5.20.24
This week we move into the famous hall of faith in Hebrews 11. And we will be looking at what it means to live in a harsh world with faith. Unlike conservatives, who tend to define faith as something you need to find a way to conjure up more of…and unlike liberals who view intellectual skepticism as the peak of personal maturity - the Bible has a far more complicated and nuanced understanding of what faith really is.
There are several aspects of what biblical faith is that we see in our passage. And each one builds into the next one. The first aspect of faith is that it’s actually very rational. The world likes to think of faith as a blind leap into the dark. But that’s not what biblical faith entails. As the writer puts it, “Faith is being confident in what we hope for and assured of what we cannot now see.” According to the Bible, faith is comprised of confidence and assurance - not a blind leap.
As the writer tells us in verse 1, we are “certain of what we do not see.” And the word “certain” here conjures up the idea of validating through evidence. And when he gets to verse 3 he says, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” And the word “understand” is a word that means to “think” or to “reason”.
If we were to paraphrase the first 3 verses, we could summarize it this way: "Faith actually uses reason to perceive that the seen material world all by itself doesn’t make any sense. There must be an unseen supernatural reality as well." And we see evidence of this all over the face of our lives. For example, even though evolution is the most common accepted view of the origins of the universe, the implications of that view means that life has no inherent value. If we were not designed for a purpose by a Creator, then we are independent creatures who can decide our own fate. But what this means is that life has no real meaning. It has no deep purpose. And yet, everything inside us screams that we have value. That we matter. And we are continually driven to pursue a purpose. But how can that be, if there is no purpose and there is no design. This is just one of many examples (love and beauty being two other key elements of our humanity) of how we know, deep in our hearts, something that our world tries to deny. And the only conclusion must be that there is more behind this world than many are willing to admit.
Even the ideas that “some” things are just wrong - boots off the deeper assumption that there is a design and purpose beneath our seen world. Otherwise, there’s no way to believe that our feelings against oppression and injustice have any more value than our feelings of selfishness and taking what I want in life. Without a design, there’s basis for saying that anything is wrong. The best we can say is that society generally agrees it’s right or wrong. But that’s exactly how society looked at slavery 200 years ago. Did that make it right?
As CS Lewis rightly points out, to deny the deeper reality beneath our world is to live in a meaningless world that still feels significant. And to do so robs us of any ability to enjoy the good things of this life. As he puts it, "You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes."
And so we see that our faith is indeed rational. There are many things that we can point to that reveal a deeper meaning and purpose beneath the world that we see.
