The Faith Hall of Fame (Hebrews 11)

Hebrews 11 as the Faith Hall of Fame

Will you please turn to Hebrews chapter 11, Hebrews chapter 11. It's not going to take you but a moment to find that since it will fall open to Hebrews chapter 10 and you can just look across the page.

So let's bow our heads. Father, we would ask your blessing upon our study this morning and that you would open our eyes and our hearts, that they may be eyes and hearts of faith, that you would teach us this morning what faith is and how we are to walk in faith and to live in faith, teach us the benefits of faith and we pray that our time here in this chapter might serve to honor and glorify you and that you would sanctify this time for your own purposes and glory and that you would bless it with and by your grace.

We pray this in Christ's name, amen. I want to begin by saying I'm very grateful to Dave and Gordy for preaching for me while I was out of the pulpit the last couple of weeks. We are blessed to have men who are able to handle the Word of God with faithfulness and truth and doing what they do in filling in is more difficult than the type of preaching that I do because they just step in and do one sermon and it's more difficult when you're not doing it every week to just go back into a passage that you were in four or five months ago and to try and pick up where you were at and carry that theme along.

That is more difficult. I'm grateful for the extra work that they did in doing that and Dave managed to preach without stepping all over my sermons and repeating what I've said, so kudos to him for that.

And kudos to him for mentoring Gordy to do his dirty work for him.

I didn't….

I didn't see that coming, so Gordy ended up stepping all over instead, which is…I guess that's just the way it is. Gordy did a great job of sort of bridging the transition between Hebrews 10 and Hebrews 11, which we're starting this morning.

The Biblical Definition of Faith

Hebrews 11 is one of the better known chapters in the book of Hebrews because it is sometimes referred to as the faith hall of fame and it is remarkable and singularly unique for a number of reasons, many of which we're going to get to this morning and many of which we will get to in the weeks that are ahead.

It is referred to as the faith chapter and it is similar to what 1 Corinthians does with the subject of love. So what 1 Corinthians 13 is to the subject of love, Hebrews chapter 11 is to the subject.

Of faith.

Hebrews 13…or sorry, 1 Corinthians 13 is referred to as the love chapter. You kind of have a definition of love, illustrations of love, examples of love, an explanation of what love is. We have the same thing here in Hebrews chapter 11 with the subject of faith.

We have a definition of faith and then an explanation of what faith is and what faith looks like and then there are these numerous examples of faith in action and in life through all of the Old Testament illustrations that are given there.

And we're going to see in the weeks ahead that the biblical definition of faith is vastly different than what the world considers faith to be. And it is vastly different than what our culture regards faith to be.

Our culture and our world, unbelievers have a certain idea of what faith is and it is entirely wrong what they think faith is. They use the term faith, but as Gordy mentioned last week, they pour into that term an entirely different meaning than Scripture does when it speaks of faith.

So Hebrews 11 is also going to show us that unfortunately many well-meaning but misguided Christians also have an inadequate view of faith. I think that if you were to poll Christians writ large across the country, not necessarily in this church, but just people who claim to be Christians in churches all across America, you would get a definition of faith that is more in keeping with what the world thinks faith is than what the Bible describes faith actually to be.

And our study over the next few weeks is going to contrast biblical faith with the world's definition, the culture's idea, and even sometimes Christian misconceptions of what faith is. Hebrews chapter 11 has been called the heroes of faith, the honor roll of the Old Testament,.

Saints.

How many of you were ever on the honor roll in school? I didn't raise my hand for a reason. Nobody who...yeah, my wife is up here quietly raising her hand. That's why she did the schooling and I did not for the kids.

The honor roll of Old Testament saints, it has been called the Westminster Abbey of Scripture. Hebrews 11 has been called the Saints Hall of Fame or even the Faith Hall of Fame. You take a stroll through Hebrews chapter 11, we are getting a chronological and historical journey through the Old Testament, stopping as it were at many of the main characters and significant people and places and times of Old Testament history to see faith on display.

It is, I like to call it, the Faith Hall of Fame, and you've heard me refer to it as that way a couple of times in recent weeks. A little bit of an aside, back in...at the end of March, the beginning of April, I made a trip, Deidre and I did, with some friends out to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then Cleveland, Ohio, and I was asked to come out and participate in a project and do some work on something out there, so we took a couple of extra days and went to Cincinnati and saw the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, and then we drove up to Cleveland where I was supposed to do this work, and we had an afternoon, and we were within an hour of Canton, Ohio, which is the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

It has been a dream of mine, as long as I've been following football, which is since I was 10 years old, to be able to go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I've watched the induction ceremonies and I've read up on stuff and visit the website to actually be able to go out and to walk through the Hall of Fame was itself quite.

