How to See the Invisible — Ian Paisley

Reading Hebrews 11:23–29

You will find an authorized version of the Word of God in front of you in the pew. Pick it up and turn with me to the 11th chapter of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 11. We are going to read from verse 23 to verse 29.

The 23rd verse of the 11th chapter of Hebrews to verse 29. We read it together, taking your time from me and all taking part in the reading. By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents.

Because they saw he was a proper child and they were not afraid of the king's commandment. By faith, Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.

For he had respect unto the recompense of the reward. By faith, he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. Through faith, he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood.

Lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them. By faith, they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land, which the Egyptians a saying to do were drought. Ending our reading at verse 29 and God will seal the reading of his word.

I take the promised Holy Ghost, the blessed power of Pentecost to fill me to the uttermost. I take. Thank God he undertakes for me. And the people of God said, open your Bibles at the 11th chapter of Hebrews.

Seeing the Invisible Future Through Faith

And let me quote the last part of verse 27. For he endured as seeing him who is invisible. I want to speak on the subject this morning, how to see the invisible future. Someone has well said that God feels the future because God is kind from our sight.

Nevertheless, while that is true, humanity's millions all have an inner craze to tear down the curtains that divide our future from our present and look into what lies ahead for us all. Soothsayers and fortune tellers have always found plenty of employment in all the races of this world.

Their follies are followed after. The exploitation of the inquisitiveness of their fellows assures them of their trade. And the gullibility of the fools who follow them ensures ready listeners who can be so easily pleased.

Nevertheless, the future is closed, curtains off from the present that be known by any mere human. Only by divine revelation can the future reliably be made known. All the others who claim special sight of the future are mere propagandists.

They propagandize their own lives, own lies and their own follies. And are both charlatans and deceivers of poor deluded souls. The future be known. Surrender to us its most intimate seer. The invisible God be seen.

Finding out be made known to us as mere mortals. The answer to that question is not no. The answer to that question is yes. Yes, the future can be made known. Let me record something which was to reveal the whole history of the great world powers which were to come and control the entire habitable world.

Daniel’s Prophecies of World Empires

The first great world power was Babylon. It was revealed to King Nebuchadnezzar, the first sovereign of Babylon, what was going to happen century after century after he was gone. There was to follow the great Babylonian empire, the Median Persian empire.

This was revealed to the king in a dream. The empire of Medo-Persia was also going to perish just as Babylon perished. But it was to be succeeded by another great empire, the Grecian empire. Then the Grecian empire was to fade and the great Roman empire of the Caesars was going to rule the habitable world for many centuries.

What is more, two great religious groups were going to occupy great power. The first one is described as a little horn in Daniel 7 and verse 8. And that depicts the papacy. And then in chapter 8, there's another little horn depicted in Daniel and that is the little horn of Islam.

The two great world religions, how they apostatized is all explained. Given years before the history of these great empires and the development of the papacy and Islam, God revealed in the centuries before what would happen and it did happen.

It happened exactly as Daniel reported it. Yes, the entire future of the world can be known by divine revelation. Again, I ask the question, can the invisible God be seen in his future workings? They know and the answer is yes, most certainly.

Moses, Abraham, and the Invisible God

But in my text, we discover Moses and what did he see? He saw him who is invisible. Can the invisible God and all his ways be known to us? That is the plain teaching of this text. Abraham looked for a city whose builder and maker was the invisible God.

God the great designer. I was struck this week in my Bible study to notice that the word builder is the same root from which we get the word carpenter. The word carpenter is used in Matthew 13, 55 and Mark 6 and 3, meaning builder or constructor.

This word was used to describe the occupation of Christ. It was used as a word of derision and contempt. The sun. Is it not an interesting fact that Christ did not choose to be a shepherd when he came into this world and lived for 30 years, known as the hidden years of his ministry?

No, he was the constructor of all things. Without him was not anything made that was made John 1 and 3. And he condescended in the days of his flesh to follow a trade involving planning, calculation, designing and construction.

This is profoundly significant. But not only Abraham saw the invisible God, so did Moses. Moses feared not the visible Pharaoh. Why? Because he had seen the invisible God. Compare him to Elijah who said, I stand before the Lord.

And to Elijah, Elijah's successor, when he used the same unique expression. See Christ, God the Son, a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor. Yes, the invisible God can be seen. But also the invisible works of the invisible God can be seen.

Biblical Prophecy and the Certainty of Judgment

He who planned the world and all its future can reveal to his people what he will do in that future. The Bible is a great book of prophecy. It tells us what is going to happen before it happens. There is nothing hid from the author thereof and there is nothing hid from the light thereof.

The unknown can be known. The unknowable can become knowable. The Bible holds. The world still poses the question, what happens after death? And the world comes up with wild guesses and assertions. But the Bible, in the plainest possible speech, speaks absolutely authoritatively.

Speaking of the great judgment day, the infallible Word states, Matthew 25, 31 and 46, When the Son of Man shall come in his glory and all of the holy angels with him, not just some of the holy angels, please note, everyone, all of them, shall come with him.

Then he shall sit upon the throne of his glory. And he will say to those on his left hand, they shall go away into everlasting punishment. And to those on the right hand shall go into life eternal. Let it never be forgotten that God can and has revealed to this world that which will happen in the future times that lie before us.

God’s Sovereignty Over Time and History

And this book also reveals what has happened in former times. For God is the creator of all time, both former times and latter times. And he has planned and decreed everything that has already happened.

