_THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM._
"By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place
which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not
knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner in the land
of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac
and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for
the city which hath the foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God.
By faith even Sarah herself received power to conceive seed when she
was past age, since she counted Him faithful Who had promised:
wherefore also there sprang of one, and him as good as dead, so many
as the stars of heaven in multitude, and as the sand, which is by
the sea-shore, innumerable. These all died in faith, not having
received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from
afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on
the earth. For they that say such things make it manifest that they
are seeking after a country of their own. And if indeed they had
been mindful of that country from which they went out, they would
have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better
country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed of them,
to be called their God: for He hath prepared for them a city. By
faith Abraham, being tried, offered up Isaac: yea, he that had
gladly received the promises was offering up his only-begotten son;
even he to whom it was said, In Isaac shall thy seed be called:
accounting that God is able to raise up, even from the dead; from
whence he did also in a parable receive him back."--HEB. xi. 8-19
(R.V.).
We have learned that faith is the proof of the unseen. We must not
exclude even from this clause the other thought that faith is an
assurance of things hoped for. It is not stated, but it is implied. The
conception of a personal God requires only to be unfolded in order to
yield a rich harvest of hope. The author proceeds to show that by faith
the elders had witness borne to them in God's confession of them and
great rewards. He recounts the achievements of a long line of believers,
who as they went handed the light from one to another. In them is the
true unity of religion and revelation from the beginning. For the poor
order of high-priests the writer substitutes the glorious succession of
faith.
We choose for the subject of this chapter the faith of Abraham. But we
shall not dismiss in silence the faith of Abel, Enoch, and Noah. The
paragraph in which Abraham's deeds are recorded will most naturally
divide itself into three comparisons between their faith and his. We
venture to think that this was in the writer's mind and determined the
form of the passage. From the eighth to the tenth verse the Apostle
compares Abraham's faith with that of Noah; after a short episode
concerning Sarah, he compares Abraham's faith with Enoch's, from the
thirteenth verse to the sixteenth; then, down to the nineteenth verse,
he compares Abraham's faith with that of Abel. Noah's faith appeared in
an act of obedience, Enoch's in a life of fellowship with God, Abel's in
his more excellent sacrifice. Abraham's faith manifested itself in all
these ways. When he was called, he obeyed; when a sojourner, he desired
a better country, that is, a heavenly, and God was not ashamed to be
called his God; being tried, he offered up Isaac.
Two points of surpassing worth in his faith suggest themselves. The one
is largeness and variety of experience; the other is conquest over
difficulties. These are the constituents of a great saint. Many a good
man will not become a strong spiritual character because his experience
of life is too narrow. Others, whose range is wide, fail to reach the
higher altitudes of saintliness because they have never been called to
pass through sore trials, or, if they have heard the summons, have
shrunk from the hardships. Before Abraham faith was both limited in its
experience and untested with heaven-sent difficulties. Abraham's
religion was complex. His faith was "a perfect cube," and, presenting a
face to every wind that blows, came victorious out of every trial.
Let us trace the comparisons.
_First_, Noah obeyed a Divine command when he built an ark to the saving
of his house. He obeyed by faith. His eyes saw the invisible, and the
vision kindled his hopes of being saved through the very waters that
would destroy every living substance. But this was all. His faith acted
only in one direction: he hoped to be saved. The Apostle Peter[258]
compares his faith to the initial grace of those who seek baptism, and
have only crossed the threshold of the spiritual life. It is true that
he overcame one class of difficulties. He was not in bondage to the
things of sense. He made provision for a future belied by present
appearances. But the influence of the senses is not the greatest
difficulty of the human spirit. As the lonely ship rode on the heaving
waste of waters, all within was gladness and peace. No heaven-sent
temptations tried the patriarch's faith, He overcame the trials that
spring out of the earth; but he knew not the anguish that rends the
spirit like a lightning-stroke descending from God.
With Abraham it was otherwise. "He went out, not knowing whither he
went."[259] He leaves his father's house and his father's gods. He
breaks for ever with the past, even before the future has been revealed
to him. The thoughts and feelings that had grown up with him from
childhood are once for all put away. He has no sheltering ark to receive
him. A homeless wanderer, he pitches his tent to-day at the well, not
knowing where his invisible guide may bid him stretch the cords on the
morrow. His departure from Ur of the Chaldees was a family migration.