A treat.

So, we did that one afternoon, it was kind of later in the afternoon, and we got to go.

There.

I was giddy about being able to walk through the nostalgia of it and see the paraphernalia and be reminded of things that I've forgotten about and be reminded of things that nobody could ever forget about, and I was really looking forward to it.

And we got there, after we paid our entrance fee to get into the Hall of Fame, there was...we were getting ready to walk into the Exhibit Hall, and there was an older gentleman there who was approaching retirement age or he was maybe past retirement age.

He obviously worked for the Hall of Fame. His job was to welcome everybody that came there and answer any questions that you might have and direct you to where you should go, how to enter the Exhibit Hall.

So, he walked up and he greeted us and he said, greetings, welcome to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Where are you folks from? And I said, we're from Sandpoint, Idaho, up in the Pacific Northwest. And he said, oh, do you all have a favorite football team that you cheer for?

And I said, I actually do. I cheer for the San Francisco 49ers. It's been my favorite football team since I was 10 years old. I have watched football and it is something of a novelty for me, and I'm excited to be here since half of the people in the Hall of Fame have played for my team, which is something of an overstatement.

And he kind of chuckled. He said, yeah, there are a lot of 49ers in here. And then without really thinking about it, I said, so what's your favorite team? And as soon as I asked that question, I had pop into my mind this sort of rolodex of football insults that I could pull out depending on what team he said that he would cheer for.

I just had them kind of all at the same time pop into my mind. And I didn't suppress the urge at all to say something. And he said, well, for instance, I'll give you some examples of what popped into my head.

If he had said, I'm a New England Patriots fan, I would have said, oh, are there Patriots players in the Hall of Fame who got in without cheating, is what I was prepared to say.

Yeah.

No, it gets better. If he had said, I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan, then I was prepared to say, the Cowboys who were inducted into the Hall of Fame, did they get out of prison on work release long enough to make it to the induction ceremony?

Or if he had said, I am a Seattle Seahawks fan, you know I was going there, right? If he had said I was a Seattle Seahawks fan, then I would have said to him, oh, I didn't realize that the bandwagon came out this far east.

But instead, and I should have expected this, he said, I'm a Cleveland Browns fan. And I said, of course. We're an hour outside of Cleveland. Who else would work at the Pro Football Hall of Fame except for a Cleveland Browns fan?

So I said, I guess I should have expected that. And then before I had a chance to second guess the wisdom of my next sentence, my brain flipped through the Rolodex of insults, the type of insults that you just banter back and forth with friends like I've just been doing, and it pulled out the Cleveland Browns card.

And I said to him, so tell me, what is it like working in the Football Hall of Fame when nobody from your team is in it? Now as soon as I heard those words come off of my lips, I had the exact same reaction that you just had.

Oh, and I thought to myself, Jim, he doesn't know you. You have never had a conversation with the guy. He is a complete stranger. He has done nothing to deserve this except welcome you to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and you treat him as if he is Mel Jensen and you're joking about his team and trying to get in digs back and forth.

This is the type of stuff that we say amongst our family. But I could tell from the look on his face that two things were true. Number one, that was a bridge way too far. I had crossed it and burned it behind me.

And number two, this guy was never going to forget me. His countenance changed instantly. Now fortunately, he led us into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and I understand that was a long walk for a short drink of water, but here's the drink of water.

When he got into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, since football is 100 years old, the Hall of Fame is laid out according to decades. So you take this walking tour through this series of exhibits, and it's quite long as you go decade by decade, one after another, from the beginning of football all the way to the end.

You see a lot of the paraphernalia and media stories, and you see trivia, and you just walk through history, 100 years of football history, get up into the time. It was neat to get up into the time that I was more familiar with, the 1980s and 90s, and to enjoy some of that.

And then when you get done with the walking tour through history, you walk into the room where you've seen all of the copper busts that they make of the players when they induct them into the Hall of Fame.

There's a room that is bigger than this room here, and it's a big semicircular wall like this, and it has all of the busts lined up, I think in the order that they were inducted into the Hall of Fame, on one wall that would encircle at least four of the walls in this room, and then there's a whole other wall that they've started heading their way down.

To.

And as you're walking past all of those busts, I got to be reminded of players that I had forgotten, players that you could never forget, players that are very familiar to me, other players that I had heard a little bit about.