He has planned and decreed what is happening. He has planned and decreed what will happen. He holds the blueprint of all time. He himself wound up the clock of time and he alone will close it down. Time is the abject slave of the sovereign of time, which is our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord Jesus is the holder of the keys of time and death and hell. He is the great I Am. Oh, how wonderfully to know accurately what has happened in the past. We must remember that all creation is time-based, that the first thing ever created was what?

Time. The first thing God ever created was time. John Bunyan, the author of that bestseller, Pilgrim's Progress, also wrote one of the most interesting commentaries on the first ten chapters of the book of Genesis.

And the great John Bunyan said this, Although God be indeed omnipotent, and not only can, but doth do whatsoever he will, and though to do his works he needeth not length of time, yet it pleased him best in the creation of the world, though it could, had it pleased him, have done all by one only word, to proceed by degrees from one thing to another, until the whole creation was completed in six days' work.

And I would remind you those were six days of twenty-four hours each. I once went on a radio program with Dr. Bob Jones in Edinburgh when we were having a great World Congress of Fundamentalists. The man who interviewed us was an apostate, and he hated what we believed.

So he said, we have two strange men in our studio today. Two very uncommon men. There's not very many people like them, because they believe that the earth was created in seven days. I said, excuse me, sir, we believe nothing of the kind.

We believe the Lord created the world in six days. Get your facts right. It's nonplussed. Uniquely, when the radio program went out, they cut out all the controversy, because it showed up as own ignorance.

Literal Creation and the Fourth Commandment

How am I so sure that those days were days of twenty-four hours each? Because the fourth commandment would be meaningless if those were days of thousands and thousands of years. The fourth commandment said, in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth and rested on the seventh day.

Well, if the Sabbath was a day of many thousands of years, you couldn't keep the Sabbath. God never asks anyone to do something that can't be done. He asks you to do what can be done. But that's only an aside.

And for as much Bunyan went on as this work went on by degrees, now this thing and then another, it may not be amiss if in our discourse of this wonderful work, we begin where God began. And if we can, go wondering after Him who hath us brought.

The first thing God made was time. I say, it was time. All of the plan in which He would build this beautiful world, He made nothing before. But in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth in the beginning of time.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is. Therefore, the first day must first have a beginning to be. Therefore, the first day must have a beginning to be. Whatsoever was before time was eternal.

God alone is eternal. Therefore, no other creation of His is eternal, was made in time. Time, therefore, was indeed the beginning. It was the first of the creation of God. Now, angels created by God are well worthy of study.

Angels as Sons of God

They were prominent in the midst of man's early history. They were most prominent in Old Testament times. They had an important part in our Lord's birth, our Lord's ministry, and our Lord's resurrection.

They will have a most preeminent time in the winding up of time, in the judgment day on the everlasting ages. It is only by a direct command of God creatively that a being can be called the Son of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Hence, Adam was called a Son of God, being directly created by God Himself. Luke's Gospel 3, 38, Adam which was the Son of God.

All God's children spiritually, having been born again by the direct commandment of God, are called the Sons of God. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the Sons of God. But not only are born again people called the Sons of God, but the angels are called the Sons of God.

Why? Because they are directly created by God. We read in Job, now there was a day when the Sons of God, that is the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them, a fallen angel.

Job 38, 7, when the morning stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. Who are the morning stars? Who are the Sons of God that shouted for joy and creation? None other than the angels.

Who in heaven can be compared unto the Lord? Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the Lord? Angels are called spirits. There is a fall among angels. Jude chapter 6 compared with Revelation chapter 12, and there was a third of the angels left their own habitation.

The Fall of Angels and Genesis 6

And they intruded themselves among men, and they produced a series of monsters which were great in size as well as in wickedness. And if you turn over to Genesis chapter 6 and read it, you will read the amazing truth about the fall of a third of the angels of heaven.

And it was because of that and their intermingling with the creation of man that it repented God that he made man, and it grieved him at his heart. And God sent the flood to purge the world of this eruption into humanity of satanic angels, angels that had fallen.

But if you turn to Genesis chapter 6, verse 4, you will find that the coming of angels, fallen angels on earth among men, did not finish at the flood. But it tells us after the flood it continued. These also were to be wiped off the face of the earth.

And Joshua was committed to that task, but he did not fulfill it. This Bible contains secrets of eternal life, that ye might know him the only true God, and Jesus Christ who thou hast sent. He said, Jesus, the truth and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me.

Salvation Through Christ Alone

I want to say a last word to those who are not converted in this house. By Christ alone you can come right now and be saved. Saved not for the years of time alone, but through all eternity. O hearer to me this morning, listen to the eternal truth of the eternal triune God, the truth upon which all the issues of eternity depend.

They are as sure as God himself. If you stand in your relationship to God, you can settle it now by coming up to the cross, confessing your sins, and seeking the washing in the blood of the Lamb. Wash me in the blood of the Lamb, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let's bow our heads. Father in heaven, we thank thee for the good and gracious word of God. And we pray that man may heed and hearken to it today. Thou hast told us in thine assuring word of what's going to happen.

The history of this earth and its kingdoms are painted faithfully with thy hand in thy word. Help us to heed thy word. But we need all of us to meet with thee and receive Christ as our Savior and as our Lord.

O men and women today, sing that verse. King of my life, I crown thee now. Thine shall the glory be, lest I forget. Thine agony lead me. O God, seal the preaching of the gospel in the salvation of the lost.

For Jesus' sake and everybody's sake, amen.