FAITH AND ITS ANNALS
HEB. xi. (II.)
We considered in the last chapter the account of Faith with which the
apostolic Writer opens this great recital of the "life, work, and
triumph of faith" in holy human lives. His words, as we found, lend
themselves to some variety of explanation in detail: the term [Greek:
hypostasis] alone may be interpreted in at least three ways. But I do
not think that this need disturb us as to the essential meaning of the
description. Each and all of the renderings leave us with the thought
that faith has a power in it to make the thing hoped-for act upon us as
if it were attained, and the invisible as if it were before our eyes.
We may pause so far further over the description of faith here as to
point out that it is precisely this, a description, not a definition. To
quote Heb. xi. 1 as a good definition of faith is to mistake its import
altogether. I have often recalled, in speech or writing, a story told
me forty years ago by an Oxford friend when we were masters together at
a public school. He had attended a Greek Testament lecture at his
college a few years before, and the lecturer one day asked the class for
a definition of faith. Some one quoted Heb. xi. 1, and the lecturer's
answer was, "You could not have given a worse definition." My old
friend, a "broad" but most reverent Churchman, referred to this as an
instance of painful flippancy. It may have been so. But I am prepared to
think that the lecturer may not have meant it so at all. He may only
have expressed rather crudely his view, the right view, to my mind, that
we have here not a definition of faith at all but a description of faith
as an operative force, an account of what faith looks like when it is at
work; and this is a very different matter.
What is a definition? A precise and exclusive statement of the
essentials of a thing, such that it will fit no other thing. A
description may be something altogether different from this. It may so
handle the object that the terms are not exclusive at all, but are
equally applicable to something else; as here for example, where the
phraseology would equally well describe imagination in its more vivid
forms--a thing as different as possible from faith. To be quite
practical, we have here, if we read this first verse in the light of
the whole subsequent development of the chapter, a description of faith
at work, of the potency and victories of faith, rather than a definition
of faith in its distinctive essence. A true parallel to this passage is
the familiar sentence, "Knowledge is power." Those words do not define
knowledge, obviously; to do that would demand a totally different
phrase. What the words do is to give us one great resultant of
knowledge; to tell us that the possession and use of knowledge endows
the man who knows with a force and efficiency which he would lack
without it. Few words are more elastic and adaptable than the verb
substantive. "_Is_" can denote a wide variety of ideas, from that of
personal identity, as when I see that yonder distant figure _is_ my
brother; to that of equivalence, as when a stamped and signed piece of
thin paper called a bank-note _is_ five pounds of gold; or to that of
mere representation, as when another piece of paper, or a sheet of
canvas, duly lined and coloured by the artist to show the semblance of a
human face, _is_ the King, or _is_ my father; or to that of result and
effect, as when we say that knowledge _is_ power, or that seeing _is_
believing.[M]
[M] It is obvious that these elementary reflections have everything to
do with the need of caution in explaining those most sacred words, "This
_is_ my body which is given for you."
Here we have precisely that last application of the verb substantive,
only in an exact and most noble antithesis. "Seeing is believing," says
the familiar proverb. "Believing is seeing," says the Divine word here.
That is to say, when the human soul so relies upon God that His word is
absolute and sufficient for its certainties, this reliance, this faith,
has in it the potency of sight. It is as sure of the promised blessing
as if it were a present possession. It is as ready to act upon "the
things not seen as yet," the laws, powers, hopes beyond the veil, as if
all was in open view to the eyes of the body.
The whole course of the chapter, when it comes down to particulars and
persons, bears this out. From first to last the message carried to us by
the lives and actions of the faithful is this, that they took their Lord
at His word, simply as His word, and in the power of that reliance found
themselves able to act as if the unseen were seen and the hoped-for were
present. "The elders" (ver. 2) are in view from the first--that is to
say, the pre-Christian saints, who were in _that_ sense distinctively
men who proved the power of faith, that they all lived and died before
the visible fulfilment of the great promise of salvation. To them, to be
sure, or rather to many of them, not to all, merciful helps were
granted. The unseen and the hoped-for was sometimes, not always, made
more tangible to them by the grant of some sign and token, some portent
or miracle, by the way. But the careful Bible-reader knows how very
little such things are represented in the holy histories as being the
"daily bread" of the life of the old believers. Even in the lives where
they occur most often they come at long and difficult intervals, and in
some lives not at all, or hardly at all. And assuredly we gather here
that, to the mind of the apostolic Writer, no experience of miracles, no
permission even to hold direct colloquy with the Eternal, ever made up
for that immeasurable "aid to faith" which we enjoy who know the
Incarnate Son as fact, and walk on an earth which has seen the God-Man
traverse it, and die upon it, and rise again.
