, right? You have a faith that endures. That’s the test of real faith.
  
  Now when you come to...and we covered that in our last time several months ago. But verse 32, we’ll pick it up. We move here from the patriarchal period of those names in the book of Genesis and Moses and Joshua, and we move now from the arrival to the promised land to the land of Canaan itself and the early history of Israel, which would be the history of the Judges and then the history of the Kings.
  
  There are six men mentioned to us in verse 32. And they are not in chronological order but they were all very critical men in the nation of Israel who demonstrated their faith in God in crisis situations. They were all courageous in faith. So let’s just briefly look at them.
  
  “What more shall I say, for time will fail me,” and I love that feature that’s so human of the writer, and speaks to the reality of a human author certainly under divine inspiration, but nonetheless a human author who would love to tell the whole story of everything but just doesn’t have the time to do it. But he does mention very familiar names and the people would be able to pick them up quickly. They are essentially the heroes of the early history of Israel. Remember when Israel comes back into the land of Canaan under Joshua, Moses having died before coming in to the land because he struck the rock and didn’t speak to the rock. They are now in the land, the land is segmented there. They conquer the Canaanites, as we know. They settle in the land and now that they are in the land, there are heroes who rise from time to time in the pre-monarchy period who lead great triumphs and great victories for the people of God.
  
  The first one is a familiar name to us, his name is Gideon. And if you want to read the story of Gideon, you open your Bible to the seventh chapter of Judges. We can’t take the time to do all that for each of these characters. We could, that would be a whole different emphasis. But Gideon is a judge. Now the term judge doesn’t mean that they were the ruling president of the nation. It simply means they were elevated to a place where their leadership and their wisdom put them in a ruling position somewhere in the life and the land of Israel. This judge had to face the Medianites. The Medianite army had a hundred and thirty-five thousand men...a hundred and thirty-five thousand men in the Medianite army.
  
  Now you remember the story of Gideon. You open your Bible to the seventh chapter of the book of Judges. He starts out with thirty-two thousand, right? Thirty-two thousand, not impossible odds, but thirty-two thousand against a hundred and thirty-five thousand, not real good odds. And then God comes to him and says, “You have way too many men, you have way too many men, Gideon, you’ve got to pair this down, and pair this down, and pair this down and finally it gets paired down to three hundred. Three hundred? Those are not good odds against a hundred and thirty-five thousand.
  
  Now, of course, all military strategy is out the window, at this point, because there is no military strategy by which the three hundred men can defeat a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers. So Gideon is now at the mercy of God. God has paired down his men to only three hundred so God is going to have to indicate what the strategy is as to how these three hundred men are going to defeat a hundred and thirty-five thousand Medianites.
  
  God gives him strange instruction in the seventh chapter of Judges. He tells him to get pitchers, pitchers used to pour water, trumpets and torches and go find the Medianite army. You go find them. Now in history, no one has fought a battle with torches, pitchers and trumpets. You might announce the battle with a trumpet. You have might have a torch if you want to protect yourself at night, but that’s not how you fight a battle. It is in an absurd battle strategy, humanly speaking. And Gideon, perhaps if he were thinking the way any normal human being would think, would say, “Lord, I’m not moving, are You kidding? You’ve paired me down to three hundred people and the only reason the three hundred are the three hundred is because of the way they drank water out of a stream? This is absurd.
  
  But Gideon didn’t argue because his faith was so strong and he understood the odds and he understood the potential for death was a hundred percent on a human level. You remember what happened. They split in to three groups. Gideon took his hundred and a couple of other hundreds, they got in the circles of the hills where the Medianites were and they lit their torches. And at the appropriate time of the announcement, they smashed the pitchers which made noise and revealed the torches and the trumpets began to blow and the Medianites went into panic, probably assuming that for every torch there was an entire division of troops when it was just one guy with a pitcher and a torch and a trumpet.
  
  The Medianites panicked. The Medianites rolled out of their bunks, or off their pads on the ground, and massacred each other. In an absolute slaughter, thinking they were fighting these massive hoards of Jewish troops who had descended upon them. It would be pretty hard to believe God in that setting unless you had a supernatural faith in a supernatural God.
  
  Then there was Barak. I love the story of Barak. It’s one of the most interesting of Bible stories. I will take you to this one because it’s a little bit shorter. If you go back to Judges chapter 4, it’s one of my favorite stories probably for somewhat bizarre reasons. Barak had ten thousand men and he was going against the mighty and massive force of Sisera. Sisera was a Canaanite commander of some confederated chariot troops. Incredible odds, no way to win. But God sent a message to Barak through a woman by the name of Deborah. Barak believed the message. Barak believed that God would give him the victory.
  
  In verse 7, “I will draw out to you Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army with his chariots and as many troops to the river Kishon; and I’ll give him into your hand.” That is the message from God through Deborah who was deemed there a prophetess because God uses her as His mouthpiece.
  
  “Barak said to her, ‘If you go with me, then I will go. If you don’t go with me, I will not go.’” I want the spokesman of the Lord with me. “She said, ‘I will surely go with you, nevertheless the honor shall not be yours on the journey that you’re about to take, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hands of a woman.’”
  
  In other words, if you just trusted God and didn’t have to take along Deborah, you’d have gotten all the credit. Now you’re going to be sort of embarrassed. “The Lord will sell Sisera into the hands of a woman.”
  
  Well, of course, the victory came. It was an incredible victory. Skipping down to what I think is one of the most interesting events. “The Lord routed Sisera,” verse 15, “and all his chariots and all his army with the edge of the sword before Barak,” just massacred them. “And Sisera alighted from his chariot and fled away on foot.” That’s the general of the army.
  
  Well that didn’t work out. “Barak pursued the chariots and the army as far as Harosheth-hagoyim, and all the army of Sisera fell by the edge of the sword.” Not even one was left. That is a massacre.
  
  Sisera is still running in the other direction. Listen to this, “He ran, he fled away on foot to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, for there was peace between Jabin and the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.” He was associated with Jabin. “Jael went out to meet Sisera and said to him, ‘Turn aside, my master, turn aside to me. Don’t be afraid.’ And he turned aside to her into the tent and she covered him with a rug.” Come on in here and I’ll hide you.
  
  “He said to her, ‘Please give me a little water to drink for I am thirsty.’ So she opened a bottle of milk and gave him a drink, and then she covered him. He said to her, ‘Stand in the doorway to the tent and it shall be if anyone comes and inquires of you, and says, ‘Is there anyone here?’ that you shall say, ‘No.’ But...this is the interesting part...Jael, Heber’s wife, took a tent peg and seized a hammer in her hand and went secretly to him and drove the peg into his temple. It went through into the ground, for he was sound asleep and exhausted.” I love the last line. “So he died.” I guess, if someone ran a tent peg from one side of your head to the other into the ground, that would do it.
  
  This is a small band of almost unarmed infantry, routing a tank division by faith. Stepping courageously into an unbelievable battle, trusting God. These are men of faith.
  
  Well then we come to Samson. Who doesn’t know about Samson? Everyone knows about Samson. Judges 13 to 16, he was Israel’s champion against the Philistines. And, of course, the Philistines we always identify, I think, as the primary enemy of Israel. They seem to show up on the scene more often than any others. And in spite of his stupidity, in spite of his bad relationship with Delilah, and I don’t think in my entire life I’ve ever met a human being named Delilah. There’s a reason for that.
  
  In spite of his tragedy with Delilah, in spite of his loss of strength, this man had years of great strong faith in God. He recovered from that and he demonstrated great courage, stupendous courage and power. That man Samson, that man who had had risen to a place of leadership because of his prowess and his strength was called by God really to conquer the Philistines. And he approached it with immense courage. He never feared to enter into battle. And he knew that at any point in time his strength came from the Lord. There was a symbol of his strength, his long hair, Nazarite vow, but his strength came from the Lord and he knew when he went into battle that at any moment that strength could disappear because he knew his own heart and he knew he was not a man who had by any means deserved this power. He trusted God, let’s say, not to pull the plug. He never feared the enemy, never.
  
  First, in anger at the father of his Philistine wife for giving her away to somebody else, he tied the tails of 300 foxes together with torches in between them and set the torches on fire and sent them through the Philistine’s grain field and burned them all up. Now he knew that could irritate the Philistines and again he’s only one man and he knows that God has given him his power and since it came from God, God could withdraw it at any point, but he has this strong faith in his calling. When the Philistines found out who did it, they killed Samson’s wife and father-in-law. He even was more angry and Scripture says, “He smote them with a great slaughter.”
  
  When they tried to retaliate, he took the jawbone of an ass and killed a thousand more of them. They tried to trap him in Gaza, he just picked up, you remember this?, the city gates, post and beam and walked up a mountain carrying them. He believed the promise of God, that God had called him to fight for Israel against the Philistines even against unimaginable odds, one against tens of thousands never phased him.
  
  And finally, remember after recovering strength, he went in to the Philistine temple and brought it down on all of them. His last courageous act of self-sacrificing faith. Now he knew his calling. He knew his calling. Listen to 13:5 of Judges, “His parents are told, ‘Behold, this young man, you’re going to give birth to a son, you’re going to conceive and bring forth a son, no razor will come to his head for the boy shall be a Nazarite,’” that takes a vow of separation to God, “‘from the womb he shall begin to deliver Israel from the hands of the Philistines.’” So he always knew when he was doing that, that he would know and experience the power of God.
  
  This is faith...this is faith and nothing but faith and he never flinched in conflict.
  