And as I got to see each one of them and when they were inducted and who they played for, it just reminded me of all of these significant figures. Now here's the parallel. In Hebrews chapter 11, we have the exact same thing, both a chronological tour of the Old Testament as well as a series of busts that the author brings out for us, some of whom we're very familiar with, others like Barak and Jephthah and Samson, unless you went through Miss Diane's Sunday School class, you're probably less familiar with some of those players.

But we get a chronological grouping of the Old Testament saints in order, and he brings up various saints and various heroes of the faith, this Hall of Fame, these characters who lived according to faith, obeyed God in faith, and are notable for that reason.

That is what we have in Hebrews chapter 11. So now that we are there, we're going to, I'm going to give you a couple of, well, I'm going to give you a warning right now. We're not going to, we are going to get through the whole chapter, but it's not going to be the only time we're going to go through the whole chapter.

We're going to go through the whole chapter today at 30 ,000 feet, as it were, to see the broad strokes of this, and I want you to be able to sort of get an idea of the entire context of this chapter.

We're going to see some of the main players, some of the main ideas, some of the main themes and what we can learn from the chapter in general. We're going to do that this morning, and then next week we're going to get out of the plane at 30 ,000 feet and go down and we're going to walk through, beginning again at verse 1, and look at some of these saints in much more detail.

Faith, Approval, and the Old Testament Witness

But before we go through the passage, let me give you two very general observations. First, we're going to read the word faith a lot in Hebrews chapter 11, a lot. In fact, it occurs 26 times in this chapter alone.

This is not even to mention chapter 10, the end of chapter 10, which also describes faith, but just in Hebrews chapter 11, the word faith occurs 26 times. Nineteen of those, we read the words by faith.

Three times we read in faith or through faith. Three times we just read of faith, and then once there is a reference to faithfulness, and in that occasion it is actually referring to God who is faithful to do what He has promised.

The word faith and faithful are related in Greek, just like they are related in English. So the author is using various constructions to describe faith, by faith, through faith, in faith, just faith, faithfulness.

That is the emphasis and the main theme of chapter 11. Second, I don't want you to forget that we are right on the heels of the warning chapter that is at the end of chapter 10. Remember, that warning chapter ends with a discussion of faith, a quotation from Hebrews chapter 2, verse 4, that the just shall live by faith, and that reference in verse 39, we're not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.

So that is how chapter 10 ends, and I don't want you to let the chapter denotation there make a division in your own mind in this material. He has just described for us the role that faith has in preserving those who believe that it is an enduring faith, it is a gift of faith, it is something that those true believers have, it is the mark of genuine Christianity.

Those who shrink back to destruction, shrink back to destruction because they do not have true and genuine faith. But the faith that saves preserves us to the end, all the way through the preservation of our soul.

That's the idea. So we are not, when we get into chapter 11, we're going to see themes that we've seen in chapter 10. This is not the first time we read about faith or the effects of faith. There are other themes that we also have in chapter 11, like reproach and reward and faithfulness in the midst of hostility and enduring to the end, living and dying in faith, obedience and perseverance.

These themes are all woven through chapter 11 because they were part of the warning passage at the end of chapter 10. So he has implored for us to have faith, he has encouraged us to have faith, and described it a little bit at the end of chapter 10.

And now in chapter 11, he's really going to drill down on what this faith looks like and how this faith preserves us and keeps us in the midst of a hostile and hateful world that opposes us at every turn.

And that is really going to be one of the main lessons as we work our way through. So let's get an overview now of Hebrews chapter 11. We're going to read the chapter, not in one stop, but in a few verses and we'll comment and we'll just note some things as we work our way through this entire chapter.

Beginning in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1, now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it, that is by faith, the men of old gained approval. We have in verse 1 a definition of faith.

It's one of the most memorable and oft-quoted verses in all of the book of Hebrews, certainly one of the most memorable and oft-quoted in Hebrews chapter 11. It is the biblical definition of faith. It is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction or the confidence of things that are not yet seen.

In verse 2, we have a commendation of faith and a reminder that the men of old through faith gained approval. And this indicates to us that the author is now going to go back and begin to discuss some of the men of old who gained approval through their faith.

He's going to take us back in history into the Old Testament times and he's going to give us a chronological tour of the men and sometimes women who gained approval with God through the faith that he has been describing.

Hebrews chapter 11, 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 there he's not describing somebody who had faith in the Old Testament and don't be confused and think that by faith God created the world.

