By Faith

We return this evening to our study of the book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11. And before we look at God's word once again, let us ask him to bless our time together. Our gracious heavenly father, this evening as we gather together to once again hear your word, we would ask that by your spirit you would be with us, that you would help us to lay aside those things that would be distractions to us, the cares and worries of the coming day and week, and Lord that we would focus upon your truth this evening, we pray in Christ's name.

We entered into this 11th chapter last month as we have been studying through the book of Hebrews, and we spent a fair amount of time looking at the beginning definition of faith. We talked about the kinds of aspects of faith.

You remember such things as notitia and absentia and fiducia. Hopefully you have been contemplating those Latin terms over the dinner table at home ever since the last time we talked about them, or maybe not.

But if you haven't been, I really don't want to hear about that. But thinking about this subject of faith and what faith really is, we know that the 11th chapter is a lengthy discussion of examples of faith.

Now the question of course that immediately enters into our thinking is, well did all these people have the exact same level of faith, same kind of faith? And I think we need to be careful that we don't sort of smash down the various stories into just one kind of presentation of faith.

The point is that the writer here is saying to the believers who are under pressure, remember how chapter 10, that last verse provides the introduction, but we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith in the preserving of the soul.

Let's talk about faith. Let's talk about how there have been many before us who have likewise been faced with tremendous challenges, likewise been faced with tremendous difficulties, and yet they give us an example of what it means to have faith.

And so we talked a little bit about how faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, but we didn't really go beyond that. We looked a little bit sort of at verse 3, but verse 3 is separated from verse 1 by normally verse 2, but logically also we listen to verse 2, For by it the men of old gained approval.

By faith we understand the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. Now, if you read through the chapter, you might go, it would seem more logical for verse 2 to have been after verse 3, because verse 3 sounds like it's pretty much a continuation of what verse 1 was saying.

And verse 2 seems to be out of place. Unless what verse 2 is, is a general introduction about the men of old gained approval from God, and then what is the first event that is noted? Even before man existed, you have the creation of the worlds.

And so if we're looking at Genesis as sort of the storybook here at the beginning from which we're drawing our examples, the first thing that you encounter in Genesis is what? The story of the creation.

And so possibly that's why verse 2 is where it is, is that that's sort of the introduction. We're going to be looking at men of old, and we're going to be seeing how men of old by faith gained approval with God.

That is how they gained approval with God. It has never been by the allegedly righteous works someone did. Faith has always been necessary. And really, once the writer begins to introduce this, he provides somewhat of a summary statement in verse 6, a verse that most of us are very familiar with.

And without faith, it is impossible to please Him. For he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is rewarder of those who seek Him. Somewhat of a summary statement that emphasizes that apart from faith, you might see people who do things that look righteous.

But apart from the presence of faith, there is no action that a person can undertake that is going to bring them approval with God. And this has always been the case. From the very beginning, a person who does not have that proper relationship with God, and if you don't have faith in the one true God, you can't have a relationship with Him, obviously, a person that does not have that faith with God cannot do anything that is truly pleasing in His sight.

There is an absolute necessity. A supremacy to faith is the assertion that is being made. And so, we are told that the men of old gained approval by faith. And so, the chapter then begins this repetitive use of the word Pistai, by faith, in verse 3.

By faith, something happens. By faith, this person did something. By faith, that person accomplished something. But the first use of by faith is there 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 which are visible.

Now, if you want to absolutely turn your mind into mashed potatoes, I could direct you to numerous biblical commentaries and commentators down through the years who have gone into an incredible amount of detail, especially on the phrase, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

I mean, especially people who seem to really like philosophy and speculative theology have written large amounts of material on that particular phrase. We're not going to spend too much time following them in their meandering thoughts.

I think, however, there is something extremely important for us to consider in verse 3 today. By faith, we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God. It is a matter of faith, acceptance of the divine revelation that has been given to us in Jesus Christ and in the written Word to recognize that we do not live in a haphazard universe that is the result of mere chance.

My friends, there is a fundamental distinction, a massive gap between viewing the world around us, the universe as a whole, and hence, us and our place in this universe, viewing that as a part of a planned, orderly event that has a beginning and an end and a purpose, and viewing ourselves as purely the result of random chance.

The difference between those two perspectives cannot be emphasized too greatly. And I truly believe that the massive chasm that we feel opening up at our feet in our own society today, between where we stand and where many, many others stand, is due to the fact that over the past 150ish years, there has been a complete change in how mankind in Western society views himself and views the world.