  Now the next name that we see there is Jephthah and he also is in the book of Judges and the story about him is pretty brief. Verse 32 of chapter 11, “Jephthah crossed over to the sons of Ammon, crossed over the Jordan River, Ammon is on the east. There is a city there today that you would know as Amon-Jordan. Ammon is just a variation of Ammon, this is the land of the Ammonites. So Jephthah who crossed over to the sons of Ammon to fight against them and the Lord gave them into his hand. He struck them with a very great slaughter from Aroer to the entrance of Minnith, twenty cities, and as far as Abelkeramim so the sons of Ammon were subdued before the sons of Israel.”
  
  Another group, of course, of Israel’s Canaanite enemies were the Amorites, conquered again by the courage of Jephthah. We leave the book of Judges and we enter the book of 1 and 2 Samuel because the next name is David. We know many instances against all kinds of odds. Saul has killed his thousands, but David his ten thousands. David was a triumphant, courageous general who fought the fight for the people of God.
  
  Of course his most familiar fight was a one-on-one battle with what we might deem human monster by the name of Goliath in chapter 17 of 1 Samuel. And Goliath is just shocked that they would send this little shepherd boy out against him. And he, of course, is the great hero of the Philistines. And so he says, verse 43, “Am I a dog that you come to me with sticks?” “And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine also said to David, ‘Come to me and I will give your flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field.’ Then David said to the Philistine...probably in a squeaky voice.. ‘You come to me with a sword, a spear and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have taunted. This day the Lord will deliver you up in to my hands and I will strike you down and remove your head from you. And I’ll give the dead bodies of the army of the Philistines this day to the birds of the sky and the wild beasts of the earth that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not deliver by sword or by spear for the battle is the Lord’s and He will give you into our hands.”
  
  Wow! You would say that is a lot of moxie for a little shepherd boy. But we know the end of the story, don’t we? Yes, it happened when the Philistine rose and came near to meet David, that David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine.” He’s running after it, he’s going into this battle full force in faith. “David put his hand into his bag and took from it a stone and slung it.” And believe me, that was a divinely directed stone. I’m sure David was good because he had fought off the wild animals while he was protecting the sheep. But there was no way this one would miss. Divine providence was involved.
  
  “It struck the Philistine on his forehead and the stone sank into his forehead so that he fell on his face to the ground. Thus David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone. And he struck the Philistine and killed him, but there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath and killed him and cut off his head with it.
  
  “When the Philistine saw that their champion was dead, they fled.” You know, if a teenaged boy is this powerful, what are the men going to be like when they show up? “The men of Israel,” verse 52, “rose and shouted and pursued the Philistines as far as the valley and the gates of Ekron,” one of the major cities of Philistia. The slain Philistine lay along the way to Shaaraim, even to Gath and Ekron. The sons of Israel returned from chasing the Philistines and plundered their camps and David took the Philistine’s head and brought it to Jerusalem but he put his weapon in his tent.”
  
  What in the world would give this man the courage to do what he did? It is faith in the calling of God. These are men of faith.
  
  The next name is Samuel and for that, of course, we’re already in 1 Samuel because we’re where David is. Samuel also appears here in the first 25 chapters. He dies in verse 1 of chapter 25. Samuel was a great man of faith. He was...he was facing a rebellious people. He was facing idolatrous people. He faced them with the courage of great conviction. He spoke God’s Word. He thought nothing of personal protection and personal safety. Samuel always said what he believed to be right against all threats. He was fearless when he warned people and he warned people, believe me, including even the great High Priest Eli.
  
  And then it mentions in verse 32 the prophets. And with that, we sweep all the way from 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, the books of history, the period of the kings, the period of the unified Kingdom, the divided Kingdom. We sweep all the way through the prophets, all the way down to the end of the Old Testament...the prophets.
  
  Now you can go back to Hebrews chapter 11 because we’re going to remain there for just a few more minutes. And here he just mentions the prophets. That takes us right to the end of the Old Testament. The wisdom literature was authored by the kings predominantly; Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon. There are other historical books, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, goes back to patriarchal period. But we pretty well have swept across the Old Testament, and now we come to the prophets. And here you have no more names, but you have experiences that belonged to the prophets. These defining experiences we can find on the pages of the Old Testament. It’s a list of horrible experiences which these men faced and women with unconquerable courage and faith.
  
  The prophets, verse 33, along with all the rest who by faith, or through faith in every case conquered kingdoms, literally katagonizomai, overcame, overpowered, overthrew. It literally means to fight down or to subdue. And this would describe the Judges. This would describe Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah and David. And they not only conquered kingdoms, they wrought or they performed righteousness. Literally they executed justice. They executed judgment, leaders who upheld justice in very, very challenging times. They were men who did what was right no matter what the cost. It says of David, for example, in 2 Samuel 8:15, “David reigned over all Israel and David administered justice and righteousness for all his people.”
  
  Then it says they obtained promises. There are many illustrations of that. Joshua was given a promise of victory. Gideon was given a promise of victory. Barak was given a promise of victory, David was given promises by God that were fulfilled and some that were to be fulfilled later.
  
  And then we move past those when we come to the next phrase, “shut the mouths of lions.” Who does that describe? Daniel...Daniel chapter 6 verses 22 and 23. Daniel who obeyed God when it meant he had to go to the lion’s den, believing God would take care of that and God shut the mouths of the lions.
  
  Quench the violence of fire. Who would that refer to? Daniel’s three friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego as we know them, by their Babylonian names who standing in the fire were not burned. And, in fact, there was a companion in the fire, very likely an appearance of the Son of God. They conquered. They went into the fire. And do you remember what they said? They said, “We’re not going to bow down to you and if we go in the fire, we’ll burn, or maybe we won’t burn, but in any case we will not bow down to you.” They conquered by faith.
  
  It can be said of these heroes also, they escaped the edge of the sword. Who was it that was always trying to kill David? Saul, wasn’t it? No matter how often Saul tried to get David’s head within the reach of his sword, he never could.
  
  And then, of course, there was Goliath. And then there was Elisha. Do you remember when Jorum was rushing after Elisha in 2 Kings 6, wanting to kill him with his sword but he could not? And then it says they were from weakness, verse 34, made strong. You know who comes to mind when I read that? Hezekiah. Remember Hezekiah prayed for long life. He prayed for more life? Because he was a good king, God gave him more life. He had no son in the death struggle. He believed in God’s promise and power and Hezekiah prayed and was healed and lived another 15 years and eventually bore a son, 2 Kings chapter20.
  
  It further says about these heroes who lived by faith that they became mighty in war and put foreign armies to flight. And we just read about them. Back to the Judges and the Kings and even more of the Kings, particularly in the southern Kingdom.
  
  And then I love this, “It is through the faith of these men,” verse 35, “that women received back their dead by resurrection.” When did that happen? First Kings 17, that’s Elijah...Elijah, healing the dead son of the widow of Zarephath. And then in 2 Kings 4 it’s Elisha raising the child of the Shunammite woman from the dead. The faith of these prophets in death brought great victory.
  
  So this is a faith that conquers very, very challenging, life-threatening circumstances. The petty problems of suffering that these Hebrews to whom the letter was written might have been going through for their identification with Jesus Christ was nothing like what these men experienced.
  
  But that’s not the whole picture. Sometimes God chooses not to let His people conquer in struggle, but rather refines them through a struggle. Verse 35 again, “Others were tortured, not accepting their release.” That’s not a victory...that’s not a release from torture but an endurance so that they might obtain a better resurrection.
  
  Now here we saw the achievements of faith in the midst of the threat. Here we see the endurance of faith in the midst of the trial. Verse 35 says, “Tortured,” tumpanizo, very interesting Greek word. Literally to torture with the tumpanium. What is a tumpanium? It’s a torture instrument of ancient times. It’s a wheel-shaped contraption over which criminals were stretched as though they were skins and they would have all their extremities stretched to the circumference of the wheel and they would rotate on the wheel while people pummeled them with clubs. This is the basis of the word “tortured.”
  
  There have been those people of faith who have been tortured. They rejected denial of the faith. They rejected release. They would not banish from their lips the name of the true and living God because they looked for a better resurrection. They looked to the future.
  
  Others experienced mockings and scourgings and chains and imprisonments. I think of one who went through just about all of this and that would be Jeremiah...tortured, chained, imprisoned, thrown into a pit, Jeremiah 38, scourgings, beatings, imprisonments...that would be true of Daniel, too, wouldn’t it? And there are surely others.
  
  Verse 37, they were stoned. That happened to Jeremiah according to tradition. And the Old Testament record of Zechariah as well indicates a stoning. Sawn asunder, tradition says, Isaiah the prophet’s life ended when he was sawn in half. They were tested, that’s probably a better translation than tempted. They were tested, the torture of being tested, pressured to deny their God which they would not do.
  
  These aren’t the triumphant ones on a human level, these are the ones who suffered even death. They were put to death with the sword, died by sword. And some of them became exiles. Some of them went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, ill treated, mistreated, treated with evil force is the Greek verb.
  
  And then down in verse 38, some of them wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. And I think all of these things would be somewhat familiar to the Jewish people who were hearing this, being read in their congregations. They knew the stories of these people that we don’t know because they’re not necessarily contained in the pages of Scripture, but likely much of it was passed down. And so in a cryptic fashion, it can be rehearsed to them. They were wanderers, vagabonds, just existing because they had been put out society. That was the price they paid for their faithfulness to God.
  
  And then the most commendatory statement that is made in this entire chapter is in parenthesis in verse 38 and it really ought to be in italics. “These are people of whom the world was not worthy.” Isn’t that a great statement? The world was not worthy. The world thought them unworthy. The world deemed them unworthy to live, unworthy to be comfortable, unworthy to be affirmed or approved, or left alone. The world felt itself somehow diminished by their presence. The truth is, the world was not worthy of them.
  