God didn't create the world by faith. That's not an action that God did. God doesn't need faith. God doesn't possess faith. So God didn't create by faith but he is saying that we, going all the way back to creation, we believe at the very beginning of the book of Genesis that God made the entire world and everything that is out of things that were not yet and things that were not even.

Seen.

So that's a reference to creation. So he's taking us in verse 3 all the way back to creation. So it's as if we were beginning back in Genesis 1, verse 1, right at the beginning of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

You're right in the foyer and there's a car there. This represents the birth of professional football since people sat around in a car lot on this car and birthed the idea of football. So now we're going back to Genesis 1, 1, the creation of all things, and now we're going to start a chronological tour through Old Testament history.

The first character, Abel, in verse 4. By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous. God testifying about his gifts and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks.

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. Notice the reference there to pleasing with God being gaining God's approval.

That was in verse 2, remember? Verse 6, 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. That is another one of the most oft-quoted and familiar verses in Hebrews chapter 11.

Without faith it is impossible to please God. It describes there the necessity of faith, the centrality of faith in the life of those who are pleasing to God. 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.

So in those first, what are we at, seven verses, in those first seven verses we've gone through Genesis 1, chapters 1 through 9, and we have hit the highlights of faithful men, a lineage of faith, Abel, Enoch, Noah.

Coming to verse 6, he tells us of the centrality of faith, the necessity of faith in pleasing.

God.

Notice the reference to Enoch pleasing God. That is the same idea that we read in verse 2 about those who gained God's approval through their faith. And very quickly then in this chapter we come to Abraham and he camps on Abraham for a bit beginning in verse 8.

By faith Abraham 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 he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as 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.

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.

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.

For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a 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. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for he has prepared a city for them. By faith Abraham when he was tested offered up Isaac and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son.

It was he to whom it was said in Isaac your descendants shall be called. He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead from which he also received him back as a type.". That is a long paragraph that describes the faith of Abraham and you can probably see from that some of the references in that song that Josh, that we sang with Josh this morning the references to a city whose maker and builder is God, a city, a nation, a land, the promises, dying without receiving those promises.

It is interesting that this is the longest single example that the author provides in Hebrews chapter 11. All of the other patriarchs other than Moses are brief references to either what they did or how they lived or what God did through them but this is the longest example that he provides.

It is as if he races through Abel and Enoch and Noah and then he comes to Abraham and he hits the brakes and he camps on Abraham. And I think that there is a significant reason for that, one of them being that there is a lot that is connected to Abraham.

You have the Abrahamic covenant, an unconditional covenant that God made with his people and with Abraham, the details of which have yet to be fulfilled in this world and that unconditional covenant being connected to Abraham obviously affects not just the Jewish nation but also the nations of the entire world.

So when you get to Abraham, suddenly you have the expanding of the scope of God's intention in his redemption and in his covenant plans and you get glimpses of Abraham being a father to many nations and his descendants being as numerous as the seashore.

We get into Romans chapter 4 and Paul says that those of us who are not just under the law but those of us who are by faith are also children of Abraham. So we consider Abraham our father as a faith father.

So we have Abraham now standing as a father in the way of the law with the Jews and physically to the Jewish nation but also as a faith father to all who follow in the steps of Abraham and believe God as Abraham did.

So he comes to a screeching halt at Abraham in order to camp on that and show us all the various lessons from the life of Abraham. Abraham believed God and left his land. He believed God and left the comforts and conveniences of his own land, went out and lived in a tent, not even knowing where he was going, being promised a land that he had never seen, occupied by people that he could not conquer or kick out of the land.

He was promised descendants that he had never seen and Abraham died without ever seeing the fulfillment of the promises that God made to him. He trusted God for a land. He trusted God for his offspring and he trusted God even though God told him, sacrifice your only son Isaac.

That's an interesting account and we're going to spend some time camping on that and the significance of it, the typology of it when we get to that. The other Patriarchs are also mentioned that are attached to Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Isaac.

Hebrews chapter 11 verse 20, 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 worshipped 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. So we have Isaac and Jacob and Esau and Joseph, all of which did things in faith, all of which had things happen to them and were blessed in faith by their Patriarchs.

So we get to the end of verse 22 and we've reached the end of the book of Genesis in our tour. We're halfway through this chapter and we've only gone through the book of Genesis. Notice the references in verses 20 and 22 to dying.

Abraham died never receiving the promise. Jacob died never receiving the promise. Joseph died in Egypt never receiving the promise. All of these men died, lived and then died in faith. And then next up is Moses beginning of verse 23.