And not just in Western society, obviously, in many other societies as well. If we do not believe that this world has purpose, then so much of what the Word of God says ends up having no meaning whatsoever.

This is a fundamental worldview conflict. And here, the scriptures identify it as a matter of faith. And remember, faith is not blind in the sense of it doesn't have an object. Faith is not turning off one's mind.

Instead, by faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God. Now, most of your translations won't capitalize the word, Word, there, though it's hard to avoid making the connection in our minds between this verse and what we have in Hebrews 1, and what we have in John chapter 1, where the Logos, the Word, is that by which all things are made.

But what is being asserted here is that God is the creator, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. In other words, God has created all things, and God did not just simply organize some kind of pre-existing matter.

He's not like the gods of the pagans. The gods of the pagans always came out of some greater physical reality. Some of them have stories of where a primeval god is cut in half, and some of the universe and some of the planets and stuff comes from one half, and the stars come from another half, and all the rest of this stuff.

But there is always an intimate connection between God and everything that's material, so that the idea of a creator who is before all things and independent of all things, and upon whom all other things exist, that was not something that they understood or something that they theorized.

And yet, along comes this strange religion of the Jews, and strange because those Jews say, there is the only God. And they're saying their God did not come from other gods, did not come from a certain mountain, did not come from some ancient cosmic accident, but instead has eternally existed, and is the creator of all things, and by his word all things come into existence.

What a strange idea these people have. Well, this is the assertion that is being made by the author here. By faith we understand the world's repaired by the word of God, and if that is a part of faith, then what is it to say otherwise?

It is to deny biblical reality. It is to deny biblical faith, and my how many there are today, who for various and sundry reasons, and there are, I believe me, I fought this battle all the way through high school, then I went to a Christian college, and had to continue fighting the battle there, to be perfectly honest with you, to engage these subjects, especially as a science major, as well as a Bible major at the same time.

There are many, many things we could go into in the discussion of this particular subject, but let me just simply state this. It seems to me that fundamentally there are many people who call themselves Christians today, and who may well very much be believers in Jesus Christ, but they have not been instructed appropriately on the subject of the relationship of divine revelation to any other source of truth in regards to the created world.

In other words, they seem to have the idea that God's revelation can be subserviated to other sources of information. Now, we all know that the Bible is not intended to be a physics textbook. It's not intended to, what's the example Brother Callahan has used in the past?

It says if you want to rebuild a Borg-Warner 350 automatic transmission, it's not going to do you much good to be trying to find the instructions between Leviticus and Deuteronomy, or something like that.

You're going to need to look someplace else. However, the Word of God gives us the foundations, the basis upon which to make sense and order out of God's creation, so that we can say, there's one set of instructions on how to rebuild this transmission.

There's not 27 different ways to do it. Because tomorrow is going to be like today, the order of the universe, the laws of physics, the things that allow a transmission to work, pressure and hydraulics, and all the rest of that stuff.

Why is that so ordered? Why is that something we can study and understand? It's because God is the creator of all things. It provides us with that framework upon which we can understand these things. And so, I do believe that it is an act of rebellion to deny that God is the creator.

I believe it's an act of rebellion. Now, that can be done in many different ways. You can do it in a blatant, overt way, or what you can do is, you can limit God's act of rebellion to sort of like the deists.

If you know anything about the deists, they're, as a group, not overly popular today. They had been much larger, say, around the time of the American Revolution. I think there's still a lot of deists around functionally, but not just in the sense of using that particular name.

And a deist believes that there is a God, but that we really don't know anything about the God. And he obviously is necessary sort of to get things going, but basically what he did is, he wound up the universe, and he set it off, and then he's gone on vacation to Fiji or something ever since then, and has not bothered to send any note cards or postcards home as to what's going on.

So, he's not communicated his will. He doesn't really have any will, doesn't really have any purpose. They recognize there is a need for a creator, but they didn't want to give a place for revelation, divine law, redemption, etc., etc.

That's the deistic kind of approach, and I think there are many people who have that kind of approach to looking at the creatorship of God. They want to find a way to remain religious, in one sense, but at the same time, bow the knee to, and I'm going to use a very specific term here, and I mean it intentionally, scientism.

There is a difference between science and scientism. Science is the study of what we would say is God's creation, and the very fact that anything can be defined, that we can know things, we can see relationships between things, we can study things, I see imprinted all over the creation, from the massive size of the universe, and the laws that govern the physical bodies, all the way down into the nucleus of the cell, into fractal geometry, into all these things that we have discovered, only over the past couple of, sometimes, decades, or even a couple of hundreds of years, I see God's fingerprint all over these things, and yet other people can stare at it and never see it at all.