  Why did they do this? Why did they do this against all this kind of terrible treatment? They did it because of what they believed was in the future waiting for them, a better resurrection. But look at verse 39, “All these having gained approval through their faith didn’t receive what was promised.” They didn’t have anything in their hand, it was all faith, right? It was all faith. They didn’t even know about Christ. Oh they knew the prophecies about Him, but they didn’t know who He was. He had not come. He had not died. He had not risen from the dead. There was no confirmation that this would ever happen. They had to believe God’s promise. And they did. They gained approval through their faith, though they didn’t receive what was promised because God had provided something better for us that apart from us they wouldn’t be made perfect. None of them would ever be in heaven if it weren’t for what happened that we know about, right? The cross and the resurrection. The better thing is the New Covenant.
  
  Perfect means saved in the book of Hebrews. Perfect means access, open and granted to
  
  God, full access to what the Old Covenant couldn’t give, access into the presence of God both in time and eternity. They lived by faith in something they couldn’t see. They lived...and that’s how the chapter’s beginning launches it, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That’s how these great heroes lived. Their faith was courageous faith. They conquered in struggle. They continued in suffering. And they counted on a salvation that would be provided in a way they could not see.
  
  Now I’m going to read verse 1 of chapter 12. “Therefore,” this is not the end of the story and shouldn’t be the beginning of a new chapter. “Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us...” We know who they are, right? We just met them all and to what do they witness? To what do they witness? They witness to the validity of a life of...what?...faith. “Let us lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us and let us run with endurance the faith race set before us.”
  
  These are given to us as models and examples to stimulate our commitment to run an enduring race of faith. Now, as I said, the chapter shouldn’t end at the end of the chapter, it should go in to chapter 12, so it will next week. We’ll look at the twelfth chapter.
  
  Father, thank You again for a wonderful day of worship and fellowship and we have been so greatly enriched tonight to be swept through the ages. The wrapping our minds around these great pinnacle people, these heroes of the faith, these great men and women who endured so much for what they couldn’t see. Blessed are the ones who have not seen and yet believe. May we run this faith race as they did for while we have seen through the eyes of biblical revelation the full record of Christ and His death and resurrection, we have yet not seen the future. We have not seen what God has prepared for them who love Him. May we endure in faith. May our faith be a real and genuine saving faith, an unwavering, enduring faith, tested and proven true. And may we enjoy the trials and tests that come against our faith because, as Peter said, they produce endurance and endurance has a perfecting work. We cherish the trials that demonstrate our faith holds because that gives us assurance that it’s the real thing and there’s no greater joy for us than to know that our faith is real and our salvation is genuine. We thank You for the consistency of Scripture and how it sweeps over vast eras of history without wavering from its integrity and the message that a relationship to God is always based on faith and faith will triumph where works must fail. Strengthen our faith, we pray, through these examples in Christ’s name. Amen.

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  The Race of Faith

  Hebrews 12:1-3

  
  Code: 90-390

  Now, we are coming tonight to the twelfth chapter of Hebrews, but it’s really a section of Scripture that I think belongs at the end of the eleventh chapter. We have gone through the eleventh chapter and we have seen this immense attempt to show that salvation comes by faith and faith alone, and that those who are God’s walk by faith as well. It is both the faith of the sinner that initiates salvation and the faith of the saint that marks his ongoing sanctification.
  
  As we come to the three verses, we’ll just look at the three verses, maybe comment on the others subsequent to that in a minute. But for tonight, I want you to look at verses 1 through 3 of chapter 12. “Therefore” of course, ties this in with what has been previously written.
  
  “Therefore since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter, or finisher 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. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
  
  Jesus here is the ultimate model of faith. We’ve gone through the eleventh chapter and we have heard about the heroes of faith from the past, from the Old Testament era both by name and by reference at the end of the chapter to what happened to them. And now we come to this really concluding statement in the opening of chapter 12 that based upon what we have just heard we are called to run this race that is set before us, it is the faith race. They ran it, they were blessed in the running, they endured to the end as we have seen, they suffered persecution, extensive persecution even death with great courage. And we got to the pinnacle last time of the eleventh chapter and talked about the courage of faith. Based upon these testimonies, we are called to run the faith race.
  
  Now as a kid growing up, and as an adult, frankly, I’ve heard this passage preached on many times. And standard approach used to be, at least, that we are to visualize here that there’s a stadium and all of these saints are sitting there watching us as we attempt to run the race, rooting us on, cheering us to the finish line. That gives the impression that somehow the saints who are now in heaven constitute some kind of mass of spectators who are watching us on earth.
  
  That is not taught in Scripture. There is not one shred of evidence anywhere on the pages of the Bible that people in heaven are preoccupied with watching what is going on down here on earth. That would actually defy the essence of heaven which is to be separated from all the sin and strife that goes on here. They are, as we know, lost in wonder, love and praise, contemplating the glory of God in the wonder of the Lord Jesus Christ and the ineffable glories of heavenly life. There is no indication that they are watching what goes on here. You hear people say that all the time, “So-and-so died but I know he’s up there or she’s up there watching down and looking over us,” and there is nothing in the Bible to indicate that that is the case. There is Jesus, a great gulf fixed between those who are in the presence of God and those who are out of the presence of God in the fires of hell. And there is an equally great gulf fix between those who are in the presence of God and anybody here still remaining on Earth.
  
  That also brings up the fact that there are no saints in heaven who are hearing prayers by people on Earth. They do not have a preoccupation with things on Earth. As far as I can tell from the Bible, they don’t even have a connection to things on Earth or to people on Earth. And so, we have something different here than what has been so often indicated.
  
  Now the word I want you to notice is the word “race” in verse 1. This is a call to run a race. Many figures of speech are used in the New Testament in particular to describe aspects of the Christian life. We are to put on the armor of God. That’s a metaphor. To put on the armor of God, to fight against the wiles of the devil, to put on the armor of God like a soldier. The military metaphors are elsewhere in Scripture, as you well know. Second Timothy chapter 2 and verse 3, “As good soldiers, we go to battle and do what we do to please the Commander.”
  
  We are also described as being engaged in a wrestling match, Ephesians 6:12, basically the same passage, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood but against the powers of the darkness, the spiritual powers, meaning the demonic hosts that are behind the world system.
  
  So we’re engaged in a war like soldiers, we’re like wrestlers in a wrestling match. In 1 Corinthians 9:26, Paul describes his Christian life like a boxing match and he says, “I’m not somebody who beats the air but I find my opponent and I strike a blow on him.” In 2 Timothy 4:7, Paul says, “I have fought the good fight,” a wrestler, a boxer, a soldier.
  
  There are references as well in the New Testament of being slaves. Galatians 6:17 even indicates that Paul sees himself as a slave of Jesus Christ who bears the brand marks of Jesus, a branded slave.
  
  We’re also described as farmers in 2 Timothy 2 who plant the crop and enjoy the harvest. We are described in our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ as a bride and He being the bridegroom. We’re also described in a father and child relationship, the Lord is our Father, He is the source of all that we need, the supplier of all our needs and we are His children.
  
  But then you have, and there are other metaphors as well, but then you have this metaphor of a race and we are runners in that race. We are athletes competing. That also appears in 2 Timothy chapter 2 where it talks about the athlete who does whatever is necessary to win the prize. The picture there is of an athlete engaged in a race, doing all he can to win the race.
  
  Perhaps the most familiar New Testament text that addresses that would be found in 1 Corinthians chapter 9 and verse 26, “Therefore I run in such a way as not without aim.” And then he goes on to say, as I pointed out, “I box in such a way as not beating the air.” I run in such a way as not without aim. It is not aimless running, like jogging. When I was in my school days both in junior high and high school and in my college days, I was, among other things, a runner and I ran. And I never ran unless there was a finish line and a potential reason for running. It’s hard for me to understand people who run, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing, maybe the worst of it on a treadmill. Paul says, “I don’t run that way. I don’t run aimlessly.” The implication is I run to win...I run to accomplish the goal that is set before me.
  
  This obviously goes with running. We all understand the interest that the ancient world, particularly the Greek world, had in athletics and in games. In Galatians 5 Paul uses that metaphor, he says to the Galatians, “You were running well, who hindered you? You were running well, who hindered you?”
  
  Philippians also chapter 2, this picture of running appears again. In verse 16 Paul says that, “He’s been faithful and he wants the Philippians to be faithful, to appear as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life so that in the day of Christ, I will have reason to glory because I didn’t run in vain or toil in vain.” Paul couldn’t comprehend an aimless race, running with no purpose in view, no goal, no victory, no triumph, no reward.
  
  Again in Philippians chapter 3 and in verse 13, “I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it, yet one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on, I pursue, I run toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Paul was highly motivated to run his spiritual race with a goal in mind and there he tells us what the goal is, it is the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus. He says in 2 Timothy 4:7 again, “I have finished the course. I don’t run aimlessly, I run to win, I run to finish, I run for the prize which is the upward call and Christ’s likeness.”
  
  So that particular metaphor appears a number of times, particularly in the writings of the Apostle Paul. But here as we look at Hebrews, the writer of Hebrews encourages all his readers to run this race. The Christian life is a race.
  
  Now I want to break this passage down a little bit because it’s very practical. We’re not going to find all kinds of profound theological things here, but some very helpful practical elements.
  
  First of all, let’s talk about the event...the event. Verse 1, just draw out this aspect, “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” Let us...he says that many times in this letter, let us. If you go back in to chapter 4, for example, you’ll probably see it four or five or even six times as he encourages people, “Let us...Let us....Let us.” Come in to chapter 10, “Let us draw near.” This is an indication that the Holy Spirit is speaking through Paul to this community of believers, of Jewish believers, some of them were genuinely regenerate, some of them were genuinely born again and this would be a call to them to be faithful in the race and to run with all their might and to run with endurance. Some of them, as you remember, are intellectually convinced about the gospel but haven’t really even entered the race. But he’s talking in general to the community of people who have at least outwardly identified with Jesus Christ, to constitute a church and he’s encouraging them who have not yet entered the race to get in the race. And those who are in the race, to run with all their might.
  
