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HOLY HELP FOR THE HOPELESSIN EVERY CIRCUMSTANCE THROUGH FAITHHebrews 11:32-40INTRODUCTION If there is one thing that living in the 21 st century teaches us it is that there are lots of different kinds of people in the world and the conditions within which people live are radically different from one another. I just found out this last week as I read the Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine that there is an organization called the Wisconsin Speleological Society. For what does this society exist, you may ask? This is a group of people in Wisconsin who love exploring and preserving caves in the state. These are people who delight in wiggling into cramped, pitch black, cold and slimy places far underground with only a headlamp lighting up a few feet in front of them while the bright sun shines outdoors. You don't have to go to India to find people who are really different from you. People differ widely in what interests them, what they want out of life, what they love and what they believe. But people don’t only differ in what kinds of things interest them and what things they value but also in the circumstances of our lives. We differ in our economic status, our educational status, the parental and family conditions we grow up in, our religious experiences, our health status, our living situations, the climate we live in, the experiences we have had in life and hundreds of other ways our circumstances differ from one another. It is the fact of this great diversity that is one of the driving forces behind our cultures rejection of absolute truth or universal explanations of reality. We are told by our “postmodern” pundits that there simply cannot be a single, unifying explanation for the diversity that exists within human cultures and persons. There can be no single answer to the myriad of problems that confront such diverse people within such vastly different contexts. Yet this is exactly what the Christian gospel claims. The Christian gospel claims that despite the vast diversity of human experience and circumstances we are united by these facts: ONE: the one true and living God has made everything that exists and every human being in his image. TWO: every human being has willfully, by nature refused to recognize and honor and be grateful to this God. THREE: therefore, our perfectly just and holy creator is determined to punish every one of his rebellious subjects. Every human being shares these four great facts in common, no matter what superficial diversity there exists between us: we are all created in God’s image; we all live in God’s world; we all are united in our dislike for and disregard of our great and glorious creator and thus we all stand guilty before his tribunal and are subject to his condemnation. All of the joys and miseries of life in this world arise out of these four facts. It is because these four things unite human beings that God has provided a single solution to the alienation that exists between him and us. He has provided in the person of Jesus Christ and by means of his perfect life, substitutionary death, glorious resurrection and ascension to God’s right hand where he now lives to intercede for his people the only sufficient savior. This means that regardless of the circumstances of your life Jesus is the only one who is able to make you right with God and to gain for you God’s help. This is what the author to this letter to the Hebrews aims to convince us of as he completes his survey of how OT characters obtained all the promises of God through faith in Christ as he was revealed in the promises God made to them. He concludes this section with a series of rapid-fire allusions to a great company of diverse people who lived by faith in Christ in incredibly diverse circumstances. So this is my goal this morning: to convince you and I that regardless of what conditions we may find ourselves in, God is able to help us as long as we are willing to live by faith in Christ. The solution to whatever difficulties we may find ourselves in is Christ. The gospel of Jesus is the most relevant thing in the world and this is what we will see as we work our way through this passage because God, through the gospel, provides help in any and every situation as we trust in Christ. MAIN POINT God helps those who trust in Christ as their representative and sacrifice therefore…I. We can do everything through Christ (vv. 32-35a) The first thing to notice in our passage is that the author, in v. 32, does something good preachers and communicators regularly do. He has just made reference to about 17 specific examples of people in the OT in chronological order, who lived by faith in God’s promise to renew the universe and bring them to live with him in that renewed universe through a savior. But now he acknowledges that if he were to continue with this procedure he would end up writing a much longer letter than he has the time to write and they have the time to read. "There is more to be said but I don't have time to say it." Yet, he cannot quite bring himself to simply end with Rahab the prostitute and thus he makes a list of people and events to show that everyone in the OT who is commended by God or shown in a positive light lived by faith in God’s promises. Or to use the language of 11:1, everyone in the OT who lived and died for God did so because they were absolutely certain that the promised future was a present certainty. Confidence that the promised future good was a certainty was what motivated every person alluded to in these verses to do what they did. This list presupposes a detailed familiarity with the OT. There is no way that I have time to help you identify every person and event alluded to in this passage. I would recommend that you take this passage and as a family try to figure out to whom all these events are referring. What I want to do is to make sure you see the overarching structure of the passage and then use one of the events mentioned in here to enable us to see the principle he is seeking to illustrate and then try to apply that principle to our lives. We have recognized that the author’s system has