The Substance of Faith
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2024 · 1 December 2024
Please turn to Hebrews 11. We need to understand the foundations of our faith. We understand that we are saved by faith. “The just shall live by faith,” which is essentially foundational teaching in Scripture. It is quoted in Hebrews 10:38. That passage is taken out of Habakkuk 2:4 but is repeated by the New Testament writers in several other places also because it’s so foundational.
“What is faith? What is the essence of faith? How are we to understand faith?” And that’s why we want to look at this chapter. This chapter has been called “Hall of Fame, or The Heroes of the Faith.” It’s been called, “The Faith Chapter,” and it presents to us is the power of faith. And it needs clarification today because there is a false faith movement within evangelical Christianity.
We’re talking about faith, not the false kind of faith that supposedly can create your own future, but the true kind of faith that can produce in you confident trust in the future that God has promised you. All they hear is a faith that is recorded in Hebrews 11. From the human perspective they might have written their story differently, because all their stories are filled with difficulties.
But the kind of faith that we’re talking about, the faith that God gives a believer is the faith to trust the future that God has written. That faith would be placed in the gospel, in the person at the heart of the gospel, namely Jesus Christ. For the first time in their life through the gospel and salvation, they understand that their relationship with God is not dependent on works but on faith.
But it’s more than just a chapter designed to encourage believers to continue to walk by faith. Remember that through the first ten chapters the writer make one major point that the New Covenant is superior to the Old Covenant, and that Christ is superior to everything else. Jesus and His sacrifice is completely superior to the sacrifices of the animals in the old system.
Jesus is a better sacrifice who made a better offering. Jesus is better than angels, the writer tells us in these chapters. He is better than the prophets. He is better than Moses, better than Aaron, better than Joshua. He is a better priest than all other priests. And He is from a better priesthood, the Melchiz1edek priesthood. He is the mediator of a better covenant and He is a better sacrifice.
But at some points in the ten chapters there are warnings. There are at least four of them by the time you get to this chapter and Hebrews 11 constitutes another warning. And these warnings are given to non-Christian Jews who are attending this fellowship and non-Christians. These Jews are apparently intellectually convinced of the gospel, they understand the truth of the gospel in their minds.
And there are these periodic warnings not to fall back, not to go back into Judaism. Don’t go on sinning willfully after you have the knowledge of the truth, says Hebrews 10, or you will bring upon yourself a far more severe eternal judgment. So the warning is, “Come all the way to the New Covenant. Come all the way to Christ. Come all the way to faith.” This is a real big change.
The Jewish system had long forgotten that salvation was by grace, that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord, that Abraham believed and it was accounted to him for righteousness. They had created a religious cult built on ethics, built on morality, built on religious ceremony. Salvation came to those who observed all those ethical standards, all those moral laws and all those ceremonies.
It was necessary then to teach the Jews salvation by faith. Jesus said that salvation was by faith and not by works. Paul said in Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace are you saved through faith and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift.” Romans 3, 4, indicates that salvation comes by faith alone. But the Jews have a hard time being deprogrammed. So something different has to be shown.
Hebrews 11 is written because it is a necessity to prove to the Jews that salvation is by faith and that people not only after Jesus but even before Jesus were saved by faith. So Hebrews 10:38 states the key, “My righteous ones shall live by faith.” That is a direct quote from Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.” Habakkuk is an Old Testament prophet and you can’t shrink back from that.
If you fall back, God has no pleasure in that and you will fall back into eternal destruction. Now how is He going to get this case across? How is he going to penetrate their sort of Old Testament thinking? Hebrews 11 gives us a list of Old Testament saints whose lives were marked by faith. The people of God through all the ages have become the true people of God by faith.
Chapter 11 says at verse 4, “By faith, Abel.” At verse 5, “By faith, Enoch.” At verse 7, “By faith, Noah.” Verse 8, “By faith Abraham.” And again in verse 17, “By faith Abraham.” And in verse 20, “By faith, Isaac.” In verse 21, “By faith, Jacob.” Verse 22, “By faith, Joseph.” Verse 23, “By faith, Moses,” and again in verse 24. Further in verse 31, “By faith, Rahab.”
And in verse 32, “There’s Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets, who by faith did all these amazing things.” Verse 39 sums it up, “All these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they would not be made perfect.” Faith is confident trust in the future God has promised.
These people hadn’t received the promise but they trusted in the promise and thus they live by faith. Now we’re just going to look at the opening three verses and then we’ll do some character studies over the next Sunday evenings. But let’s just consider a few things. First is the nature of faith. Verse 1, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
We’re talking here not about some act of faith but we’re talking about the reality of a settled faith. It exists as a commodity. It is a gift of God, Ephesians 2:8 says, “not of works.” It comes from God. And when God gives this commodity of faith, it is the assurance of things hoped for. That’s what it means to live by faith. It means that we put our confidence in something not seen.