  As we have been saying all along, this book, this great epistle is written primarily to believers. And we all need that exhortation, to stay in the race and to run it with all our might and all our strength. And so there is that element of it. But there’s also the encouragement bound up in the sort of general nature of “Let us” to those who were intellectually convinced but had not come all the way to Christ. It’s time now to get in the race, it’s time now to run the race. The Christian life is a race...it is a race. That is to say it demands great effort, it is not a sprint, is not a middle distance, it is a marathon.
  
  The entrance to the race is the new birth, salvation by faith in the perfect and complete work of Christ. And apart from faith in Christ, you’re not even in the race. You’re on the sideline. The race starts for you when you become a believer. But once you become a believer, you must be continually urged and Paul does that, as we pointed out, a number of times to run with all your might...not to jog, not to walk, not to sit down and rest, not to fall back. The Holy Spirit is calling us to run.
  
  Certainly we could understand that in our own Christian experiences, there are times when we seem to have slowed down to a veritable crawl. Some of us are even at times falling victim to temptation, going backwards. The Christian life then is not a trot, it is not a morning jog, it is a race.
  
  The word “race,” important word, agona. You know an English word that sounds like that? Agony...agony. It is not a sprint, it is not a dash, as I said, it is a marathon, it is a faith race. There is a very obvious element behind being a good runner and that is training, self-discipline, following whatever rigid standards are going to yield the most effective race. It’s very challenging to be an enduring runner.
  
  Reaching back into my own life, I was a sprinter. I didn’t want to run anything longer than a hundred meters, or two hundred meters at the most. They made me run the four hundred which I didn’t particularly like. It was just too long and too painful, too agonizing.
  
  But I remember one meet that I was placed in to and I don’t know what happened, they asked me to run something I’d never run and that was the eight hundred. Now for me, I only knew one speed, you get out there and you’re a sprinter and you run as fast as you can. That works okay in a hundred and a two hundred, it’s not too effective in the four hundred and it’s stupid in the eight hundred. So I remember leading this particular eight hundred meters by a longshot for about five hundred meters and then every single person in the race passed me. I was done. I hit the proverbial wall, as you might imagine, by lack of training, a lack of commitment to the sacrifice necessary and the discipline necessary to be able to endure that kind of race. And we’re talking about running a race, the assumption here is that the runner does whatever he needs to do to be in the shape that he needs to be in to endure the race to the very end. It will demand every ounce of energy and it will demand discipline and training if you’re going to run to really win. Amos...Amos said, “Woe to them that are at ease,” Amos 6:1, “Woe to them that are at ease.” This is a race. There’s no place for standing still or walking slowly, this is a race. And it is an agony. It is an agonizing, relentless event. It is lifelong and it is to be run with endurance.
  
  Let me just make a comment about that. That’s hupomone which means to be under and to remain there. Hupa is under, mone from the verb meno, to remain. It is to remain under the challenge, to remain under the difficulty, to remain under the struggle. There will be obstacles, there will be problems. We will be weary and tired, distracted, but we remain under this challenge. We take it as God gives it to us and stay in the place where He’s put us, enduring whatever might come our way.
  
  So this is really the key word, it’s the word endurance. You know, the Apostle Paul says to the Ephesians, “Having done all to stand.” And I think about that verse a lot. There are people that I know who have done all but at the end of the race, they’re not standing. They’ve crashed and burned somewhere along the line. They had no hupomone, they didn’t remain faithful under the challenge and the obligation to run the race.
  
  I want to come to the end of my life having endured faithfully in the race. Never have broken the rules, never have violated the calling, but running with endurance. That’s the imagery also in 2 Timothy chapter 2. The athlete does whatever he has to do to discipline himself to gain the prize, to win the prize.
  
  So that’s the event. And that’s how we must view the Christian life. It is not a floating along. I started reading again this week J.C. Ryle’s book on holiness and just going through it again which is always a wonderful experience for one’s soul. And what prompted that book was the...in his era, the nineteenth century, what prompted that book was the growing influence of the Keswick Movement in England which was the “Let go and let God” movement. You just kind of sit down and God takes over and you don’t do anything. This was the...well, this gave birth to what we know as the Quaker Movement, this was what’s called Quietism, a Let go and Let God, just relax and let His power take over your life.
  
  Well that rankled J.C. Ryle to the bone, I promise you. Because he viewed the Christian life in a biblical way, it was a warfare. It was a boxing match. It was a wrestling match. It was an agonizing race. And he wrote the book on holiness to shut down that false kind of idea that you are to relax and somehow let God do everything for you. So it is a race. That’s the event. And we’re in it for life.
  
  Secondly, the encouragement...the encouragement. What is the encouragement? “Therefore since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us.” This is the encouragement to run the race because of this cloud of witnesses.
  
  Now please, get out of your mind that imagery of a stadium and all these people sitting up there cheering you on. That’s not the point. What is this cloud of witnesses? We just met them n chapter 11. That’s who we’ve just seen. And to what do they give witness? To what do they all give testimony? To the value of what kind of life? A life of faith. They’re not witnesses of us, they’re witnesses to the power of faith, to the wisdom of faith, to the righteousness of faith, to the blessing of faith. They are witnesses to the life of faith, whether it is Abel, or Enoch, or Noah, or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob Joseph, Moses or the rest, better referred to without giving their names with the exception of some Rahab and those listed in verse 32. They are those who are this great cloud of witnesses who have given testimony to the great power and blessing of a life of faith.
  
  Since we have so great a cloud of witnesses to the power of faith, let’s run the same faith race. All that nephele, that cloud, that mass, that body of witnesses testify to the greatness of a life of faith. The results are worth it, that’s what they tell us, the results are worth it. For Abel, they were worth it. To Enoch they were worth it because he walked one day and walked into the presence of God. And for Noah, his faith caused him to escape the Flood. And for Abraham, his faith led him to a covenant with God and a full promise yet even now, still to be fulfilled in the future. But his life was blessed and the promise of a son was fulfilled. And so, all of them experienced the blessing and the hope of promise in the life of faith. They didn’t receive the fulfillment of it, as we know at the end of the chapter. They gained approval through their faith but didn’t receive, verse 39 says, what was promised. But they showed, even though they hadn’t received the full fulfillment of the promise, the blessedness of living a life of faith. They are the witnesses to the greatness, the validity, the blessing of faith.
  
  Verse 15 of Philippians 2, “Prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent children of God, above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding fast the Word of life.” You need to be that kind of person, Paul says, so that his race was not in vain. He ran for your sake. So he isn’t in Hebrews 11, but it’s a very paralleled principle. He ran a faith race to show you how to run a faith race, make his run what he wanted it to be by being faithful to run yourself.
  
  If the athlete endures what he endures to run to win a corruptible crown, how much more should we discipline ourselves to receive an incorruptible crown? Setting aside the indulgences of the flesh, maintaining the training rules that God has laid down for us, exercising temperance, we run the race and our...our examples, our models are all who have gone before us and run the race of faith. We draw encouragement from them. And even though they didn’t receive the promise in their day, the promise was fulfilled in Christ. In His death and resurrection, all that they had hoped for was to be realized and they now have entered into that fullness of that realization and so the faith that they exercised though not fulfilled in their life has been fulfilled through the coming of Christ, and we know that, so we know the full measure of the value of a life of faith.
  
  We in ourselves are frail, we are weak and yet we belong to a mighty company of runners in the race of faith. And they all are winners. And so will we be. For the God of yesterday is the God of today. He’s the same yesterday, today and forever, Hebrews 13:8.
  
  There’s another element here beside the event and the encouragement and that’s the encumbrances. In verse 1 again, “Let us also lay aside every encumbrance...every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us.”
  
  Now in order to run effectively, you’ve got to get rid of useless weight. I remember years ago in one of the Olympics, I was watching the sprinting events and the world’s leading sprinter lost and the commentator said afterwards, “He lost because he had put on so much weight.” Nobody runs a race in an overcoat. You put weights on for training. You may wrap weights around...even around your ankles for training, but you take them off when you get in the race. Travel light. Do some discarding. It reminds me of 1 Peter 2:1 where Peter says, “Strip off your soiled polluted garments, get down to the bare basics to run the race.” Certain things need to be eliminated if you’re going to run a faith race effectively.
  
  Number one...number one, every encumbrance, or every weight, as the Authorized put it, it’s the Greek word orchon, it simply means bulk...bulk. It could be a mass of anything. It could be weights that you’re carrying. It could be superfluous flesh. You need to get rid of anything that slows you down in the race.
  
  A runner starts with a reduction of all t he excess body weight, getting himself down where he has as close to zero fat as possible and then works to make himself nothing but a muscle machine. And he trains to make sure he stays that way. In the race, he takes off his baggy warm-up suit, gets down to the minimum so that he is able to run. No encumbrance at all.
  
  Now what is he talking about here? What is he referring to with this weight, this encumbrance? Well, first of all, it’s not sin because he refers to sin also. “Lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us.” These are two things that slow you down. These are two things that entangle you, that encumber you. First, the weight and second, the sin. Well if the weight isn’t sin, what is it?
  
  Well the Scripture doesn’t tell us here but I think it’s obvious what it is. What was dragging down these Jewish believers in this new community, this new church, what was holding them back? What was dragging them down? What baggage were they still carrying around? Simple answer, what was it? It was the baggage of their former Judaistic legalism. They were running, I guess you could say, like overweight people in bulky sweatshirts. They were going to collapse in a pile of legalistic sweat. You can’t run the race dragging along everything from the past.
  