But the writer of this Epistle, like Philo, describes it as the man's
own personal obedience to a Divine call. Submitting to God's will,
possessed with the inspiration and courage of faith, obeying daily new
intimations, he bends his steps this way or that, not knowing whither he
goes. True, he went right into the heart of the land of promise. But,
even in his own heritage, he became a sojourner, as in a land not his
own.[260] God "gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to
set his foot on."[261] Possessor of all in promise, he purchased a
sepulchre, which was the first ground he could call his own. The cave of
Machpelah was the small beginning of the fulfilment of God's promise,
which the spirit of Abraham is even now receiving in a higher form. It
is still the same. The bright dawn of heaven often breaks upon the soul
at an open grave. But he journeyed on, and trusted. For a time he and
Sarah only; afterwards Isaac with them; at last, when Sarah had been
laid to rest, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the three together, held on
bravely, sojourning with aching hearts, but ever believing. The Apostle
brings in the names of Isaac and Jacob, not to describe their
faith--this he will do subsequently,--but to show the tenacity and
patience of "the friend of God."
His faith, thus sorely tried by God's long delay, is rewarded, not with
an external fulfilment of the promise, but with larger hopes, wider
range of vision, greater strength to endure, more vivid realisation of
the unseen. "He looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose
Architect and Maker is God."[262] In the promise not a word is said
about a city. Apparently he was still to be a nomad chief of a large and
wealthy tribe. When God deferred again and again the fulfilment of His
promise to give him "this land," His trusting servant bethought him what
the delay could mean. This was his hill of difficulty, where the two
ways part. The worldly wisdom of unbelief would argue from God's
tardiness that the reality, when it comes, will fall far short of the
promise. Faith, with higher wisdom, makes sure that the delay has a
purpose. God intends to give more and better things than He promised,
and is making room in the believer's heart for the greater blessings.
Abraham cast about to imagine the better things. He invented a blessing,
and, so to speak, inserted it for himself in the promise.
This new blessing has an earthly and a heavenly meaning. On its earthly
side it represents the transition from a nomadic life to a fixed abode.
Faith bridged the gulf that separates a wandering horde from the
cultured greatness of civilization. The future grandeur of Zion was
already held in the grasp of Abraham's faith. But the invented blessing
had also a heavenly side. The more correct rendering of the Apostle's
words in the Revised Version expresses this higher thought: "He looked
for the city which hath the foundations"--_the_ city; for, after all,
there is but one that hath the eternal foundations. It is the holy
city,[263] the heavenly Jerusalem, seen by the faith of Abraham in the
early morning of revelation, seen again in vision by the Apostle John at
its close. The expression cannot mean anything that comes short of the
Apostle's description of faith as the assurance of things hoped for in
the unseen world. Abraham realised heaven as an eternal city, in which
after death he would be gathered to his fathers. A sublime
conception!--eternity not the dwelling-place of the solitary spirit, the
joy of heaven consisting in personal fellowship for ever with the good
of every age and clime. There the past streams into the present, not, as
here, the present into the past. All are contemporaries there, and death
is no more. Whatever makes civilization powerful or beautiful on
earth--laws, arts, culture--all is there etherealised and endowed with
immortality. Such a city has God only for its Architect,[264] God only
for its Builder.[265] He Who conceived the plan can alone execute the
design and realise the idea.
Of this sort was Abraham's obedience. He continued to endure in the face
of God's delay to fulfil the promise. His reward consisted, not in an
earthly inheritance, not in mere salvation, but in larger hopes and in
the power of a spiritual imagination.
_Second_, Abraham's faith is compared with Enoch's, whose story is most
sweetly simple. He is the man who has never doubted, across whose placid
face no dark shadow of unbelief ever sweeps. A virgin soul, he walks
with God in a time when the wickedness of man is great in the earth and
the imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually,
as Adam walked with God in the cool of the evening before sin had
brought the hot fever of shame to his cheek. He walks with God, as a
child with his father; "and God takes him" into His arms. Enoch's
removal was not like the entrance of Elijah into heaven: a victorious
conqueror returning into the city in his triumphal car. It was the quiet
passing away, without observation, of a spirit of heaven that had
sojourned for a time on earth. Men sought him, because they felt the
loss of his presence among them. But they knew that God had taken him.
They inferred his story from his character. In Enoch we have an instance
of faith as the faculty of realising the unseen, but not as a power to
conquer difficulties.
Compare this faith with Abraham's. "These,"--Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob,--"all _died_ in faith," or, as we may render the word, "according
to faith,"--according to the faith which they had exhibited in their
life. Their death was after the same pattern of faith. Enoch's
contemplative life came to a fitting end in a deathless translation to
higher fellowship with God. His way of leaving life became him.
Abraham's repeated conflicts and victories closed with quite as much
becomingness in a last trial of his faith, when he was called to die
without having received the fulfilment of the promises. But he had
already seen the heavenly city and greeted it from afar.[266] He saw the
promises, as the traveller beholds the gleaming mirage of the desert.
The illusiveness of life is the theme of moralists when they preach
resignation. It is faith only that can transform the illusions
themselves into an incentive to high and holy aspirations. All profound
religion is full of seeming illusions. Christ beckons us onward. When we
climb this steep, His voice is heard calling to us from a higher peak.
