I want to take a moment to introduce our speaker this morning, Heinz Deschenkolik. He lives currently in Ontario, Canada. He is the director for Sola Scriptura Ministries. He's out here in concert with the conference that we just had on Friday evening and Saturday morning.
Over the last couple of years, I've had the privilege of getting to know him. He's a dear brother and a good friend, and I hope and pray that God will bless the preached word to our benefit. Well, that was one of the best scripture readings I've heard in a long time. It almost makes me feel redundant.
I mean, that was a fabulous message. I think we should call a benediction. I'll go home after that. That was fabulous, Jim.
Thank you. It's a delight to be here. Thank you. I emailed our church this morning and let them know.
Actually, I emailed them last night and let them know how the conference went and the type of fellowship we're having here in Chilliwack, British Columbia. And they promised me they'd be praying. Well, they prayed for us three hours ago when their service concluded that this morning we would be blessed that the spirit would move amongst us mightily. So it feels like coming home, hearing the old great hymns, hearing a very tight liturgical formulation, seeing a church that is dedicated to the London Confession of 1689, and more importantly, to the authority of scripture.
So I heartily congratulate you for your stand for truth. And you've got a good man in Jim Butler. Take care of him, please. Otherwise, I'll come back and I'll deal with you.
Opening Illustration: Luther at Worms
I want you to put your imagination caps on for a moment. I want you to imagine, if you will, that yesterday afternoon on Parliament Hill, that the Canadian Parliament passed a law that outlawed the Christian faith. It has now become a capital crime to call oneself a Christ follower. That to speak of Christ, to preach of Christ, to write of Christ, to blog of Christ, to say anything of Christ, has become a crime that is punishable by death.
Imagine that for a moment. All of us have email. Most of you are on Facebook. A lot of you have social media accounts, you tweet, and many of you have blogs, you post things about Christ and about your faith.
Some of us have written books and articles, many of us are preachers and evangelists, and many of us have a public ministry. And all the articles and books and letters and correspondence that we have written about and talked about the Lord Jesus Christ has now become a capital offense punishable by hanging. Now imagine still that there's a minor miracle of technology that comes to the hands of the Canadian government, and somehow they're able to compile every word you've ever written, every email you've ever sent, every tweet you've ever tweeted, every social media that you ever mediated, all becomes evidence in a potential criminal prosecution against you for being a Christ follower. And imagine still for a moment they have targeted you, They've compiled the evidence, and you are summoned to appear before the magistrate for the heinous crime of being a Christian.
And you're not simply going to your local court office. You've been summoned to Parliament Hill to appear before a joint session of the Canadian Federal Parliament. And imagine still that on the appointed day, you arrive there. And as you approach Parliament Hill, there is a media frenzy.
The BBC is there. The CBC is there. CTV. There's media trucks, camera trucks, all the newspapers, radio stations.
There's a throng of over 1,000 people who want nothing more to see what it looks like to see a Christ follower pilloried in a public court. There's a media frenzy. They're out for you. And as you walk in the door of Parliament, not only is Parliament there, the 300-plus parliamentarians, but The Senate is there.
All the senators from Canada are amassed there against you in a joint session. And in the gallery section that's normally reserved for the public and the media to watch, it's filled with Canadian officials from the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police, CSIS. All the heads of Canadian military are in the gallery watching as you step into Parliament, this joint session of Parliament. Now, the front table is a table. that has all the writings, all the tweets, all the emails, all the evidence that indicts you as a Christ follower, and the Speaker of the House asks you the following question.
Does this body of evidence accurately represent what you truly think, feel, and believe about the Lord Jesus Christ? Answer carefully, for if you answer yes, the next walk you're going to take is up 13 wooden steps to a scaffold. You'll have destiny date with Mr. Ellis, the Canadian hangman.
How would you answer? Now, that sounds kind of far-fetched for Canada, doesn't it? This sort of scenario could never happen, could it? Well, brothers and sisters, let me tell you that what I've just described to you indeed did happen.