  The biggest weight encumbering these new believers, pounds and pounds and pounds of Jewish legalism, rabbinic tradition, dead works, dead weight. And it wasn’t easy to let it go. It was ingrained in them, Sabbath observances, for example. That’s why in Colossians 2, Paul says, “Don’t let anybody hold you to a Sabbath or a new moon, or a feast day or a festival. That’s shadow and shadow goes away when substance arrives. He says the same thing to them in Galatians, “Having begun in the Spirit, do you think now that you can hold on to all of this past stuff and somehow having begun in the Spirit you’re going to be made perfect by the flesh?” It’s impossible.
  
  They were holding on to the temple. They were holding on to the priests. They were holding on to the rituals. They were holding on to the ceremonies. That’s why all through this letter the writer says there is a better priesthood, right? And a better sacrifice and even a better temple and a better covenant. And in chapter 6 he says, “Let’s go on, leave these things behind.” Even at the end of chapter 5, it says the same thing. We can never run by faith if you’re hanging on to works, or any of the trappings of a works system.
  
  The race is run by faith, plus nothing. And anything you hang on to from past religion that is made up of pointless ceremonies and traditions and rituals and rules, will only slow you down. He’s saying unload your Judaism, unload your legalism, drop all the old weights and the sin which so easily entangles us.
  
  We heard some testimonies tonight in baptism. One testimony from Patricia who said that she was raised a Catholic. We all know that many people in our church who came from Catholicism, how many of you are former Catholics? Put your hands up. Yeah, a lot of people.
  
  One of the things you had to face when you left Catholicism was the temptation to hang on to it, right? To hang on to attitudes toward Mary, to hang on to attitudes toward the Mass, to hang on to attitudes toward works. To hang on to fears that you had that if you violated Catholic Law and Catholic Church, you might commit a mortal sin and end up in hell. And that’s not an easy thing to let go of when it’s ingrained in you. Some of you came out of Seventh Day Adventism and it’s hard for you to let go of some of the dietary restrictions and restraints. Some of you came out of Mormonism and there are things that hold on to you and still have a grip on you. Those are the encumbrances that slow down the faith race because all of those are components of a works system.
  
  And then in addition to that, sin which so easily entangles us. Both of them entangle us. Literally, paristemi, the root is to surround us, to gather around us and inhibit us. It’s like trying to run when you’re surrounded and there’s all kinds of things in your way. Reference is not to some specific sin, but to face the fact that sin itself surrounds us, closes in on us and restricts us in our race. Sin is an ever-present threat to hinder our running.
  
  Religion threatens us. Religions of works from the past and sin. Whatever sin it is, whatever forms of sin it is, and you heard that again in the testimonies tonight. You heard the young man giving his testimony and saying it’s not that he is now void of temptation, it’s still a struggle. He is still surrounded by the reality of his flesh and his fallenness and so are we all.
  
  It’s a very challenging thing to run the race. It’s tough enough to fight sin without having to fight all of the dead weight of a former religion of works. So the weight is legalism. Sin at its heart is always unbelief. So in a sense, you could sum up the sin as unbelief. You always engage in an act of unbelief when you sin. We all do. Whenever we sin, we believe we will get gratification in a way that God says we won’t. So when we sin, we’re saying, “I don’t believe You, God, this is what I want, this is what I will do, I reject what You say about it.” All sin then is an act of practical unbelief because look honestly, we want the best for ourselves, it’s part of our nature to want to indulge ourselves and want to have joy and peace and all of that. And when you sin, you assume you’ll find it there when God says you won’t. So you believe the lie rather than the Word of God so that all sin is in the end a form of unbelief. Now if you’re going to try to run a faith race, unbelief or failure to believe God is going to hinder you, so is hanging on to any kind of works.
  
  There’s a third thing I want you to look at, or fourth, the event, the encouragement, the encumbrances, and then the example...the example. We’ve had a lot of witnesses to the validity of a faith life. But there’s one example that rises above all the rest. Verse 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.”
  
  The course has been set. The weights and obstructions stripped off. The race is under way. We have the encouragement of others who have run before us, mortal men who lived by faith triumphantly. But beyond all that, there is one example to whom we look. Looking unto Jesus. Second Timothy 2:8, Paul says there, “After having given the picture of a soldier and an athlete and a farmer and even a teacher, trying to encourage Timothy to get his act together to run the race, to be a faithful soldier, to make all the ultimate sacrifices, he says, “Remember Jesus Christ...Remember Jesus Christ.”
  
  Literally the Greek says, “Look away to Jesus. Get your eyes off the immediate surroundings, look away to Jesus, lift your eyes to heaven.” Second Corinthians 3:18, “Gaze on His glory and be transformed in to His image from one level of glory to the next.”
  
  Those of you who have run competitively know that you have to keep your eyes ahead of you. You can’t run effectively looking at your feet, right? Looking at your feet you will stumble and fall. Where you put your eyes is absolutely critical.
  
  
  A few times I ran the hurdles and the first thing I learned about the hurdles was you never look at a hurdle because as soon as you look at a hurdle, you’re in it, under it, it’s all over you. You never look at a hurdle, you look way above the hurdle. And that’s what our writer is telling us.
  
  You know, you’re in a race, keep your eyes off the ground, off your feet, off your surroundings. Where do we put our eyes? We put our eyes on Christ. This is back to Philippians 3, “We set our eyes on the goal who is Christ.”
  
  Why do we want to look at Him? Because He’s the perfect example. He’s the perfect model. You don’t look at the people around you and say, “Oh, I’m a lot faster than Joe here. I’m an awful lot faster than Alice over here.” You put your eyes on Jesus and He’s the model. Why? Because He is the author, archegos, the author. He is the reason we have any faith, isn’t it true? He gave us that as a gift. He is the leader. He is the originator. He is the author. He is the one who granted us faith out of His store and He too has faith as exhibited in His attitude toward His Father.
  
  Back in verse 6 of Hebrews 11 it says, “Without faith it is impossible to do...what?..please God. Without faith it is impossible to please God.” You can’t please God without believing Him. And what did the Father say about Jesus? Mark 1 verse 11, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” God was pleased with Christ because He always believed His Father. That’s why He never sinned. “I do what the Father says. I do what the Father shows Me to do. I do what the Father does.” In His temptation, how did He respond to every temptation that Satan threw at Him, those three in a row, He always quoted Scripture and affirmed His trust in His Father. “I will believe My Father.” “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” He took everything that God His Father ever said and put His complete trust in that. And His faith was so strong that He even sustained joy as He looked at the cross and its shame. He saw through that to the end. What was the end? Being seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
  
  Did He want to go to the cross? Well, from a human viewpoint He said, “Father let this cup pass from Me.” Did He trust His Father to take Him through the cross and out the other side? Absolutely. Did He trust that the shame would only be temporary only for a little while on earth culminating in His horrible death on the cross? Absolutely. He believed God would take Him through that cross, out the other side of the grave and set Him at His right hand in heaven. That’s faith. That’s faith that faced the crisis, the likes of which no human being has ever faced, except Him. That’s how great His faith was.
  
  
  To become alienated from God, to bear all the sins of all the people throughout human history who would ever believe, and yet to emerge triumphant. He is the author but He’s also not only the archegos, the the prototype of faith, He is the teleon , He carries faith to its completion. He is the perfect illustration of faith. Perfect faith front to back, trusted God totally in everything, He raised faith to its perfection and established the highest example of faith. He is the source then of faith and He models it. And He is the epitome of faith as an example of believing God in crisis that we can’t even imagine.
  
  So the event, the encouragement, the encumbrances and the example, we keep our eyes on Him. And then the end, like Him, “He sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
  
  Where did He find His joy in running such a difficult faith race? He believed God, He believed God, He never wavered, He was faithful to God’s Word. He pleased God and without faith it’s impossible to please Him. He was perfect in His faith. Why? Why would He endure the shame, endure the cross and have at the same time joy? Because He saw past that to the goal of being seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Do I need to remind you that there’s a seat there for us on His throne with Him, as well?
  
  He is the model of faith because He sees past the horrendous persecution, the horrendous suffering. Far worse than any of us would endure. And even the Hebrew readers, verse 3, he says to them, “Consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” Verse 4, “You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin, hasn’t cost you your life like it did Him.” He saw through to the very end.
  
  His joy in the race was that He could see through the suffering, through the agony, through the shame to the reign on the right hand of the Father. I love what it says in John 15:11, Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be made full.” We share in the same joy because one day we will also sit on the right hand of the Father enthroned with Jesus as joint heirs with Him.
  
  Future reward, Paul says he was laid hold of by Christ for the prize which was to be like Christ. And it is to that that he presses. And even in the struggle there’s joy because...here’s the key...the victory is already guaranteed, right? We win the race. God always causes us to triumph in Christ, Paul said to the Corinthians. We will receive a crown of life, a crown of rejoicing. We will be rewarded in eternity.
  
  And so, the exhortation then for us to run the race is a full and rich exhortation. And when we get our eyes on Jesus and the ultimate goal, it is easier to make all the necessary sacrifices to gain that final eternal reward.
  