That height gained reveals a soaring mass piercing the clouds, and the
voice is heard above still summoning us to fresh effort. The climber
falls exhausted on the mountain-side and lays him down to die. Ever as
Abraham attempted to seize the promise, it eluded his grasp. The
Tantalus of heathen mythology was in Tartarus, but the Tantalus of the
Bible is the man of faith, who believes the more for every failure to
attain.
Such men "declare plainly that they seek a country of their own."[267]
Let not the full force of the words escape us. The Apostle does not mean
that they seek to emigrate to a new country. He has just said that they
confess themselves to be "strangers and pilgrims on the earth." They are
"pilgrims," because they are journeying through on their way to another
country; they are "strangers," because they have come hither from
another land.[268] His meaning is that they long to return home. That
he means this is evident from his thinking it necessary to guard himself
against the possibility of being understood to refer to Ur of the
Chaldees. They were not mindful of the earthly home, the cradle of their
race, which they had left for ever. Not once did they cast a wistful
look back, like Lot's wife and the Israelites in the wilderness. Yet
they yearned for their fatherland.[269] Plato imagined that all our
knowledge is a reminiscence of what we learned in a previous state of
existence; and Wordsworth's exquisite lines, which cannot lose their
sweet fragrance however often they are repeated, are a reflection of the
same visionary gleam,--
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star.
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, Who is our home."
Our author too suggests it; and it is true. We need not maintain it as
an external fact in the history of the soul, according to the old
doctrine, resuscitated in our own times, of Traducianism. The Apostle
represents it rather as a feeling. There is a Christian consciousness of
heaven, as if the soul had been there and longed to return. And if it
is a glorious attainment of faith to regard heaven as a city, more
consoling still is the hope of returning there, storm-tossed and
weather-beaten, as to a home, to look up to God as to a Father, and to
love all angels and saints as brethren in the household of God, over
which Christ is set as a Son. Such a hope renders feeble, sinful men not
altogether unworthy of God's Fatherhood. For He is not ashamed to be
called their God, and Jesus Christ is not ashamed to call them
brethren.[270] The proof is, that God has prepared for them a settled
abode in the eternal city.
_Third_, the faith of Abraham is compared with the faith of Abel. In the
case of Abel faith is more than a realisation of the unseen. For Cain
also believed in the existence of an invisible Power, and offered
sacrifice. We are expressly told in the narrative[271] that "Cain
brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord." Yet he
was a wicked man. The Apostle John says[272] that "Cain was of the Evil
One." He had the faith which St. James ascribes to the demons, who
"believe there is one God, and shudder."[273] He was possessed with the
same hatred, and had also the same faith. It was the union of the two
things in his spirit that made him the murderer of his brother. Our
author points out very clearly the difference between Cain and Abel.
Both sacrificed, but Abel desired righteousness. He had a conscience of
sin, and sought reconciliation with God through his offering. Indeed,
some of the most ancient authorities, for "God bearing witness in
respect to his gifts," read "he bearing witness to God on the ground of
his gifts;" that is, Abel bore witness by his sacrifice to God's
righteousness and mercy. He was the first martyr, therefore, in two
senses. He was God's witness, and he was slain for his righteousness.
But, whether we accept this reading or the other, the Apostle presents
Abel before us as the man who realised the great moral conception of
righteousness. He sought, not the favours of an arbitrary Sovereign, not
the mere mercy of an omnipotent Ruler, but the peace of the righteous
God. It was through Abel that faith in God thus became the foundation of
true ethics. He acknowledged the immutable difference between right and
wrong, which is the moral theory accepted by the greater saints of the
Old Testament, and in the New Testament forms the groundwork of St.
Paul's forensic doctrine of the Atonement. Moreover, because Abel
witnessed for righteousness by his sacrifice, his blood even cried from
the ground unto God for righteous vengeance. For this is unquestionably
the meaning of the words "and through his faith he being dead yet
speaketh;" and in the next chapter[274] the Apostle speaks of "the
blood of sprinkling, that speaketh a better thing than that of Abel." It
was the blood of one whose faith had grasped firmly the truth of God's
righteousness. His blood, therefore, cried to the righteous God to
avenge his wrong. The Apostle speaks as if he were personifying the
blood and ascribing to the slain man the faith which he had manifested
before. The action of Abel's faith in life and, as we may safely assume,
in the very article of death, retained its power with God. Every
mouthing wound had a tongue. In like manner, says the writer of the
Epistle, the obedience of Jesus up to and in His death made His blood
efficacious for pardon to the end of time.
But Abraham's faith excelled. Abel was prompted to offer sacrifice by
natural religiousness and an awakened conscience; Abraham sternly
resolved to obey a command of God. He prepared to do that against which
nature revolted, yea that which conscience forbade. Had not the story of
Abel's faith itself loudly proclaimed the sacredness of human life?
