Tonight we’re meeting in homes throughout the area, but during our regular Monday night meetings, we’re studying through Hebrews 11. Here are the notes for the first study, from a few Monday nights ago.
We’re reading Hebrews 11 because we want help for our journey through a difficult world. Life is difficult. Hebrews tells us that what we need to make it through is faith.
For instance:
Hebrews 4:1-2 Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.
There is something up ahead of us called “God’s rest.” You can fail to enter it. We have examples in the scriptures, stories of people who did not get there. They were consumed by the pain and grief and stress of this world, and failed to get to God’s rest, because they did not hear God’s words with faith. Can you relate to this?
The counter-example is in Hebrews 6…
Hebrews 6:10-15 For God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name, in that you have ministered to the saints, and do minister. And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. For when God made a promise to Abraham, because He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, saying, “Surely blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply you.” And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise.
You can get tired in your life of service to God. (v.11) Notice: they shouldn’t be sluggish in what? (v.10) It can become hard to imagine continuing to believe and persevere through all the opposition for your whole life. But (v.12) we are supposed to know the stories of those who’ve gone before us. Abraham is an example. (v.13) He actually got what God had promised him after…what? (v.15). So…when God wants to help us endure, one of the things he does is to remind us of all the people who’ve gone before us, and how they’ve endured. You could call verses 11 and 12 the theme verses for our whole study of Hebrews 11. What’s the point of doing this? That we would imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. We’re going to zero in on faith in particular, because that’s what Chapter 11 does. And I wonder if Faith is the reason that people endure…I think it is, so if you zero in on faith, you’ll wind up with the fruit of endurance. Those in Chapter 4 did not have it. Abraham, here in chapter 6, did.
Hebrews 10:19-23 Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
What do you need to really have closeness with God? Look at verse 22. Look at the central place faith occupies in our ability to draw close to God. And verse 23 is the idea of endurance again.
Hebrews 10:35-37 Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise: “For yet a little while, And He who is coming will come and will not tarry.
Here it is again… what do we need? We need the ability to endure. How does someone endure? Look at the next verse…
Hebrews 10:38-39 Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him.” But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.
Those who endure, those who are able to press on, those who are able to continue actively doing the things God wants done in the world no matter how discouraging life gets, are those who live by faith. And then, at the end, they inherit the promises. And if we say… honestly, that just seems like it’s going to be so… hard… Hebrews says, well, it can be done. Remember the lives of all the people who’ve already done it. What you need to have is faith. And when you read on and hit chapter 11 verse 1, it’s almost like the writer of Hebrews imagines an objection something like, “Ok, but what does that even mean? What is faith? Telling myself things I can’t see are real? How can it really help me in my actual daily life?”
And so you get something that sounds like a definition:
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
So this is partly a definition. What does it mean? “Substance” has the idea of “that which stands under” something—we could say, “the ultimate reality” which kind of is hard to understand, so some people have opted to read this word to mean “guarantee” (ESV = “assurance”) “of things hoped for” So faith is in some way the guarantee or reality of what we hope for. “evidence…of things not seen” kind of means the same thing. Is it saying faith connects us to those things we haven’t see yet? Or is it saying that faith itself is the evidence—having faith shows that these things are true. It’s kind of vague. Maybe it’s kind of vague because we’re supposed to…feel pressure just to to keep reading into Hebrews 11 in order to really get it…
If “we need faith to make it through this difficult world,” then what we see as we keep reading into chapter 11 is that the best way to learn about what faith is, is to actually watch it in action—to see all the ways that people have lived by faith, and what it’s meant in their lives. Maybe the rest of the chapter is the fullest definition of what verse 1 means. And I think, in my life, one of the things God has used the Bible for, time and time again, is to basically say to me: “Slow down, Brian. Slow down. The urgency you think you feel, the energy the world is buzzing with right now, all this angst and worry and fury—it’s nothing new to God. He knows what you need. What you need is endurance. And what you need to be able endure, is faith.” And then, over and over again, what God does is, invite us to stop, sit down at his feet, and listen to the stories he wants to tell.
Maybe it’s such a familiar thing that you haven’t noticed how unexpected it really is. What if every time you had a plumbing problem you called your plumber and he told you stories about his old plumbing exploits…? You ever turned to the bible and get frustrated by stories that seem to have nothing to do with your life? Why is Hebrews 11 a bunch of stories? Why is the bible a bunch of stories? Why not just give us information—facts about God? Why tell the stories? The bible gives two reasons for this. First: John 5:39 — “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me.”
The bible tells us about Jesus—that’s the most important thing it does, so we can know who he is and how to trust in him. But there’s another thing these stories do… First, look at Romans 15:4 …
“For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.