  Father, we thank You for this wonderful passage. So much more could be said about it but it’s just been a delight tonight to look at it and to consider its practicality in our lives. We thank You for the testimonies that we heard tonight and testimonies by the hundreds and thousands that could be given by people sitting here that are very much like those of what You’ve done. We thank You for putting us in the race. And now, Lord, we want to run the race with strong faith, unwavering faith, trust in Your Word, setting aside anything that would encumber us from the past and sin that surrounds us and hinders our running. Keep our eyes, Lord, focused on Jesus, how important it is to be gazing into His glory at all times, realizing what He realized that no matter what we suffer here, even though it’s not as severe as His, it’s not unto blood such as His was, yet it’s painful for us to go through it and we need to keep our focus on the fact that as for Him for us there will be a day when we will be enthroned in glory and receive that eternal reward. We desire with joy to run our race in a way that would be consistent with those who have run before us. Thank You that we belong to this great host of witnesses, this great mass of witnesses, this great cloud of witnesses that have proclaimed the blessing of a life of faith. We thank You for that and we give You the glory in Your Son’s name. Amen.

  ---

  God’s Faithful Discipline

  Hebrews 12:4-11

  
  Code: 90-391

  Now as we continue in our look at the book of Hebrews and particularly the life of faith as we have seen it laid out in chapter 11, and then reemphasized at the beginning of chapter 12, we come to the final section that I want to deal with in this series, and that is Hebrews chapter 12 verses 4 through 11...Hebrews chapter 12 verses 4 through 11.

  I’m going to read that passage. It is, for most of you, a familiar text of Scripture. What we want to take it not in its pieces as it is sometimes quoted, but in its whole. Starting in verse 4, the writer of Hebrews says, “You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin. And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him. For those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines and He scourges every son whom He receives. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with sons, for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seem best to them. But He disciplines us for our good so that we may share His holiness. All discipline, for the moment, seems not to be joyful but sorrowful, yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

  You will remember that Matthew chapter 18 where we have our Lord Himself giving us the pattern for church discipline, after having told us how important it is to confront each other in the church and to confront sin and sometimes to tell the congregation and sometimes even to put the person out of the church because of the influence that they’re having for evil, there’s sort of a difficulty in the mind of the reader to do that, a reluctance to take on the responsibility of confronting people to that degree and so our Lord says, “Remember that where two or three of you are gathered together, there am I in the midst.” And that refers to the two or three witnesses engaged in a discipline situation.

  So when we do discipline in the church, we’re reflecting what our Lord desires for His church and here is a passage that lays that out. We do on a one-to-one basis, we do in the life of the church on an open basis what our Lord is doing in a secret way in the lives of all who are His children.

  This is a very important and a very informative passage, one, I think, every Christian should thoroughly understand. If you get a grip on the truths in this text, make them your own, you will view your life in a very, very different way. And we need to back up a little bit and get kind of a running start.

  The Hebrew community is at least in name Christian. There are true believers who make up the majority, apparently, and there are some interested Jews on the fringe who haven’t yet come all the way to Christ. What is raising the stakes for even those who have named the name of Christ and certainly for those who are thinking about it is that having any association with Jesus Christ and with the church of Christ produces persecution from the surrounding Jews. And if you go back to chapter 10 verse 32, we read, “Remember the former days when after being enlightened you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated. For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one.”

  When they became believers or even when they associated with the believers, persecution was immediate, it was severe. Some of them literally lost their property. Their property was seized and taken from them. They were pressured by that to go back in to Judaism, to let go of the things of Christ which they had legitimately embraced or superficially embraced, being seriously mistreated raised the price. This is reminiscent of our Lord’s parable of the soils where the seed goes down, takes a little root, begins to shoot up but the persecution, the thlipsis, the pressure, the tribulation causes the seed to die before it ever bears any fruit. Persecution is very difficult for new believers to bear and it’s very threatening to those who are only considering whether or not to identify with Christ.

  Now in response to that, if you’re still in chapter 10 and verse 35, he says, “Therefore do not throw away your confidence.” You’ve had confidence in Christ. You’ve put your trust in Christ. Don’t throw that away because at the end of that is a great reward, a great reward.

  Then down in verse 38 he says, “My righteous one shall live by faith and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.”

  So here you have an illustration of people who have made some kind of an external commitment to Christ, they have come together to assemble with a believing group of Christians, some genuine and some only in consideration of Christ, the threat is then likely to drive some of those who are considering Christ away from Christ because the price is too high. And even some of those who have genuinely come to Christ are in danger of not making a clean break from apostate Judaism and perhaps even questioning their suffering, asking why it is now that I’ve come to Christ that I am so suffering.

  Well they need to understand that they have to live by faith. And you remember that I just pointed out the words of verse 35, “If you will hold on to your confidence in Christ, if you will continue to live by faith, there is a great reward.” The implications of that tie in with the words of our Lord, “In this world you will have tribulation. Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” There is to be expected difficulty and tribulation in this life, and we live by faith.

  We live our lives, as we’ve been learning in Hebrews chapter 11, we live our lives in anticipation of something we do not have. None of us has ever seen heaven. None of us has ever experienced righteousness in its full perfection. None of us has ever seen the goodness of God in its full massive reality. We all believe in that but we believe in something we have not experienced. We will not experience it until we’re in His presence. We make the sacrifice that is necessary to come to Christ, it’s a sacrifice of self, we deny ourselves, take up our cross, follow Him. We make the sacrifices that are called for in a life of repentance and a life of holiness and a life of sanctification by saying no to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. We resist the devil. We fight against him and the onslaught that comes from his enterprises in the world.

  And we do all of this not because we hold in our hand the end of our faith, but because we believe it is to come. There is for us a great reward. We have enough evidence of the promises of God as we go along in this Christian life, we see Him answer prayer, we see Him providentially order our lives. We Him pour out blessing upon us. And we see it enough to anchor our faith. It is critical for us to hang on in difficult times.

  Now we come in to chapter 11 and, of course, what you have in chapter 11 are all these great people who really illustrate faith. And they illustrate faith in the sense that they lived and died for something they didn’t receive, whether you’re talking about Abel or Enoch or whether you’re talking about Noah or whether you’re talking about Abraham, or Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, flowing on down, Moses all the way down through all the rest of the prophets and holy saints of the Old Testament who suffered all the things that are indicated at the end of chapter 11...these were people who did not receive what they hoped for in life. The promises that were promised to them were not fulfilled. All the promises to the patriarchs were not fulfilled in this life. All the promises to Moses were not fulfilled in this life. All the promises to and through the prophets were not fulfilled in this life. They didn’t even see the great promise of all promises, the coming of the Messiah as the one to provide salvation. And that is why verse 39 ends that eleventh chapter by saying, “All these having gained approval through their faith did not receive what was promised.” They all lived and died before Christ came, before the New Covenant was ratified, before the gospel was fully understood because God had provided something better for us so that apart from us they would not be made perfect. We’re on the other side of the cross. What they only saw by faith, we know by biblical sight, if you will, all of the truths concerning Christ. So they were not made perfect. They died...all of them died in hope for the fulfillment of the promises.

  Now we have the promised fulfilled in Christ but we too live by faith and we live for a future hope in the glory that is to come. Now having said that and illustrated the courage of all these people, for their lives were all very challenging, they exhibited great courage which is sort of the crescendo at the end of the chapter, as you see that they conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, verse 33, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, etc., etc. This is the kind of faith that can take anything that comes and it endures.

  Now in chapter 12 then, the writer turns to this community of believers and says, “Now I have showed you that salvation has always been by faith and it is always a matter of believing what you have not yet received and I call on you to lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us and run with endurance the race that is set before us. Your call to run a faith race, your call to live your life in anticipation of something you do not have. Then he says, “Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith who is the model of faith. He did what He did, lived the life He lived, suffered what He suffered for something to come in the future. He endured the shame of the cross for the joy that would come after that. He acted in faith. He went to the cross in faith. He expressed a possibility, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” It seemed as if He had. But He had, of course, not forsaken Him in the end. He saw His faith vindicated when God raised Him from the dead. He was a perfect illustration of faith because He was perfectly obedient, perfectly trusting and His faith was vindicated.

  So look to Jesus as the perfect model of faith. He despised the shame. He could see through to the end when He would be seated at the right hand of the throne of God. And when you think about your own life, verse 3 says, “Consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself so that you will not grow weary and lose heart, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin. You haven’t had to go as far as He has, you haven’t had to die for your faith.”

  So here he is calling them to a life of faith. Calling them to accept the fact that it’s going to be a challenging life, it’s going to be a threatening life. Nobody has died yet in this community of believers. Eventually many, of course, would die for their faith in Christ.

  Having said all of that about the life of faith, living the life of faith, being courageous in the life of faith, he then comes to the question, “Why is it that if we have come into the Kingdom by faith, why is it if we have confessed Jesus as our Lord, if we acknowledged Him as the one who died and rose again on our behalf, why is it that life is still for us so hard? Why is it so hard?” Is it that somehow Satan has power over God? Is Satan doing all of this? Are demons doing all of this? Some people think so. Some people think if things go wrong in your life it’s the devil. Why is it that we are going through this? Why is it that we are suffering? Why is it that it’s so hard? Why is it that we lost our property? Lost our homes? Become alienated? Why does this have to happen to us?

  And the answer comes in verses 5 to 11, “It is the discipline of God....It is the discipline of God.” That’s what it is and that’s how you are to see it. When you have difficulties and challenges in your life, you don’t look to Satan, Satan’s not your lord, Satan’s not your father, he used to be your father...Jesus said, “You’re of your father, the devil,” to unbelieving Jews. But the devil is not your father, not my father. We’re not under his sovereignty. He has nothing on us. In a very real sense, he’s been placed under our feet. We have been delivered from his power, delivered from the evil one.

  The issues that come into our life that challenges us, that call for our courage and our faith to be strong, the struggles, the trials the suffering, the pain is not the work of Satan in the life of a believer, it is the discipline of God...it is the discipline of God.