Some of the translations will say, “Faith is the substance of things not seen.” That’s a great translation. It’s a word that basically can be legitimately translated substance, essence. Faith is substantial confidence in the reality of something not realized. Faith gives present substance to something that is future. All the saints, men and women who had nothing but the promises of God.
No visible evidence that messianic promise would come true, no visible evidence that kingdom promise will come true. Yet the promises were so real and the revelation of those promises in Scripture so reliable that people built their entire hope on them. All the Old Testament promises related to the future. Those people exercised faith in what was promised that they did not receive.
What would that be? Eternal life, heaven, everlasting bliss, reward, joy, reunion which is promised in the Old Testament of the saints in the presence of God? The very presence of God? The glories of eternal bliss. They never even saw the ultimate sacrifice. They never knew who the Messiah was. They were people of faith but their faith was anchored in a reliable revelation from God.
Faith is so strong, it is a gift of God that allows us to trust Scripture. And in trusting the gospel in the Scripture we thus trust Christ as Savior. That’s the whole package. I think we need to understand that. It wouldn’t do any good to trust in Christ as your savior unless you could trust the Scripture for everything that He being your Savior means. Do you really understand that?
Does that mean that Scripture can’t be proven to be true?” No, the Scripture can be proven to be true, which just strengthens our assurance, doesn’t it? Every fact in Scripture is proven archeologically to be true. And we have evidence in past history. All this has already been proven to be trustworthy. But this is against the grain of your own flesh. Is that not true?
You live your life as a Christian battling against the flesh that is your natural expression. It’s the way you used to live, in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. But you don’t live that way now. You restrain the flesh. You limit the pleasures. You resist sin. Because you understand that there is a future reward to come before the Lord and bring honor to His name.
For example, what would make you build a boat in a desert because you were told it was going to rain when it had never rained in the history of the world? Can you imagine building a boat as Noah did for 120 years in the desert and dealing with the mockery of his neighbors? What put his faith into action? He was so confident that it became a conviction that he could literally live his life on.
Verse 2 says, “For by our ancestors were approved.” He’s going to help these Jews who maybe are struggling with this idea of salvation by faith, by pointing to the fact that this is how the saints of old gained approval. Why did the Jews identify them as heroes of the faith? Why did they look at Abel, Enoch and Abraham as noble? Because of their faith and that’s what he’s going to show.
Abel believed God regarding sacrifice. He did what God told him because God told him what to do and I’ll bless you. Enoch believed God so much so that he didn’t die. Noah believed God and because of it God granted to him righteousness and God vindicated him, God spared him and his family. Abraham and Sarah believed God for a child and God fulfilled the promise.
We’ll learn about Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and everybody else, all who believed God and were approved. The record of the Old Testament stands as testimony to their faith. They trusted in what they couldn’t see. They lived their lives based upon promises God made to them, and certainly God approved of that and they were rightfully honored and remained the heroes of the faith.
And then there is, an illustration of faith, the first one that he gives. 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 this is a wonderful illustration. This illustration takes us back and gives us a foundation for faith looking forward. That looks back at creation. Creation made out of things unseen.
Creation is ex nihilo, God made the whole universe out of nothing. What is seen was not made out of anything that was visible. So out of the invisible came the visible, out of nothing came everything. We understand that by faith. Because we weren’t there. Now where do we place our faith? In the revelation of God written in Genesis 1 and 2 which tells us that God created the universe by His Word.
“Let there be light, and there was light.” He spoke everything into existence and the record is in Genesis 1. We can look at the effect which is the universe; we understand that it exists. There had to be a time when there was nothing. That time ended when God created the universe. By faith we understand how that happened. Our faith is in the revelation of Scripture. Somebody did this.
But the person who understands that it happened doesn’t know how. Only the person who puts his faith in the Scripture understands how. By the Word of God. So by faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God. Why? Because that’s what the Scripture says and that’s a reality. Scripture says God created it, we live in it and we can see the evidences of His creation.
So the fact that we can look back and see that God described His creation, told us how He made it and has left His imprint on it and we are now living in that creation gives us the opportunity to have a foundation for believing in the future. And we can trust that the same God who spoke this into existence by His Word has said that He has spoken another world into existence which awaits us.
And that we will one day experience that world. We can trust Him for that as He is the source of that in the same way He’s the source of this. There’s really no other way to explain the universe than to say that God created it. And here we live in a world created by the Word of God, described in detail in Genesis 1 and 2. All true science confirms the creative hand of God in the complexity of this universe.
So we live now in a universe created by the Word of God, we see His imprint on it and that is the foundation by which we trust that God will, in the future, have waiting for us another universe in the glory of His presence, also promised by His creative power. We all live by faith. All of us who are believers, we trust God. We trust God as Creator of this world and we trust Him as the Creator of the world to come. Let us pray.