been to follow the chronology of the opening books of the OT. He began with creation in v. 3 and worked his way up to Joshua 6 with the destruction of Jericho and the salvation of Rahab the prostitute. Now he makes a quick list of six individuals followed by a group. The first four individual’s stories are recorded in the 7 th book of the OT, the book of Judges which is the history immediately following the story of Joshua and his leading the people of Israel to take over the land of Canaan. The two most prominent of the judges were Gideon and Samson, whereas Barak and Jephthah were lesser known judges. Then David is the first faithful king of Israel and represents not only himself but the 9 other faithful kings of Judah. Samuel was the last of the judges and the first of the prophets in the OT. He then stands at the head of all the prophets who are named last. After listing these individuals as representatives of all the faithful in the OT he then begins to list all that the faithful did by faith. There is an enormous variety of people and of circumstances contained in this list. The point of the variety is to show us that it doesn't matter who you are, who your parents were or what circumstances you may find yourself in: through faith in Jesus Christ you can do whatever God tells you to do. That is an important qualification on my point here: we can do everything that God commands us to do through Christ as we live by faith in him. This is one of those very basic, biblical concepts that are regularly perverted by false teachers. The promise isn't you can do whatever you want to do through Christ but you can do whatever God calls you to do through Christ. Right now I want to think about just one person and one incident that is referred to here in order to identify the principles of living by faith in Christ and then I want us to think about how these principles apply to us. I want us to think about Gideon. We first meet Gideon in the biblical narrative in Judges 6. The Midianites are ruling over the Israelites due to Israel's sins against the Lord. Each year their armies raid the land during the time of harvest and steal the grain, livestock and other produce from the Israelites. Sort of like how the grasshoppers rob the ants in the Disney/Pixar movie, "A Bugs Life." Finally, after they are completely impoverished the people, we are told, "…cried out to the Lord for help." God's answer to their prayer is Gideon. One day, while Gideon is furtively threshing his wheat in a wine press, trying to preserve his harvest from the Midianites, the "angel of the Lord" comes and sits near him under an oak tree. He says to Gideon, "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior." Gideon immediately begins to complain. He wants to know why the Lord has abandoned them. Why he asks does he not do to the Midianites what we have been told he did in the past to Egypt when he brought Israel out of Egypt. In other words he basically says its God's fault they are in such trouble. When the angel ignores him and tells him to go save Israel he, like Moses before him, explains why he is unfit for the job. His clan is the weakest in the tribe of Manneseh and he is the youngest and weakest member of this clan. Make a note at this point: the angel of the Lord has just told the weakest member of the weakest tribe to save Israel. After some more negotiating and then after he fulfills his first assignment, which is to tear down the idol of Baal in his hometown the Lord tells him to muster an army. He calls out an army of 32,000 men from the northern tribes of Israel. The Lord tells him that is too many men. If they win the battle they will think they did it and not the Lord. So Gideon tells everyone who is afraid to go on home. He is left with an army of 10,000. The Lord says that is still too many. He tells Gideon to march them down to a local body of water. When the men go to get a drink the Lord tells Gideon to only keep the men who kneel on one knee, keeping their weapon in one hand and scooping up water in the other. He says that those who get on both knees and lap like a dog cannot fight. Well, Gideon is left with an army of 300 men to face an army of tens of thousands. That night the Lord tells Gideon, "Get up, go down against the camp, because I am going to give it into your hands." After God graciously gives him a sign assuring him of victory he prepares his men for the battle. He divides his three hundred men into three groups of 100 each and separates them around the edge of the camp. They each have a torch concealed by a large clay pitcher and a trumpet. When Gideon gives the signal at about 3am, they break the pitchers, thus disclosing the torches and blow their trumpets and shout, "For the Lord and for Gideon." Then the text says, "When the 300 trumpets sounded the Lord caused the men throughout the camp to turn on each other with their swords." There are more details in the story but the bottom line is that the whole Midianite army was wiped out and Israel was saved by Gideon. What do we learn about living by faith? God commands weak people to do impossible things. He also promises that if we will do what he commands that he will through us perform the impossible. Our part is to believe his promise and act in accordance with what is promised. Gideon got three hundred men to hold up torches and blow trumpets in the middle of the night. He did this through or by means of his faith in God's promise to wipe out the Midianites. God did the hard part. He wiped them out. Gideon's faith did not do anything. There is no power in Gideon. Rather his faith connected him to the God of infinite power. Gideon had to believe two things: that God would do what he promised and that what God promised to do was better than hiding his grain from the Midianites and hoarding it for himself and his family. Gideon had to do some very uncomfortable things in order to be a part of God's work but it was not his work that was determinative. God did the work while Gideon participated in what God did by his faith. There are dozens of stories in the OT like this which are all alluded to in this list. The hard part for us is this: last I