The Substance of Faith

When we talk about faith, we're talking about trusting in what God has said, not trusting that you can create something as yet unsaid, a future unwritten, unspoken, unrevealed but rather to believe in that promise which is laid out in Scripture in all its glory, in all its detail that has been given to every true believer. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If someone asked you, what is faith?

How would you respond? It can be a greater challenge to answer that question than you might think. For some practical help, stay here as John looks at Hebrews chapter 11 in his ongoing study called The New Testament, Beginning to End. Now, before you continue this series, John, I know these landmark sermons have caused all of us here at Grace to You to reflect on many years of Bible teaching and also to express our appreciation for the people who have partnered with us, who've made this ministry possible.

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That's right, friend. For more information on how you can support Grace To You and help equip believers around the world with biblical truth, visit our website, gty.org. I'll repeat those details before we close today, but for now, if you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews 11 as John MacArthur works his way through the New Testament beginning to end. I want you to turn in your Bible to Hebrews chapter 11 and as when we talk about salvation, we talk about the gospel, we're always talking about faith and that raises the question, 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 the Hall of Fame. It has been called the Heroes of the Faith.

It has been called the Honor Roll of Old Testament saints, the Westminster Abbey of Scripture. It's been called the Faith Chapter and perhaps other things as well. What it presents to us is the power of faith...the power of faith, the excellency of faith.

So when we talk about faith, we're talking about trusting in what God has said, not trusting that you can create something as yet unsaid, a future unwritten, unspoken, unrevealed, but rather to believe in that promise which is laid out in Scripture in all its glory, in all its detail that has been given to every true believer. Well we can start where the chapter starts with the first, by faith Abel. You wouldn't say that if Abel had a choice to write his future, he would have written that he would be murdered by his brother. No, these are people who died. These are people who struggled. These are people whose lives were marked with horrendous suffering.

And it crescendos toward the end of the chapter. So from the human perspective, if they somehow had the power to write their own future, they perhaps would have written it differently than God wrote it. But the kind of faith we're talking about, the faith that God gives a believer is the faith to trust the future that God has written because inherent in what God has written for us is His promise of ultimate blessing and eternal joy. The message of the first ten chapters is, put your faith in Jesus Christ.

He is in every sense superior. Now this reinforces for the believers who are receiving this letter the superiority of Christ to which they have already asserted their will by the power of God. They already know that.

They have trusted in that reality. But at periodic points through the opening ten chapters, familiar to anyone who studies the book of Hebrews, there are warnings. There are at least four of them by the time you get to this chapter and this chapter constitutes, if you will, another warning. These warnings are given to non-Christian Jews who are attending this fellowship. They're sitting on the fringe, if you will. They're apparently intellectually convinced of the gospel. They understand the truth of the gospel in their minds. They understand the power of the proof of that truth by the miracles and signs and wonders which were wrought by Christ.

So we could say they're intellectually convinced. They are hanging on the fringes of this fellowship of Christian Jews, but they never really have come all the way to Christ. And there are these periodic warnings not to fall back, not to go back into Judaism. There's one of them in chapter 2.

There are more in chapter 3 and 4, another in chapter 6, another in chapter 10. Don't go on sinning willfully after you have the knowledge of the truth, says chapter 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 big change...big change because we know that the Judaism that existed in the time of our Lord and thus in the time of the New Testament was a system of salvation by...what?...by works, by merit. The Jew attempted to earn salvation. It was necessary then to teach these people the reality of salvation by faith. They had a lot of other things that they could look at in terms of New Testament literature to be taught that. Jesus said that salvation was by faith.

That was clear and not by works. The Apostle Paul made it abundantly clear, Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace are you saved through faith, Romans chapter 3, chapter 4 and all the way through indicates that salvation comes by faith alone. Scripture is replete with that emphasis. But the Jews are having a hard time being deprogrammed.

Can we put it that way? They're having a hard time being deprogrammed. So you're going to have to show them something other than the New Testament. They would like to be able to accept this reality of salvation by faith rather than by works, coming from Christ, coming from the Apostles, coming from Paul, coming from the New Testament writers. But isn't it possible that there could be some other illustrations of salvation by faith from the Old Testament?

This might get them across that barrier that seems to be so formidable for them. And that is why the eleventh chapter of Hebrews is written. It is written because it is a necessity to prove to the Jews who are intellectually convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, that salvation is by faith and that people not only after Jesus but even before Jesus were saved by faith...by faith.

Now how is He going to get this case across? How is He going to penetrate their sort of Old Testament thinking? The answer in chapter 11 by giving us a list of Old Testament saints whose lives were marked by faith. The true people of God through all the ages have become the true people of God by faith.