By faith Moses when he was born was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw that he was a beautiful child. That's the faith of Moses' parents, not Moses' faith. He was a baby. It wasn't his faith that was operative but his parents' faith.

And they were not afraid of the king's edict. Verse 24. 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 was 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.

Now Moses is the second longest example from the Old Testament. Abraham and Moses. He scurries through the other Old Testament saints. He gets to Abraham and he stops there, parks on Abraham, describes Abraham's faith and life and all the incidences from the life and faithfulness of Abraham that are worth emulating.

And then he skips over Jacob and Isaac and Joseph and there's certainly a lot of things that they did in faith. He kind of bounces past those and then he comes to Moses and slows down, hits the brakes as it were again, stops and camps on Moses.

Why Abraham and Moses? What do those two men have in common? Covenants. Abraham an unconditional covenant regarding a land, a people and a promised Messiah. Moses a conditional covenant that dealt with the people in the land and for preparation for a Messiah.

Those two men to whom God gave covenants and who were in a sense mediators of those covenants and involved in those covenants, the author is camping on those two significant historical.

Figures.

Why?

Abraham being the father, the patriarch of the entire nation of Israel, the one to whom every Jew would go back in his lineage and to whom as believing Gentiles we point back to as the example of a faith that is imputed to us as righteousness.

We point to Abraham as well. But then he stops on Moses who was the mediator of the old covenant. The old covenant that the author of Hebrews has spent the last 10 chapters arguing has passed away and is no more.

So he stops with that covenant to deal with Moses to show that even in terms of Moses' life with that transitory and temporary covenant, the old covenant that has passed away, faith was operative in his life and faith was operative in the life of Abraham as well.

So those two men have the most real estate devoted to their lives of faith in Hebrews chapter 11 in contrast to all of the others. Moses' parents are mentioned here. Notice Moses' acts of faith. He turned his back on Egypt which meant its wealth, its reputation, its status, its position.

His acceptance with all of the hoi polloi of society, Moses turned his back on that. He left Egypt and he was associated with the people of God saying as the author of Hebrews does that he considered the reproach of Christ as greater riches than all the treasures of.

Egypt.

Moses understood something about Christ in his expression of faith when he walked away from Egypt. He obeyed the Passover, he obeyed and kept the law, mediated the law, he went through the Red Sea and now we come to the end of verse 29 and we've only gotten through the Pentateuch.

Now we're at the book of Joshua which is where verse 30 begins. 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.

Rahab and the Faith of Outsiders

So now we're into the book of Joshua. We're getting towards the end of this chapter and you think, man, you need to speed it up a bit. You say this in my preaching all the time, you need to speed it up a bit.

This is what we say to the author of Hebrews. You've got a lot of folks to go through. We've only made it through the first six books of the Old Testament and you have already filled us with examples of faith.

Joshua is the one who is though not mentioned is obviously in view in verse 30 when he references the walls of Jericho falling down. And then there is Rahab in verse 31, Rahab the harlot. Now she is something of an anomaly in this chapter so far, isn't she?

Why is that? It's not because she's a woman. She's not the first woman mentioned. Remember Sarah was already mentioned earlier in connection with Abraham. It's not the fact that she is a woman that makes her unique in this chapter.

What makes Rahab unique is a number of things. First of all, the author mentions it. She is a harlot. Don't let that escape your notice. She sits kind of outside the stream of the faithful, obedient, righteous, godly men that we've been examining so far, doesn't she?

Abel and Enoch and Noah and then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, oh and a harlot. You kind of stop and it should strike you, if you weren't familiar with it, it would kind of strike you, a harlot.

And not just a harlot, but here is a woman who is outside of the lineage of Abraham who was a member of an idol-worshiping nation that was dwelling in the land whom God was going to command the children of Israel to go in and to wipe out and cleanse the land of all of them and destroy them.

Abraham, she did something by faith. She stands out amongst all of the people in the land of Canaan as a singular example of someone outside of the lineage of Abraham and outside of the godly lineage that we read of in the first five books of the Old Testament.

She stands out as somebody who is outside of all of that and yet has faith. And she is a Gentile. So if any Jew were reading this and he thought, yeah, of course, this is my godly lineage, I trace it all the way back to Abel through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, that's my lineage, those are my guys, those are my peeps.

Rahab, the harlot. See this kind of faith that we're talking about in Hebrews chapter 11 is not just for Jews and it's not just for the outwardly righteous. If Rahab, a harlot, can have faith and be made acceptable to God and please God, then every person in this room can be made acceptable to God and be pleasing to God on the basis of faith as well.