checked none of us are being asked to destroy an army of thousands with 300 men. None of us are being asked to rule justly as a king over Israel. None of us are being thrown into the lion's den for praying to the Lord or into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down in worship of a golden idol. None of us have a death warrant issued by the mad queen Jezebel. How do these stories help us? Every true Christian sitting in this room is being commanded by God to do impossible things; things that are way beyond your ability to perform. Parents, God commands you to raise these hard hearted, sinful enemies of God, that is, your children, in the training and instruction of the Lord. You have no ability to bring about their conversion to Christ. All you can do is by faith preach the gospel to them, teach them the Bible and model the Christian life in front of them. You cannot save them and yet you are commanded to bring them up in the Lord. Husbands, God commands you to love your wives by dying like Jesus so that your wife feels the love of God in and through your love. There is no way you are able to die and there is no way that your weak efforts can ever persuade your wife that she is loved by God. Only God can do that. The only way you can do what God tells you to do is by trusting him to do what you cannot do and trusting that dying is a more sure way to be happy than demanding your own way. Wives, God is commanding you to submit to your husband like the church submits to Christ so that the greatness of Christ is seen by your husband and shown by your marriage. Only God can do this. All of us are commanded by God to do good works in such a way that people who see us praise God. You are a weak, miserable creature and have no ability to live this way. Neither do you have any ability to persuade others of God's greatness by your half-hearted efforts. Only God can do this. Yet we must trust God to do what we cannot do and we must trust that doing good works for the glory of God is a more certain path to joy than living to please ourselves. God commands every person sitting in this room to love and forgive every other person sitting in this room so that the whole world will look at us and see that Jesus Christ is the only Savior of the world. If you don't know how hard that is, then you've never tried to love these people. Again, you and I have no power to show that Christ is great through our love, but God does. So we must act in love towards one another trusting Christ for the ability to do so and believing that loving other Christians for the glory of Christ is infinitely superior to just taking care of ourselves and our own families. God is commanding you to do impossible things. If you are a true Christian then you will act as though God is going to do what he has promised and that what he promises is the best thing in the universe. God helps those who trust in Christ as their representative and sacrifice therefore…
II. We can suffer everything through Christ (vv. 35b-38) A friend of mine was recently in a prayer meeting with Christians from a variety of spiritual backgrounds. He asked the group to pray for his friend who was dying of cancer. His friend is a Christian and her desire was to glorify God in her dying and so my friend asked the group to pray that his dying friend would glorify God in her death. One of the people in the group immediately confronted him and said that there was no way that God would be glorified by a Christian dying of cancer. Rather it was God's will that he be glorified in her healing. Faith he argued doesn't give into death but believes in God's power to heal. If there is no healing then there is no faith. If there is no healing then God can get no glory. Hebrews 11:35b-38 ought to put all such foolish and wicked thinking to rest. In 35a we are told that the widow of Zarephath and the Shunammite woman both received back their dead sons by resurrection through faith, the first by the ministry of Elijah and the second by the ministry of Elisha. Here are women and prophets who believed that God would bring dead boys back from the dead and he did. However, immediately following he tells us that others, by faith in God's promises, were tortured. They were offered release from their torture by renouncing their faith but they did not recant and thus they were tortured and killed. How did they do this? They did it by believing that there was a "better resurrection" coming and it was far better to be tortured and to be a part of that resurrection than to renounce their faith in Christ and escape pain and death now but lose out on that better resurrection. What is this resurrection referred to here at the end "better than?" It is better than the resurrection those two boys experienced. Being tortured and killed leads to a better result than having your dead son brought back to you. Why? It is better because the boys, while raised to life still died but that future resurrection will never end. So by faith people are brought back from the dead and then die later and by faith people die and stay dead until the return of Christ and that final permanent resurrection. The thing I really want you to notice is the contrast between these two lists of acts that are performed by faith. Notice the first clause in v. 34. Daniel's three friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were told that if they would bow down and worship the idol that Nebuchadnezzar made then their lives would be spared but if they refused they would be thrown into the fiery furnace. They, like the people mentioned at the end of v. 35 refused to accept release believing in that better resurrection. However, God delivered them from that fire. They did not die but were kept alive. Yet, in v. 35 we are told of others, like Zechariah the prophet or Stephen the first Christian martyr who also were faithful to God but whom God did not deliver. They were both stoned and not delivered from death as were Daniel's three friends. Notice also in v. 35 there were some who by faith escaped the edge of the sword. We might think of David escaping Saul's sword or Elijah escaping Jezebel's sword. But then look at v. 