Why is that? And that's the difference between science, which is a study of factual things, and scientism, which always includes, in its fundamental assertion, the idea that man can know truly and properly things about the universe around him, without any reference, and in fact, by repudiating any reference to the creator himself, so that this impersonal, almost buddhistic force type idea, this idea of science, I follow science, becomes really an object of worship.

Have you ever listened to Richard Dawkins? If you want a fundamentalist worshipper of scientism, listen to Richard Dawkins. Oh my. I've pointed out, Doug Wilson said it quite rightly about Christopher Hitchens.

It's even more true about Richard Dawkins. There's two things certain about him. He knows God doesn't exist, and he hates him. And it just flows. Every week that someone sends me a link to some new thing that Richard Dawkins has put out, oh, just the expression of this visceral detestation of God.

But you would think that if he's really the atheist he claims to be, there would be no spiritual nature to his worldview. But there is. He cannot know what he knows about genetics and the gene without giving some expression to the desire to worship.

He becomes a fundamentalistic worshipper of scientism. And that scientism is what men have used to remove from the thinking of mankind, you have a creator, and because you have a creator, someday you will stand before him and you will be judged.

Now, it's funny. The state has to do everything it can to try to inculcate that thinking into the young person. That's why, for example, in Sweden, there's a young boy that was taken away from his parents who were homeschooling him.

Haven't seen him in over two years. Why? Because the state must have the children. Why? Why? Why not just use popular culture to communicate what the state wants its people to believe? Because there's this thing called the image of God.

And it takes a lot of work to suppress that image of God. And so there's got to be constant exposure and constant pushing down that knowledge of God and replacing it with something else, because our conscience, those young kids, when they do what's wrong, there's that furtive look.

There's that conscience. They know. And you've got to try to efface that. You've got to try to suppress that. You've got to try to get rid of that. That's why the state wants your kids. It wants to fill their minds with everything mainly of amusing thoughts to try to keep them from recognizing that they are created in the image of God.

They don't want them to understand that the world's repaired by the Word of God, because if they understand that, then they will never grant ultimate authority to the state. They will even hold the state accountable to God.

Oh no, what will happen if that happens? You see, theology does matter. And so the first statement is made by faith. We understand the world's repaired by the Word of God, so what is seen is not made of things which are visible.

It's not just some archaic leftover from a time when we had the God of the gaps. The God of the gaps. That's the big thing today, is to talk about the God of the gaps. See, as our knowledge expands, oh, we are so proud of our knowledge.

As our knowledge expands, the room for God contracts, because all we needed was the God of the gaps. We didn't know. Well, God does it. Well, God does it. What's thunder? I don't know. It must be God.

And so they say, you see, the more and more we learn, then the less and less room there is for God. I don't know about you, but I've loved, I've always loved studying physical sciences. I mean, you don't major in biology if you don't find that to be something that's extremely interesting.

I still find it very interesting. And there are few things, few areas of study that have been more of a bulwark in my thinking regarding the existence of God than to look at what we have learned just in the past 60 years about the physical universe around us.

Anyone who can look at the mechanisms we have discovered biochemically and not see the designer, there must be something going on. Oh, they're suppressing the knowledge of God. How did the apostle Paul so accurately represent and recognize the activity of man long before man was doing what he's doing now in suppressing this knowledge?

I mean, it's just like the tremendous guilt that lies upon every society today that murders unborn children. There has never been a time in man's history that we have known more about life in the womb.

I think about little Clementine and I think back on when Josh was in the womb and we got this fuzzy black and white ultrasound type thing. That's all we got. And Clementine has this 3D full color thing with the face and everything else.

And it's just like, wow, you're getting old, son. That's all there is to it. Your technology is a little dated now, shall we say. And of course, back when I was born, you couldn't do any of that stuff.

So we see so much more. We know so much more. And yet we have the absolute arrogance. And it's what it is. It's arrogance to go, well, we understand a little bit more now about how the child develops in the womb.

And there's much we still can't even begin to explain as to how that one fertilized egg begins to differentiate into all these things. But we're getting some ideas and we're starting to see a little bit more of the mechanics.

And it's almost like someone picking up my iPad here and they've never seen one before. But after a while, they know the power button's here. You can plug the headset in there. And here's the thing to adjust the volume.

And now that I know a little something about it, I don't have to think there is a creator. That's ridiculous. And if that's how man is, well, you know a little bit more about the mechanics. The God of the gaps, you know, he just keeps getting smaller and smaller.