These "elders" were men called to live, in an eminent and most trying
degree, not by sight but by faith, by mere reliance upon a Promiser.
Therefore their living witness to the capacity of faith to make the
unseen visible and the hoped-for present is the more precious to us. We,
with the Christ of God manifested to us, displayed in history,
experienced in the heart--what are not we to find the power of faith to
be in our lives, having, for our supreme seal upon faith, the promise
fulfilled, the Image of the Invisible God, made one with our nature and
dwelling in our hearts?
One partial exception, and only one, to this great ruling lesson of the
chapter is to be noted; it occurs in the second verse. There "by faith
we perceive that the worlds," the _aeons_, the dispensations and
evolutions of created being, "have been framed," perfected, adjusted to
one another, "by the Word of God, so that not from things which appear
has that which is seen originated." These words appear to be inserted
where they stand in order, so to speak, to carry the sequence of the
references to the Old Testament down from its very first page. The work
of faith has exercise in face of the mysterious narrative of Creation,
and in this one instance the exercise is quoted as what concerns us now
quite as much as "the elders." They like us, we like them, get our
guarantee as to the facts of the primal past not by sight but by faith,
by taking God at His word. He, in His revelation, tells us that "in the
beginning"--the beginning of whatever existence is other than
eternal--"God created." Things finite, things visible, came into
original being not as evolved from previous similar material, but as of
His will.
But when that pregnant side-word has once been said, the argument
settles itself forthwith upon the recorded examples of the potency of
faith as "the elders" exercised it. We see man after man enabled to
treat the invisible as visible, the promised as present, by reliant rest
upon the word of God, however conveyed. To Abel, we know not how, it was
divinely said that the sacrificed "firstling" was the acceptable
offering, and, antecedent to any possible experience, he offered it. To
Enoch, we know not how, it was made known that the Eternal, as invisible
to him as to us, cared for man's worshipping company, and he addressed
himself through his age-long life to "walk with God." Noah was apprised,
for the first time in man's known history, of an approaching cataclysm
and of the way of escape; the promise came to him wrapped in the cloud
of an awful warning, and it was long delayed, but he acted upon it in
the steady energy of faith. Abraham was "called," we know not precisely
how, but in some way which tested his reliance on things "not seen as
yet," and he set out on that wonderful life of a hundred years of faith.
He renounced the settled habits and old civilization of Chaldea for the
new life of a Syrian nomad, "settling permanently in tents" ([Greek: en
skenais katoikesas]), he and his son and his grandson after him, all in
view of an invisible future made visible by the trusted promise, a
future culminating at last to his "eye of faith," so here we are
solemnly assured, in the city of the saints, in the Canaan of the
heavens. The same reliance on the sheer word of promise nerved him to
the awful ordeal of the all-but immolation of his son. And that son in
his turn, against all appearances, and rather bowing to the Word of God
than embracing it, blessed _his_ least-loved son above his dearest; and
that son in his turn, and his son in his turn, carried the process on,
treating the greatness of Ephraim and the deliverance from Egypt as
things seen and present, because God had so spoken. The parents of
Moses, and then Moses himself, in his strange life of disappointments
and wonders, deal likewise with the future, the unseen, the seemingly
impossible, on the warrant of a promise. Figures as little heroic in
natural character as Sarah, as little noble in life as Rahab, take place
in the long procession, as those who treat the invisible as visible by
faith. So do the thronging "elders" of ver. 32--a group singularly
diverse in everything but this victory over the seen and present by
faith in the promise. So do the unnamed confessors and martyrs of the
closing paragraph, the heartbroken, the tortured, the wanderers of the
dens and caves, who all alike, amidst a thousand differences of
condition and of character, "obtained a good report through faith"; and
all won through faith that victory, so great when we reflect upon
it--that they died "not having received the promise." They trusted _to
the very end_. When they sank down in death upon their shadowy path of
pilgrimage, "the promise," the promised Christ, had not yet come.
Nevertheless they treated the hope of Him as fact, and they won their
victory by faith.
And now they are parts and members of the "great cloud" who watch us in
our turn--us, with things unseen and hoped-for still in front, but with
JESUS at our side.