The stories in the bible were written to help us have “endurance” so we could keep hoping. Now look at 1 Corinthians 10.
1 Corinthians 10:1-11
Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, 2 all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. 5 But with most of them God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. 6 Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. 7 And do not become idolaters as were some of them. As it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” 8 Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell; 9 nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed by serpents; 10 nor complain, as some of them also complained, and were destroyed by the destroyer. 11 Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.
Notice verse 1 and verse 6 and verse 10. Verse1 says we need to be “aware of”…two lists of stories in between v.6 and 10. The events in this list are “examples” for us… (see language map at end). In other words, in addition to pointing us to Jesus as the only hope for the whole world, the stories in the Bible, especially the old testament, serve to educate us about all kinds of important things. Verse six here gives us just one to those things—the stories can help us, when we’re feeling tempted by sin. The stories in the Bible, even all those old Testament stories, can help you defeat temptation. Now that’s just one thing they can do, but it’s a huge, important thing.
And if we stop and think about how they can actually help us defeat temptation, we get a blueprint for how God uses the historical stories collected in the scriptures to grow us spiritually. The example of that in 1 Corinthians 10 is, if we are getting tempted, and we know the stories referred to in verses one through ten, we can remember what happened to the people who gave into temptation—all the heart break and misery and alienation from god that spun out of their cravings and their indulgence of their wants…and if we then look back at our own lives there’s a good chance we’ll see patterns that match what happened to those people back then, and we can realize that we’re facing the same kinds of situations, and God will use those stories to say something like: “Remember Kibroth Hattaavah?” And we’ll be like, “Oh yeah God, totally, thank you for reminding me about Kibroth Hataavah, because of Kibroth Hataavah, I am totally not giving in to that temptation.” Do those words mean anything to you, Kibroth Hataavah? God wants them to. How are you going to defeat temptation if you don’t know the history of things like…what happened when the children of Israel got really dissatisfied with all the good things God had done for them and decided that the one thing they didn’t have, which was fresh meat to eat, meant more to them than everything they did have, and they started feeling like, if they didn’t get that, life wasn’t worth living?
God has filled his word with stories—events, battles, journeys, drama, and people—good people, shifty people, people whose lives were mixed bags, dangerous people, all kinds of characters and things that happened, so that we will have mental patterns, which, as we move through life, God can apply to all the situations we face.
You meet someone at work, and you can get to know him, and God can help you notice things about him, and you can call to mind a story from 1 Samuel, and you can think… “That guy’s like Doeg. I need to watch out for him.” You can find yourself in a stressful situation, you can think, “Why me?” and then the Holy Spirit can bring to mind the story of Esther, and you can think, “Oh yeah. She didn’t shrink from her time. I can’t shrink from mine.” You can ask older people what they think about some issue, and you can get an answer you don’t like, and get tempted to write them off and just listen to younger people who “get it,” and the Holy Spirit can say to you… “remember Rehoboam and his father’s counselors.” And on and on it goes.
I have become convinced that God wants to populate our minds with the stories and characters of the Old Testament, and the New, and he wants us to read our world through them. They provide the patterns we need to understand our lives, and to grow in faith. (The word for “examples” in the 1 Corinthians passage, in the original language, has the idea of something that leaves an impression, or a pattern to follow.)
We live in a time when competing sources of information are vying for our allegiance. And there are all these competing narratives about where the world has come from and where it’s headed. And so we have a desperate need to remember the one trustworthy source of information, God’s word, and the one grand narrative that God tells—What is the true story of the world? And where is the world actually headed? And what about right now? What are we supposed to be doing while we wait for Jesus to come? The answer is, we’re supposed to walk by faith.
“What do we do if everything starts to fall apart?” The Book of Hebrews comes to us and says: live by faith. Endure. “But what if we can’t even figure out what’s really going on in the world? What if it’s hard to know what’s really happening and who to really believe? Walk by faith? How do we do that?” Hebrews 11 says well, you do it like Abraham. And you do it like Abel. Enoch. Noah. Sarah. Like all the people before you who lived in confusing, unstable times. They walked by faith, and you can too. And here’s how. That’s the eleventh chapter of Hebrews.
So… “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Does that mean that faith “stands under” what we hope for, and “guarantees” that what we don’t see yet will happen? Well, remember Abel, and the way he offered the true sacrifice, even though right next to him, his brother Cain was following a totally different course? That’s what it means. Remember how Noah built that huge boat? All that time and labor in a hostile world? That’s what it means.
And over the next few weeks, we’re going to see what each story teaches us specifically about how a person can live by faith. So that we can show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, so that that we do not become sluggish, but instead persevere in imitating those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.