Chapter 11 is loaded with illustrations. Just looking 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. And verse 21, by faith, Jacob. Verse 22, by faith, Joseph. Twenty-three, by faith, Moses. And again in verse 24, going down further, verse 31, by faith, Rahab. And then 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.

They didn't receive what was promised. They trusted that it would come as it had been promised. And that's exactly what I said is the definition of faith you want to work with. Faith is confident trust in the future God has promised. Faith is not some kind of power by which you create your future, it is the power of God given to you to trust in the promises God has made in Scripture.

These people hadn't received the promise and they trusted in the promise and thus they live by faith. So the first thing we learn about faith is that it is trusting in what isn't visible. It is trusting in what isn't received. It is trusting in what isn't experienced. It is trusting in something not yet manifest. Faith, belief, that's a noun, the Greek word pistis, it is a noun, it means belief, trust, confidence, faith.

And I love the fact that he uses a noun because it emphasizes the settled reality of this. It is a commodity that is possessed. Certainly believing can be a verb, but 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 doesn't mean that we see something we want and bring it into existence, it means that we put our confidence in something not seen, convictions of things not seen. Some of your translations will say, faith is the substance of things not seen. That's a great translation.

I love that translation. Faith is the substance of things not seen. Confidence is a word that has substance, doesn't it?

It does. It's a word that you can take to the bank. It's a word that you can sort of cash in on.

It's a word that basically can be legitimately translated substance, essence. That gives it reality. Faith is substantial confidence in the reality of something not realized. Faith gives present substance to something that is future. As this chapter will show us when it unfolds, in Old Testament times there were...well, all the saints, men and women who had nothing but the promises of God...nothing but the promises of God to rest on, nothing but the promises of God to hope for, no visible evidence that messianic promise would come true, no visible evidence that Kingdom promise would 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, that's what it says at the end, at the end of the chapter. Those people who exercised this faith, 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 very likeness of God. David says, I look for the day when I will awaken thy likeness, the glories of eternal bliss. They didn't see any of it here. 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 a God who cannot lie and so their faith gave substance to the future hope. Now we're on this side of the cross, but, folks, we understand this, don't we?

None of you has seen heaven and you don't know anyone who's been there and back except the Lord Himself. And yet you have basically put your entire eternal destiny on the foundation on the fact that the Scripture is reliable and what God has promised you can trust, right? And what that has done is created substance in the present tense for a future promise. But it has substance now.

It has weight now. It provides assurance now so that you sing and you pray and you praise and you act and you live and you obey and you minister and you witness because this hoped for reality gives present weight to your life, substance. And frankly, this is against the grain of all the things that work in a fallen world, is it not? First of all, it's against the grain of your own flesh.

Is that not true? So now that you believe these things and have put your trust in Christ and are now living a life based upon promises for the future that you haven't seen that have so much weight that they control your life, what do you do? You live your life as a Christian battling against the flesh that is your natural expression. Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just say, forget it? I'm just going to go with whatever I feel.

It would be a lot easier, right? It's the way you used to live, like the godless Gentiles live in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. What happened? Whatever happens. But you don't live that way. You restrain the flesh. You restrict the flesh.

You limit the pleasures. You fight against your fallenness. You resist sin. You run from it. You flee it.

Why? Because you understand that there is a future reward and a future desire to come before the Lord and bring honor to His name by the life you've lived. So you literally have brought substance into your life by the things that you hope for in the future. Why do you have this kind of hope that's so strong that it can change the way you live your life and that you live your life against the grain of your own fallen flesh? Because you believe in the truth of God's revelation.

Why do you believe that? Because God has given you the faith to believe in that revealed Word and everything you ever study in that Word and all the evidences that come around that Word indicate that it, in fact, is true. Because faith is so powerful, it gives such substance to your life that you live against the grain of your own fallenness and you live against the grain of the world of which you are a part. There's a real sense in which you live against the grain of your own senses...your own senses because you can't do what your natural senses tell you to do. If left to your own natural senses, you'd be out of control in every aspect of your life, would you not? Because those senses are never satisfied. You never have enough of anything because if you see something else, you want it, right?

You want it. This is what it means to have substance in the present based upon promises for the future. This is how we live our lives as Christians. This is what it means to live by faith. Faith furnishes the heart with firm support in the revealed promises of God. Faith believes God. It believes God as revealed in Scripture. And that faith, Scripture says, is an anchor. Here we see it as an anchor, laid out in the experience of believers. Real faith gives us a confident substance in the present. But I want to go beyond that. It is not just the assurance, or the substance, or you could even translate it the evidence, elukas, but it is also the conviction, that's the word evidence, it's the conviction, elukas, of things not seen.