It is amazing, amazing to see that the Apostle Paul got it right a long time ago, professing themselves to be wise. They became fools. It literally says in Romans 1 that their reasoning, their dialogues in their minds became futile and empty.

And we see that around us. Oh, we see that around us. And what did we talk about this morning? We talked about ways in which the world could try to make us ashamed of the gospel. Let me tell you something.

Right here is probably one of the primary mechanisms that is used today to try to make you ashamed of being a Christian. Oh, you don't believe God created this, do you? Oh, come on. I bet you probably believe in Noah and the ark too.

He's a few verses later. Yeah, he's down there just a few verses down. A few people. They're actually people making the strong suggestion that we should not be allowed. Richard Dawkins has said this openly.

He considers the idea of giving Christian parents the right to instruct their children about the creation of the world to be child abuse that the state should be able to stop by taking your children from you.

How's that? That's what a real secularist wants. That's child abuse. That's terrible. Oh, how can you do that? Of course, I would respond. You tell people that they are nothing more. In fact, just this afternoon, wasn't looking for it.

Wasn't looking for it. It just happened to come up in something that was sent to me just this afternoon. I was reading Richard Dawkins and he was saying, you see, the only thing that's really eternal in mankind is his genes.

We, as individuals, are throwaway cardboard boxes, in essence. We're just gene carriers. But we pass our genes on to the next generation and then we just get, that's all. That's the only purpose we have.

That's it. We're just disposable. What's really eternal are our genes. And those little snippets of nucleic acids and the order in which they are placed, that's the only thing that has any lasting value.

You are nothing but the cardboard box in which the iPad comes. That's all you are. You don't see what's happening to Western society now that that has become the orthodox way of viewing things. Russian society is disappearing.

You know why? Because Russians are disappearing. You know why? Because they love abortion. Oh, they have abortion. Man, they have abortion. The Russian government's now realized, you know, ran the numbers and realized, we're going to disappear.

We're not having enough kids. We're actually going to vanish from the face of the planet. They're now paying people to have children. It may be too late. It's become so ingrained that the only reason you have to exist is for the stuff you can gather and the happiness you can generate for yourself.

Don't worry about your country. Don't worry about your family. Don't worry about offspring. And don't worry about grandchildren. It doesn't matter. Live for yourself. For tomorrow you die and your genes are gone.

That's the only purpose you had anyway. I consider that child abuse. I consider that human abuse. It rips out from our hearts everything that is worthy and good. It turns morality and ethics into whatever you happen to feel they should be.

And we see the results all around us. The degradation of society and the speed at which it's going. By faith we understand the world's repaired by the Word of God. The world will say to you even this week, you better be embarrassed that you believe that.

Don't you dare be embarrassed. You see, what will help you to not be embarrassed is to realize that that person who's trying to make you embarrassed has been robbed of something that you possess by grace.

You possess it by grace. It gives you the recognition that you are the creature of God, the creation of God. That you are a part of all this that God is doing. That there is a sovereign creator. That you have a transcendent purpose, a transcendent meaning.

That God's law has meaning. That you can find joy because there is a way of life. There is a way that you have been created to behave and to act that will give you fulfillment. Because you have all that.

That person who's trying to intimidate you has been robbed of that. And one of the best ways I've found to not be embarrassed is to go on the offensive. I don't mean in an offensive way. Obviously we can use the term in more than one way.

But what I mean is to challenge back and say, Oh, so you believe that this world, with all of its informational purposeful order, with all of the laws by which it functions, by all of its massive incredible complexity that is far beyond anything that our highest scientific achievement can begin to mirror, just happened by random chance so that you are just the random result of atoms bouncing around and banging into each other.

And you want to say to me, I should be embarrassed by believing that I have been created by God and that I see his fingerprints all around me. Really? It might get an interesting conversation started.

It might get you a punch in the nose too. I don't know. Get an interesting conversation started. Don't be intimidated because by faith, the very first statement, think of all the by faiths in here. What Enoch does and Noah does and all the patriarchs and Abraham by faith.

But the very first one, if you miss the first one, how can you really understand the rest? By faith, Abraham. Well, so some guy 3 ,000 years ago, you know, did something. If God isn't the creator, if God really wasn't speaking, then it's like dominoes.

You start the first one down, the rest go with it. And so it's amazing today for me to be watching these organizations that have sprung up of Christians who become embarrassed about what God says in his word.

Now, I don't get it because Jesus clearly believed in the creation. I mean, I trust him for my salvation, but he was just confused about creation. Really? That's Christian faith? Honestly? But these organizations have sprung up to try to help Christians get together and come up with different ways of presenting Christianity to the world without all the stuff that's embarrassing to the Christian faith.

