5.22.24
This week we are looking at the great chapter of the faithful in Hebrews 11. And what we’ve seen so far is that biblical faith is quite different from how the world often defines it. Even those in the church tend to have a far too narrow view of what genuine faith looks like.
The beginning of faith is not some blind leap into the dark. Rather, biblical faith is quite rational. It’s what looks at life and says, “No matter how much the world tells me that I’m an accident that has no design, I feel the need to be significant. No matter how dog eat dog the evolutionary model forces on society, my gut just tells me that certain things are wrong.” These are rational ways of looking at life and saying, “There must be more to life than what we see each day. There must be a deeper force behind and beneath it all. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense.”
Secondly, we saw that biblical faith doesn’t stay as a mere intellectual assent. But it must become personal. God always invades our lives with his call that messes with our comfortable status quo. And as that call comes, it pushes us to begin questioning everything - why am I living this way…why am I doing this?
And now thirdly, faith begins to transition into a more “advanced” stage, where God starts to shift the foundations of our lives from our comfortable and safe idols and on to Jesus. Most people assume that true “faith” means that our lives are finally going better. But biblical faith goes in the exact opposite direction. Once his call becomes personal to us, God begins to shake everything in our lives that is shakable in order to show us the one foundation that is unshakable. And so biblical faith passes through the valley of the shadow of death, as it strips away the weak foundations we’re building on, and pushes us toward the Rock of Jesus.
What the author tells us united these great heroes of the faith was that they were all looking forward to a city whose foundations could never be shaken. God had been directing their lives in such a way that they had come to see that every foundation they had been building upon was crumbling beneath them.
Part of what this means is that God intentionally brings or allows challenging circumstances into our lives in order to reveal just how fragile our foundations really are. While we are busy crying out to God to change our miserable conditions, God is lovingly using it to strip away the trust in foundations that can never hold the weight of our lives and replace them with the foundation of Jesus. And it’s “weak” faith that needs for our lives to go the ways we want them to. But a growing biblical faith embraces the sufferings of Jesus, knowing that they are turning us into people of great faith and tremendous character.