This takes it a step further. It is the substance that becomes conviction. Maybe I should have picked that up a little bit earlier because it's conviction that basically defines how you live, okay? You can know something to be true, but until it becomes a conviction, you don't put it really into action.

So we have substance that has led to conviction. What would make you live against the grain of your fallenness? What would make you live against the grain of the world? What would make you live against the grain of your own senses? What would cause you to abandon everything for something you can't see, for promises that have never been fulfilled?

What would cause you to live this kind of life? A conviction...a conviction. And implied in that conviction is a strong, strong commitment. For example, borrowing from the chapter, 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?

A conviction? Well it would have to be more than just some kind of hope because you would have to spend 120 years building the boat. Can you imagine building a boat as Noah did for 120 years in the desert and dealing with the mockery of his neighbors?

Some of you being mocked by your neighbors for a few days, perhaps there's more than you can handle. What put his faith into action? There was such substance to what he had been told. He was so confident in the revelation of God to him that it became a conviction that he could literally live his life on. That's what puts faith into action.

He acted on it. Because of revelation came action. Because of substance came conviction. So that's the nature of faith. A word about the testimony of faith. Verse 2, and here the writer sort of introduces us to what is going to be the emphasis of the chapter, for by it the men of old gained approval. Literally some translation, I think the King James says, the elders, meaning the Old Testament saints.

And this is where he sort of tips his approach here. He's going to help these Jews who maybe are struggling a little bit with this idea of salvation by faith because they've come out of a work system by pointing to the fact that this is in fact how the saints of old gained approval. The approval means praise, approbation. Why would we identify them as heroes of the faith? Why did the Jews identify them as heroes of the faith? Why did they look at Abel as nobler than Cain? Why did they look at Enoch as noble? Why did they look at Abraham as noble?

Why did they look at Sarah as noble? Why did they look at the others, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and all the rest? Because of their faith. And that's what he's going to show throughout this chapter.

This is not a new concept. The great heroes of the faith, the saints of old live by faith. Abel believed God regarding sacrifice, acted on faith that what God said was true and what God expected was the path of blessing. He did what God told him because God told him this is what to do and I'll bless you and he did it and was, of course, received and approved. Enoch believed God, so much so that he didn't die.

God was so pleased with him that one day he took a walk and walked right into the presence of God and skipped the dying part. Noah believed God and because of it, God granted him righteousness and God vindicated him, brought about what God had promised but spared him and his family. Abraham and Sarah believed God for a child and God fulfilled the promise. 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 by the people of the past and even remained the heroes of the faith.

God's Word made their hope real and based upon what God had told them, they lived obediently by faith and are rightly honored as heroes. And then there is finally an illustration of faith, the first one that he gives. And he gathers us all into the illustration 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.

This illustration takes us back and gives us a foundation for faith looking forward. 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. That looks back at creation. Creation is things seen in the universe made out of things unseen. That's creation. Creation is ex nihilo, God made the whole universe out of what?

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. You say, why do we understand it by faith? Because we weren't there, right? You say, well I can't live by faith, I can't conduct my life by faith.

Well try this on. The world exists, the universe exists, by faith we understand that God created it by His Word. Now where do we place our faith? In the revelation of God written in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 which tells us that God created the universe by His Word, right?

Let there be light and there was light. He spoke everything into existence and the record is in Genesis 1. So we have an opportunity to place our faith in something in the past as a foundation to place our faith in something in the future. 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 for those who know Him and love Him. You're listening to Grace to You with pastor and author John MacArthur. Today's lesson is part of his series titled, The New Testament Beginning to End.

It's a collection of landmark sermons from John MacArthur's more than five decades of Bible teaching. Now as John mentioned before the lesson, this ministry is made possible because of the faithful support of listeners like you. Your donations help keep this broadcast on the air in your area and around the world, encouraging believers and strengthening local churches. If you'd like to partner with Grace to You, visit our website, gty.org, or give us a call today. The toll-free number is 800-55-GRACE. You can also mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. And even if you're unable to give today, you can still support this ministry for generations to come by making Grace to You part of your estate plan. For details about legacy giving, visit our website, gty.org, or call us at 800-55-GRACE. That number one more time, 800-55-GRACE. And when you go to gty.org, I would encourage you to listen to all of the messages from our Truth Matters conferences, including the most recent conference on recovering a biblical worldview. John and a number of other Bible teachers gathered at the Answers in Genesis conference center and took a hard look at critical race theory, gender and sexuality, and other issues that affect churches today. Again, all of our conference messages are available for free at gty.org. And now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember that Grace to You television airs this Sunday. Check our website for Channel and Times, and then join us tomorrow for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.