And yet the very first faith that is recommended to us in the hall of faith here in Hebrews chapter 11 is the faith that recognizes that the world's repaired by the word of God. So what is seen was not made of things which are visible.

God has the power to create. Now, you may have heard the theological statement, the theological phraseology we use for this. It's clearly what has been believed from the beginning, but the specific phraseology is normally creation out of nothing.

I'm not a real big fan of that phrase, only in this sense. Nothing doesn't exist. God wasn't nothing. It's not creation out of nothing. It's creation into nothing. In other words, creation finds its origin and its source in the creative word of God, in the powerful word of God, who says, let there be and there is.

And so it is creation into what was nothing before that. Not as if nothingness existed and had an existence unto itself, which is how the Latin phrase is normally expressed could be understood. What we do absolutely affirm is that God has the capacity and the power to create by his divine word.

He is not dependent upon pre-existing materials. He is not like the Mormon God who simply organizes pre-existing material and material itself is eternal. It's a completely different worldview than the Christian worldview.

But the very first thing that lays as a foundation under being able to recognize that God was involved with Abel and Cain and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and so on and so forth, all down to the chapter, the foundation to all of that is that the world in which they lived is an ordered, created world.

It has purpose and it has meaning. If you don't have that, if you don't have that foundation, there's no reason to continue reading on the chapter. That is why God has given us his revelation. He's given us that foundation.

And every atheist, every secularist, no matter how thorough their indoctrination has been, is still created in the imago dei, the image of God. It's still there. Oh, marred, damaged? Yes, they're still creating the image of God.

We still have a contact point with them. We dare not go to that point where we say, well, they're just too far gone. No reason. And I say to you that every atheist, every secularist, no matter how consistent they try to be, cannot help but at times give witness to the truth of the gospel.

They'll be driving down the road, probably angry with some Christian someplace for being a Christian, angry with somebody for reaffirming their existence in God. They look up, they see one of those Arizona sunsets.

And no matter how hard they try to go, oh, it's just because of the properties of light filtering through the atmosphere. And I know all about the different temperatures in the atmosphere and the bending of light.

Their worldview has no basis for saying that's beautiful. Outside of, well, you know, it's just chemical processes in your brain that have been taught over the years to recognize that as beautiful. Man, it must really be a bummer to have to be constantly dehumanizing yourself that way.

You know, it must be, it must be a real strain. A lot of energy. Must sleep well at night because it must be exhausting.

Because the next morning, there's going to be a beautiful sunrise. And they're going to have to start the process all over again. They're going to hear birds singing.

They're going to see beautiful little children. And that image of God is going to keep coming up and coming up. We have to pray that we'll have opportunity to say something. The Spirit of God will make that to come alive in their hearts.

But what's the first thing by faith? We understand. We know. In other words, it has to be a part of our thinking process. This is another one of those many places where one of the biggest dangers I've seen in the church today is we bring people in.

What has Pastor Frye said many, many times? What we win them with is what we win them to. We use some type of fluffy, self-help methodology perspective. We bring them in. We don't challenge their fundamental worldview.

We bring them in. Let them continue to have a worldly worldview. And we slather some Jesus on it. And we wonder why we end up with problems. This text tells us we understand. It needs to be a part of our thought process that God's the Creator.

Everything else we do, when we talk about death, when we talk about life, when we talk about the purposes we have, what does it all go back to? There's a purpose. God's involved. God's involved. And so we see by faith, we understand that the world's repaired by the Word of God.

I don't know about you, but I am so thankful that God, by His Spirit, has been merciful to me so that I understand. What would it be like to live in this world and to think it was, in fact, just a boiling cauldron of chaos going nowhere but toward destruction?

If you, this evening, have hope, if you, this evening, recognize that God is active in this world, be thankful because that faith came in the Spirit of God. Let's pray together. Indeed, our Heavenly Father, we do thank You for this Word, and we thank You for this promise.

And Lord, though the world would do everything in its power to rob us of this knowledge, we would pray that You, by Your Spirit, this evening, would once again confirm in our hearts that You are the one who said, You are the one who divided the light and the darkness.

You are the one who created all things and gave to all things purpose and meaning. Father, we thank You for that promise. We thank You that our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, believed that. And Lord, that to this day, Your people continue to be upheld by Your Spirit in recognizing who You are and what You've done.

Fathers, as we go forth this week, may we not be ashamed, but may we proclaim to a world that has been deceived and led astray the truth that leads to life. We pray in Christ's name.