Faith Is ...

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. 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.” – Hebrews 11:1-3

If one factors God out of life’s equation and adopts the view that we are little more than cosmic accidents, life, with its inevitable hardships and suffering, becomes hard to defend. In fact, suicide has been considered intellectually consistent, even fashionable, by some existential intellectuals in recent years. But for the Christian, there is substantial reason for hope in this life and in the life to come because of the promises of God’s Word. In fact, 1 Peter 1:3 tells us that we have been “born again to a living hope.” The degree of our experience of hope is proportionate to the degree of our faith. The more profound our faith, the more profound our hope.

This was important to the writer of Hebrews because of the rising storm of persecution that was about to fall on the church. He knew that the key to survival was a solid faith and an attendant hope. That is why he in Hebrews 10:38 quoted Habakkuk 2:4, “But my righteous one will live by faith.” There is a spiritual axiom implicit here: faith produces hope, and hope produces perseverance. Without faith one will inevitably shrink back.

The character of faith is spelled out with great care in the famous lines of verse 1: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Faith’s character is, in a word, certitude – a dynamic certainty about what God has promised. It is not a feeling. It is not optimism or bootstrap positive thinking either. It is not a hunch. It is not sentimentality. An old song says, “You gotta have faith” – the sentiment being that if you somehow have faith in faith, you will be okay. And faith is not brainless.

The first half of the verse expresses the future certitude that faith brings: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for.” R. Kent Hughes describes the words, “being sure” as a translation of a single Greek noun – hupostasis, which literally means, “That which stands under” or “foundation” and hence “substance.” He goes on to say that this word has appeared twice earlier in Hebrews where it was translated objectively [“being”] in 1:3 and subjectively [“confidence”] in 3:14. The KJV here uses the objective translation: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Likewise the NEB says, “Faith gives substance to our hopes” – the idea being that faith grabs hold of what is hoped for, as something real and substantial. Most other translations render the word subjectively – “the assurance” [RSV, ASV, NASB, NAB] or “the guarantee” [JB] or “being sure” [NIV]. Hughes concludes by saying, “Actually, the objective and subjective tenses of the word are not at odds because genuine faith does bring an assurance of what we hope for that is both solid and substantive.”

The second half of verse 1 joins faith’s future certitude to the parallel visual certitude that comes through faith, because faith means being “certain of what we do not see.” The KJV translates this, “the evidence of things not seen,” and the RSV says, “the conviction of things not seen.” These translations augment each other because the evidence by which a thing is proved brings conviction and certainty to the mind. Our faith is the organ by which we are enabled to see the invisible order – and to see it with certainty, just as our eyes behold the physical world around us. What do we see? We see the future because it is made present to us through our faith. But we also see more – namely, the spiritual kingdom around us. Genesis 28 records how Jacob, on that miserable night he fled from Esau into the wilderness, forlorn and alone, laid his weary head on a rock to sleep and “had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it” [v. 12]. In a flash he saw what had been around him all the time. He saw the unseen spiritual order, and that is what we see by faith. The more we understand this, the more we can unleash the power of God’s Spirit to change not only our lives but lives of those around us as well.

Having given us faith’s character in verse 1, the writer now calls to mind faith’s activism in verse 2: “This is what the ancients were commended for.” All the ancients in Israel who received divine commendation received it because of the character of their faith. This certitude produced a dynamic activism. Think of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego [alluded to in 11:34]. They had nothing but God’s word to rest on. They had no visible evidence that they would be delivered in this life. But they knew they would ultimately be delivered – they knew it so well that it was a present reality [see Daniel 3:16-18]. There is no evidence that any of them had ever seen the invisible world at work around them, but they did see it by faith and were certain of it. Graciously, God did let them see it with their physical eyes when He delivered them. Remember Nebuchadnezzar’s astonished words as he watched the trio in the flaming furnace: “Look, I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks a like a son of the gods.” [Daniel 3:25]. And so it goes for every example in the great Hall of Faith of Hebrews 11 – from Abel to Samuel to the unnamed heroes of the faith. And so it goes for us. By certain faith we will endure in blessed activism. And by certain faith we will receive God’s commendation.