  Now it’s pretty clear, having read that passage, that it’s about discipline since the word is repeated throughout the entire text...all the way down to the last verse. This is about discipline. The word is paideia which is used of the training of children. We talk about pedagogy. A paidagogos was a child trainer, a child mentor, a child teacher. Paideia, or paiea is child training, it’s part of our training, it’s part of our Father’s discipline for us. The word speaks of whatever occurs in the life of children brought upon them by their parents to cultivate their soul, including corrective issues, including curbing their passions, including hedging them against the things that are dangerous.

  It is also not just protection but it is instruction with a view to producing virtue, aiming at the increase of character. The word doesn’t have the idea of punishment is what I’m getting at. It has the idea of training. And that’s consistent with verse 11 which ends, speaking of those who have been trained.

  So you look at the issues of your life that are negatives from the human perspective that are challenges that are difficult and you have to view them as the training of God in your life. The discipline of parents in the training of their children we expect. And I’ll tell you something, we enjoy it. Nobody enjoys an undisciplined child. We expect it. We enjoy it. A loving father who cares for his children disciplines his children, sometimes painfully.

  The Scripture is pretty clear about this. The discipline is not done by giving your children “time outs.” The discipline is not done by taking away activities. The discipline scripturally is done with a rod...with a rod. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Corporeal punishment, inflicted pain is the way to train a child, the biblical way. And that’s what God uses in our lives, to train us to get our attention.

  God does not necessarily bring to bear serious and severe discipline on us throughout all our lives, but there are times when He does and always...always for His own purposes...for our good and His glory.

  Mark it, there’s a great difference between divine punishment and divine discipline. I think you can make the distinguishing idea in your mind with the English words, right? You know the difference between punishment and discipline. Discipline speaks of training for a good outcome. Punishment speaks of retribution, vengeance, wrath...that’s not what we’re talking about. The Lord doesn’t do that with us, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ, right? Romans 8:1. So let’s not use the word punishment as if God would punish us. The truth is, He punished Christ for us, right? So we’re not talking about condemnation kind of punishment. This is something very different. It doesn’t mean it’s not painful. It may be very painful.

  Punishment has one purpose, discipline another. The purpose of punishment is to inflict vengeance. And punishment from God is eternal. The purpose of discipline is to produce virtue and discipline is only for a temporal season. In punishment, God is the judge. In discipline, God is the father. In punishment, the objects are His enemies. In discipline, the objects are His children. In punishment, condemnation is the goal. In discipline, righteousness is the goal.

  Now, having said that, let me take the word discipline, or the concept discipline, and break it into three parts, just to help you sort it out a little bit. I think there are three reasons for the Lord’s discipline, three reasons that things in our lives come along that cause us to struggle, to suffer, that bring pain.

  Reason number one we’ll call correction. Reason number one we’ll call correction. We all know that the Scripture is for correction, right?, 2 Timothy 2. God is in the business of correction. Every branch He prunes. That’s a painful slicing away. We have sins in our lives that need the discipline of correction. Sometimes this correction takes very serious, serious extent. For example, in the letter to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians chapter 11, a correction reached the point where some people were sick because of the way they came to the Lord’s table, and some of them the Lord actually took them to heaven because they were more trouble here than they were worth. But it is possible to be sick, according to 1 Corinthians 11, because of sin, the frivolous sin of coming to the table of the Lord.

  You might want to start there when things go wrong in your life. That’s a good place to start. That’s a good inventory. That’s what Job’s friends did. That’s kind of a standard approach. Job started having trouble and then he had trouble upon trouble and trouble after trouble until the trouble was incomprehensible. And what did his friends say? “Ah, you’ve got a lot of sin in your life, Job. You must have more sin than we can even comprehend and you’ve done a good job of hiding it,” cause they hadn’t seen it. And we think their counsel was foolish because Job wasn’t a sinner, but that’s the standard place to start and it’s a good place to start.

  But when you look at your own life and you begin to see that God is correcting you, you have to understand this is not punishment for your sin in the sense of final punishment. This is not condemnation in the sense of final condemnation. But rather that final punishment, having been borne by Christ, this is correction. This is not smiting you in wrath. This is correcting you in love. And so, you consider the chastening of the Lord in your life as being related to the sins in your life, having a corrective purpose.

  First Peter 5:10, Peter says, “After you have suffered a while, the Lord make you perfect.” It’s going to take some suffering. It’s going to take some pain to knock off the carnal aspects of your life. Judgment begins at the house of God in this sense of correction. But it’s a serious error to get stuck there. You don’t want to get stuck there with Job’s friends that made that the final analysis even though it was wrong.

  There’s a second reason for discipline and that’s prevention...prevention. Sometimes God’s discipline is to prevent sin. The Lord fences you in and tells you to put a guard on your mouth and a guard on your eyes, and a guard on your ears and be careful what you expose yourself to. The Lord demands that you stay away from evil company because evil company corrupts...what?...good morals. The scriptures are full of things that are the barriers that the Lord puts into our lives to shelter us, to separate us from the things that corrupt us.

  I think any father knows that, any good parent understands that you put into the life of your child restrictions. And if you don’t, if you allow your children to be overexposed to the things that corrupt them...guess what? They’ll be corrupt...they’ll be corrupt. It’s preventative discipline.

  For example, the Apostle Paul has a horrendous agonizing experience of demonic activity in the Corinthian church, coming through these false teachers. It is so severe that in 2 Corinthians 12 he says it’s like a stake, like a sharp stake rammed through my flesh. This is the stake driven through his flesh. It’s a messenger of Satan, the messenger is angelos, a satanic angel, demonic activity in the church that he loved in Corinth. And they’re buying in to these false teachers and it’s like running a spear right through him. And so he goes to the Lord and he says, “I prayed three times to have it removed...three times the Lord would get them out of that church, three times that the Lord would take away my agony and my pain. And the Lord didn’t do it. The Lord said this, ‘I’m allowing this to happen to keep you from exalting yourself, to protect you from pride, to protect you from self-glory, to protect you from feeling too confident about the greatness of your accomplishments.’”

  The Lord will do some amazing things, even turn loose demons in a church to make life miserable for the pastor of that church in order to keep that man humble. So sometimes discipline comes from God for correction, and sometimes it comes for prevention. You who have suffered greatly in life know that it draws you to the Lord and away from the world, does it not?

  There’s a third reason for God’s discipline, that’s education. It’s designed to teach you the experiences of life that lead to deeper fellowship with God. There are things that come that just educate you. They educate you toward God. I think of Peter...and toward others...I think of Peter in Luke 22, this familiar passage, Jesus says, “Satan’s desired to have you that he might sift you like wheat.” But He says...Jesus says to Peter, “After it’s over, and you’re turned around, you will strengthen the brethren.”

  You can’t become an educator to strengthen others unless you’ve been through the trials they’ve been through. Part of the discipline of God is to raise the level of your sympathy, and to raise the level of your comfort. You remember in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, Paul says, “Look, I suffer, I suffer all the time.” He lays it out in the very introduction of 2 Corinthians 1. And then he says this, “I have had all these sufferings that I might be comforted by God so that I might comfort you.”

  So, some suffering is corrective. Some suffering is designed to simply prevent us from going down paths into sin and some suffering is designed to educate us. On the surface, we might not know that. We might not know that, you have to search that in your own heart. Job’s friends were totally wrong.

  What was the purpose in Job’s suffering, as far as Job was concerned? I know God was trying to prove a point to Satan, but as far as Job was concerned, what was the purpose of his suffering?

  Was it correction? No. Was it prevention? No, because he was not a man who was walking near the edge of the world. It was education. And he understands that. At the very end, this is what he says, chapter 42 verse 6, “I had heard of you with my ear, now my eye sees you.” The end result of what happened to Job was a clearer vision of God and four verses later in verse 10 of chapter 42 he says, “And now I pray for others.” He had been educated to the place where he saw God like he had never seen Him before, which made him a better man and a better teacher of others, more sympathetic.

  Well, that’s the background of discipline and why it happens. So verse 5 says, we do need to get to the text, “You have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons.” You should be expecting this. Why is this a shock to you?

  You remember this morning we read 2 Corinthians where Paul says, “Let me prove I’m an Apostle,” and he endeavors to give testimony to the legitimacy of his apostleship by the immensity of his pain and suffering. Try that on a prosperity gospel. Try that on the prosperity preacher. It’s the opposite. Just as the Apostles legitimacy was manifest by his suffering, so our legitimacy as saints is manifest by our suffering. And it’s not random suffering, it’s not willy-nilly suffering, it’s not Satan doing this, we aren’t his, we have a loving heavenly father who is doing the discipline for his own purposes.

  So have you forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons? Look, you’re Jewish people. Did somehow you forget the book of Proverbs? Did you forget Proverbs chapter 3 verses 11 and 12, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor faint when you are reproved by Him? For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines and He scourges every son He receives.” How important is it to quote to these Jewish people from the familiar Proverbs that say you should expect it, my son, and not regard it lightly and not faint under it, but understand the Lord loves and therefore disciplines. The Lord receives and therefore scourges. It’s the nature of being your loving Father.”

  So he wants his Jewish leaders to recall the words of Proverbs 3 so they will see that this is to be expected, this is to be anticipated, this discipline that comes from the Lord. So the scriptures that were written before for our learning that we might through endurance and comfort from the scriptures have hope, Romans 15 says, are where the writer turns. Have you forgotten that exhortation addressed to you as sons? Proverbs were not written for unbelievers but for believers and do we remember that the book of Proverbs was primarily a tool put in the hands of fathers for the instruction of sons and daughters as well? And be reminded that the exhortations there are just that, they are exhortations addressed to you. That is a very important thing that the Scripture in the Proverbs though written long before this group of Jewish believers ever came together was addressed to them. This is the timelessness of Scripture, it is equally addressed to us.