Would not Abraham, if he offered up Isaac, become another Cain? Would
not the dead child speak, and his blood cry from the ground to God for
vengeance? It was the case of a man to whom "God is greater than
conscience." He resolved to obey at all hazards. Hereby he assured his
heart--that is, his conscience--before God in that matter wherein his
heart may have condemned him.[275] We, it is true, in the light of a
better revelation of God's character, should at once deny, without more
ado, that such a command had been given by God; and we need not fear
thankfully and vehemently to declare that our absolute trust in the
rightness of our own moral instincts is a higher faith than Abraham's.
But he had no misgiving as to the reality of the revelation or the
authority of the command. Neither do the sacred historian and the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews question it. We also need not doubt. God
met His servant at that stage of spiritual perception which he had
already attained. His faith was strong in its realisation of God's
authority and faithfulness. But his moral nature was not sufficiently
educated to decide by the character of a command whether it was worthy
of God or not. He calmly left it to Him to vindicate His own
righteousness. Those who deny that God imposed such a hard task on
Abraham must be prepared to solve still greater difficulties. For do not
we also, in reference to some things, still require Abraham's faith that
the Judge of all the earth will do right? What shall we say of His
permitting the terrible and universal sufferings of all living things?
What are we to think of the still more awful mystery of moral evil?
Shall we say He could not have prevented it? Or shall we take refuge in
the distinction between permission and command? Of the two it were
easier to understand His commanding what He will not permit, as in the
sacrifice of Isaac, than to explain His permission of what He cannot and
will not command, as in the undoubted existence of sin.
But let us once more repeat that the greatest faith of all is to
believe, with Abel, that God is righteous, and yet to believe, with
Abraham, that God can justify His own seeming unrighteousness, and also
to believe, with the saints of Christianity, that the test which God
imposed on Abraham will nevermore be tried, because the enlightened
conscience of humanity forbids it and invites other and more subtle
tests in its place.
We must not suppose that Abraham found the command an easy one. From the
narrative in the Book of Genesis we should infer that he expected God to
provide a substitute for Isaac: "And Abraham said, My son, God will
provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering; so they went both of them
together."[276] But the Apostle gives us plainly to understand that
Abraham offered his son because he accounted that God was able to raise
him from the dead. Both answers are true. They reveal to us the anxious
tossings of his spirit, seeking to account to itself for the terrible
command of Heaven. At one moment he thinks God will not carry matters to
the bitter end. His mind is pacified with the thought that a substitute
for Isaac will be provided. At another moment this appeared to detract
from the awful severity of the trial, and Abraham's faith waxed strong
to obey, even though no substitute would be found in the thicket.
Another solution would then offer itself. God would immediately bring
Isaac back to life. For Isaac would not cease to be, nor cease to be
Isaac, when the sacrificial knife had descended. "God is not God of the
dead, but of the living, for all live unto Him."[277] Besides, the
promise had not been withdrawn, though it had not yet been confirmed by
an oath; and the promise involved that the seed would be called in
Isaac, not in another son. Both solutions were right. For a ram was
caught in a thicket by the horns, and Abraham did receive his son back
from the dead, not literally indeed, but in a parable.
Most expositors explain the words "in a parable" as if they meant
nothing more than "as it were," "so to speak;" and some have actually
supposed them to refer to the birth of Isaac in his father's old age,
when Abraham was "as good as dead."[278] Both interpretations do
violence to the Greek expression,[279] which must mean "even in a
parable." It is a brief and pregnant allusion to the ultimate purpose of
Abraham's trial. God intended more by it than to test faith. The test
was meant to prepare Abraham for receiving a revelation. On Moriah, and
ever after, Isaac was more than Isaac to Abraham. He offered him to God
as Isaac, the son of the promise. He received him back from God's hand
as a type of Him in Whom the promise would be fulfilled. Abraham had
gladly received the promise. He now saw the day of Christ, and
rejoiced.[280]
FOOTNOTES:
[258] 1 Peter iii. 20.
[259] Chap. xi 8.
[260] Chap. xi. 9.
[261] Acts vii. 5.
[262] Chap. xi. 10.
[263] Rev. xxi. 10.
[264] =technitês=.
[265] =dêmiourgos=.
[266] =aspasamenoi= (xi. 13).
[267] Chap. xi. 14.
[268] =xenoi kai parepidêmoi=.
[269] =patrida=.
[270] Chaps. xi. 16; ii. 11.
[271] Gen. iv. 3.
[272] 1 John iii. 12.
[273] James ii. 19.
[274] Chap. xii. 24.
[275] 1 John iii. 19, 20.
[276] Gen. xxii. 8.
[277] Luke xx. 38.
[278] Chap. xi. 12.
[279] =kai en parabolê=.
[280] John viii. 56.