37, there were others who by faith were killed with the sword. We might think of the numerous prophets who were killed by Jezebel and her husband King Ahab. In the NT there is this amazing contrast in Acts 12 where we read that Herod kills James, the brother of the apostle John with the sword and then he arrests Peter in order to do the same thing to him. However, the Lord sends an angel to break Peter out of prison and so he escapes the edge of the sword. What is the difference between James and Peter, between Elijah who escaped Jezebel's sword and the prophets whom Jezebel killed? Why did an angel miraculously deliver Peter but not James? Is what makes them different that one had faith and the other did not? NO!! That is the whole point of this list. They both had faith. By faith one escaped and by faith one died. Why is that? God has a plan that entails Andrew dying by faith and Peter escaping by faith. God is in charge, not us. Your faith has no power. God has all the power. He is in charge. Our responsibility is to live by faith in the promises of God. It is his business to determine whether I live in a palace and dress like a king as did David or dress in the skin of a goat and live in a cave like Elijah. God decides whether I die of cancer by faith or I am cured of cancer by faith. God decides if I have a comfortable marriage by faith or I live in an uncomfortable marriage by faith. Therefore, there is suffering and loss that God is asking you to endure in faith. It may not be God's will for you to be healed, for you to have a perfect Christian marriage, for you to have children who all love him, for you to get that girl or that boy, for you to get that good paying job. It might be God's will for you to quit your job, go to seminary and then move to India with your family to preach the gospel and then to have your daughter die of a disease. We do not know what his will for us will bring to us. We only know that it is his will that you live by faith in Christ no matter what happens. The beauty of the gospel is that you can always be a Christian, no matter what happens to you or what people do to you. Therefore if it is your goal to be a Christian, to live with God and be loved by him forever, then nothing can harm you. You can always be happy and do the right thing, no matter what happens. John Calvin says a very important thing in his commentary on this passage. He says, “… the victory of faith appears more splendid in the contempt of death than if life were extended to the fifth generation. It is a more glorious evidence of faith, and worthy of higher praise, when reproaches, want, and extreme troubles are borne with resignation and firmness, than when recovery from sickness is miraculously obtained, or any other benefit from God.” Listen the greatness and sufficiency of Christ is more clearly revealed by those who persist in trusting Christ, loving people and living in hope when all earthly hope has been taken away than when God gives the job, heals the body, creates the perfect marriage. It is no evidence of faith to be happy when you are healthy. It is a great evidence of faith when you are happy and useful to God and others even when you are sick. If your hope truly is fixed on that "better resurrection" that is yours by virtue of Christ's life, death and resurrection, then you will willingly endure suffering and loss and thus reveal the greatness of Christ. God helps those who trust in Christ as their representative and sacrifice therefore…
III. We will inherit everything through Christ (vv. 39-40) In v. 39 the author restates the point he made back in verse 13. While all these people lived by faith and God testified to their faith by including their story in the Bible and all received a portion of God's promised blessings as David did when he became king or Gideon when he defeated the Midianites or even goatskin clad Elijah in his victory over the prophets of Baal, yet none of them received the full promise, that is life lived with God forever in resurrected bodies in the restored heavens and earth. Every promise God made in the past was ultimately referring to this ultimate fulfillment. Therefore, all of those who died prior to the coming of Christ only saw the promises and greeted them from afar. Why is it that God did not give to them the fullness of the promise? The reason is because he has a plan to save all of his people through Christ at the same time. That is what v. 40 tells us. God has been working throughout all of history to one end, the bringing together of all things under Christ. God has a perfect ending for the story of the universe. That perfect ending is when all of God's people from throughout all of the millennium of human existence are gathered together around his throne in the new heavens and the new earth to worship him and the lamb who was slain. There has always been one people of God and always there has been one plan of God to save that one people of God through his one Savior, Jesus Christ. This is that perfect ending where people from every tribe and tongue and nation are brought together in one, united choir of praise to the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone who is part of that company will be there for no other reason than the fact that Jesus did what they never did. He obeyed God's law, he died the death we deserve, and he conquered sin and death and hell for his faithful people. Thus all who are united to him by their faith in him and who have lived their life by faith in Christ will joyfully join in that perfect world of love and praise to God. We are a people consumed with that vision and that dream. We are not people consumed by the American Dream. We are not people who live to be loved by others or who live to possess all the trinkets and toys of this world or who live to experience all the pleasures of this world. We live to be a part of God's perfect ending when we obtain our eternal inheritance, when all things become ours through Christ. God helps those who trust in Christ as their representative and sacrifice therefore…
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
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