  Now, I have a few minutes left so I’m just going to cover the rest of this rapidly. I want to show you two perils in discipline. I want to show you two proofs in discipline. And I want to show you two products in discipline. Two perils in discipline, what can go wrong?

  Well there in verse 5, you could regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, or you could faint when you’re reproved by Him. Those are the opposite extremes, right? You think it’s a minor thing, or it literally knocks you flat. Either of those extremes is unacceptable. Do not regard the discipline of the Lord lightly. Don’t misjudge its urgency, its important, be it for correction, make that heart examination, be it for protection, get in line and stay away from the edges of sin, be it for education, take your lessons and become a sympathetic teacher to others who suffer. But do not treat it lightly.

  Whatever troubles come into your life, whatever trials come into your live, view them as the discipline of God. You can treat them lightly by being callous, by not thinking spiritually about them, or by complaining, becoming sour and bitter. Like Israel in the wilderness, you can complain all the time. Arthur Pink said, “God always chastens twice if we’re not humbled by the first.” Remind yourself of how much sin there is yet in you, view the corruptions of your own heart and marvel that God has not smitten you more severely and more often. Form the habit of heeding the disciplines that come.

  You can also treat them lightly by simply seeing them as some kind of unjust act. You can treat them lightly by failing to change, being obstinate. You don’t want to take a shallow look at the trials of life. Take a deep look, deep spiritual look.

  Secondly, and on the other extreme, it says from Proverbs 3:11, “Nor faint when you’re reproved by Him.” This is just as bad. This is to sink down in some level of despondency. This is when you get so discouraged, so low you’re going to the medicine cabinet all the time just to cope and you’re coming around all the time with a “poor me” story thinking sympathy instead of being exercised by the discipline, you give up, you become kind of inert. Psalm 34:19 says, “Many are the inflictions of the righteous.” Expect them...expect them.

  The Psalmist could be melancholy, couldn’t he? He had a way of getting out of it did David. Psalm 42, he finally says to himself, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” right? Why are you in this depressed condition? Why are you disquieted in me? Hope in God, I will yet praise Him. Climb out of your despair.

  You should never despair about the trouble that comes to your life, never. It is the discipline of God, you should rejoice in it. So those are the two perils. Treat it lightly, or be literally crushed under it. There are also two proofs in discipline. Discipline proves two things.

  See if you can see them there, verses 6 through 8. “For those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines and scourges every son whom He receives. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with sons, for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.”

  Did you see them there? There are two things that are proven by discipline...one, God’s love; two, your sonship. That’s right, first God’s love. Two great things become clear in His discipline, two wonderful realities are proven. First, whom the Lord loves He disciplines. That’s why you don’t faint. That’s why you don’t ignore or despise the discipline of God, it all proceeds from His love. Have that sweet assurance that everything that comes into your life comes from God’s love. I can tell you, I’ve lived long enough to know, that it’s the pains of life that drive you to Him. It’s the pains of life that purge your soul. It’s the pains of life that make you a better believer, a more sympathetic teacher.

  A man one day was walking up to a stranger and he said, “Why are you looking over the wall?” And the man said, “Because I can’t see through it.” So I say to you, do what David did, look over the wall. You can’t see through it, why are you troubled, you don’t need to be. Get the upward look.

  Revelation 3:19 and there are a lot of passages that I’m not going to give you tonight, “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline. Therefore be zealous and repent. Those whom I love I reprove and discipline.”

  Was it love that elected us? Were we not chosen by sovereign love? In love, Ephesians 1, in love having predestined us.” Was it love that redeemed us? Did not God love us when we were enemies? “It is love that effectually calls us, in loving kindness I have called you,” Jeremiah 31:3. It’s all about love. It’s all motivated by love. Read Lamentations 3:31 to 33 for a good illustration of that. It is...love is understandable to us because we know that any father who really loves his child, disciplines that child. Because why? Because he wants the best from that child and he knows that in the heart of that child as in his own heart resides the worst. Every mass murderer, every serial killer, every pervert of every kind was once somebody’s little child with a heart of innocence that hadn’t yet expressed itself. A loving father disciplines for correction, for protection, for education because he loves the child and he feels the pain. My Dad always used to say to me, “This hurts you more than it does me..(he said it backwards), and then he’d wallop me. And I didn’t buy it. I...I just didn’t buy it until I became a father.

  Isaiah 63:9 says, “In...speaking of Israel...in all their affliction, He was afflicted.” Sure He feels the pain but He understands the benefit. The discipline proves He loves you. Secondly, it proves you’re sons.

  Verse 6 says, “He scourges every son whom He receives.” God...verse 7...deals with you as with sons. What son is there whom his father doesn’t discipline?” If you’re without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you’re illegitimate children and not sons. All of our Father’s sons are going to experience discipline. You have all these people running around preaching this silly notion that all God wants you to be is slap-happy all the time. Quite the contrary. Every son He scourges. Proper training must include corporeal correction of behavior. “He that spares the rod...as I said from Proverbs 13...spoils the child. But he that loves him, chastens him many times.” Proverbs 19:18, “Chasten your son while there’s hope and let not your soul spare for his crying.” Proverbs 22:15, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child but the rod of correction will drive it far from him.” Proverbs 23:13 and 14, “Withhold not correction from the child for if you beat him with a rod he shall not die. You’ll beat him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell.” What a promise. Proverbs 29:15, “The rod and reproof give wisdom but a child left to himself brings his mother to shame.” Certainly our world is full of testimonies to that, huh?

  It is for discipline that you endure. In other words, discipline is the essence of enduring spiritual development, spiritual life. God is dealing with us as sons.

  So, we’ve seen the perils in discipline. We’ve seen the proofs of discipline, that He loves us and that we’re true sons.

  There are two products in discipline, finally. Two things that God produces. They’re obvious. Verse 9, “Furthermore we had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them, shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live?” We respect our earthly fathers, shouldn’t we respect our spiritual Father, right? We give honor to our earthly father for the discipline that he gives to us out of love and because we’re sons. Shouldn’t we do the same with our heavenly father because this is what it produces, the first thing...life. Be subject to the spiritual Father and live...and live. This, by the way, is in contrast to Deuteronomy 21:18 to 21. Deuteronomy 21:18 to 21 describes a situation where you have a child that’s disobedient, a child that’s rebellious, a child that’s dishonor to the parents. And you know what the prescription is for that child? Kill the child...kill the child. Capital punishment for a rebellious, disobedient child.

  With that being the original standard, parents had an awful lot at stake because they had a legitimate, God-given reason to have their child executed if that child was not an obedient, responsive, respectful child. And that is why it says here in this verse that our spiritual Father wants to subject us to discipline that will give us life, not death; eternal life, abundant life. It’s not just that we will live eternally, it’s that we’ll really live.

  You know, the believer who is most obedient is living the Christian life at its max, right? The more rebellious you are, the more undisciplined you are, the more disobedient you are, the less you enjoy life.

  Second thing is not only life in its fullness, but verse 10, “They disciplined us for a short time, our earthly fathers, that seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good so that we may share His...what?...His holiness.” So that’s the second product in discipline...holiness. So we get a full, rich, enjoyable life and holiness. Oh, we’ll have eternal life and we’ll have eternal holiness but this is talking about here and now. You received the promise of eternal holiness when you put your faith in Christ. Discipline does not contribute to that. You received eternal life when you were saved. Discipline doesn’t contribute to that. Discipline contributes to how much you enjoy this life and all its riches in Christ and how you progress down the path of godliness and holiness and the two are inseparable, right? Because really living is connected to living a life of virtue. And the Lord keeps up the discipline throughout our lives to accomplish these ends.

  One final word. You say, “Well, it seems a little counter-intuitive, this idea, you know, of becoming a Christian and now all of a sudden I’m coming under this discipline.” And so, in verse 11 he kind of acknowledges that. “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful.”

  I mean, let’s be honest, right? When you’re going through the agony and the pain, whether it’s an illness or a job loss or an economic stress, or trouble with your children, or trouble with your spouse, or who knows what it is, a myriad of things, it doesn’t seem joyful at the time, it seems sorrowful. Yet to those who have been trained by it, if you’ll see it for what it is, training, correction, protection, education, and you learn your lessons, it will yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Your life will be just filled with the products that righteousness produces.

  Carnal senses react negatively...of course. Natural reason reacts negatively. We find no joy in the cancer diagnosis. We find no joy in the unresolved conflicts that come into our relationships. We go through a terrible time grieving over them and feeling the pain and the sorrow. But afterward...that’s the big...that’s the big word...afterward. For the moment it’s not joyful but afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Righteousness and peace go together, don’t they? When you’re righteous, you’re at peace.

  So, there’s...there’s the issue of discipline laid out for us. And this completes the picture of living by faith and understanding that the life of faith is a life of challenges, it’s a life of trials and suffering as it was for all the people in chapter 11 and has been for all the people who have ever lived by faith. But we triumph over that faith by focusing on Jesus who also triumphed in the midst of the most horrendous suffering anyone would ever or could ever even conceive of. The discipline of God is building us up to righteousness so that we can live lives that are marked by peace.

  Father, we thank You again tonight because Your Word is alive and powerful, refreshing, challenging, instructive. Thank You for teaching us. Help us now, Lord, to understand the implications of this in our own lives, to look at life perhaps differently, to see that we are not being victimized by Satan, we’re not being victimized by Your enemies, we are being trained by You toward righteousness. This is all about sanctification. Thank You for loving us that much that You would make us sons, that You would love us by conforming us even in this life through our suffering to the very image of Christ, Your true and eternal Son who Himself was perfected through suffering. We love You as a faithful Father and desire to be the children that You would have us to be, sons that You would not be ashamed of. Work that work in us for Your glory, we pray. Amen.

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