It didn't happen in Canada, and it didn't happen yesterday. But it did take place about 500 years ago on April 16, 1521, in a beautiful pastoral medieval town called Wurms. in the land of Germany. And on that appointed day, a lone Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther was summoned to appear before the tribunal of Pope Leo X. And on that day, there was a media circus as the same way there would be in our day.
There were reporters, there were spectators, there were gawkers, there were camp followers. There were about 1,000 people amassed outside the Cathedral of the Cathedral of Worms to watch this man Luther walk in and get his due and get his just desserts. And again, inside the cathedral was amassed the inquisitor from the Pope, John Eck, a brilliant theologian in his own day. There were the nobles, and the nobles of Germany were there.
The military was there. All the cardinals and bishops from Germany and Rome were there. there was this massive array of power that was standing in front of Luther. And he was asked, does this table of books and writings and tracts accurately represent what you think and feel about the Lord Jesus Christ? And in that day, they had no qualm about putting people to death by burning them at the stake for having the heinous crime of heresy.
Well, you would think that, well, The question that comes before us then is, why was Luther summoned? What did he do that was so awful? Well, three and a half years earlier, on October 31st, 1517, Luther nailed a document to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral called the 95 Theses. I assume most of you have heard of that.
It was written in Latin, not in German. It was intended to be an in-house debate amongst German Lutheran scholars, I'm sorry, not German Lutheran scholars, but German Roman scholars, about certain practices that he had witnessed in the church. He had never, ever wanted to start a reformation, that was not his goal in life. He simply wanted to try to understand how is it some practices that the Roman church were doing did not accord with scripture.
He wanted a theological, historical, a debate. Within days, those 95 theses were all over Europe. And three of the things that stand out prominently in the 95 Theses, there are other ones, but three big ones that Luther called into question was the sale of indulgences. How many of you have heard of the term indulgences?
How many of you have never heard that term before? Never, at all. Three people have heard of it and the rest of you haven't. Okay, I'll assume you haven't.
Indulgences is what I call a spiritual get out of jail free card. It's a way you can buy work and weasel your way into heaven. And it was concoctioned by the medieval church in order to extort money out of its parishioners to build the great cathedrals of Europe. And the way indulgences worked, according to Roman Catholic theology, was you didn't have heaven and hell.
You had heaven, hell, according to scripture, but you also had a holding tank called purgatory. And if you were a good Catholic that committed a mortal sin or a venial sin, and you lost your salvation from your infant baptism days, you were consigned to purgatory because you weren't the Lord Jesus, you weren't an apostle, and you weren't a venerated saint. You were just a normal pew sitter. And normal pew sitters go to purgatory, a spiritual holding tank, for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 million years.
Pick a number. Toss a coin. Pick a number. That's how long you'd sit in purgatory.
Along comes your local Roman Catholic priest that says, if you want to buy out a purgatory or reduce your time in purgatory, which was not a pleasant place, give me $10,000. I'll knock off one million years. That's spiritual extortion. And not only did they do that to the parishioners that were living, but they'd walk up to you and say, Jim, You lost a brother, cousin, sister, aunt, grandfather last year.
She's a good Catholic, and she's sitting in purgatory, and she's going to rot there for five million years before her sins are atoned for, and she is able to jump into heaven. Wouldn't you like to knock off half a million years? Well, give me $10,000. We'll just give you a piece of paper.
Done with. Her sins are atoned for. If I haven't got $10,000, well, give me $1,000. We'll knock back 100,000 years.
It's spiritual extortion. And this is what Luther had called into question. How can you possibly, by human decree, by buying a piece of paper, by giving cash, going on crusade, going on a pilgrimage, counting the rosary beads, work your way back into the kingdom of God? Indulgences.
That was number one. Number two was sola scriptura, the doctrine that says that we take our marching orders from the pages of scripture. Canons may be useful. Confessions may be useful.
Systematic theology may have a certain degree of merit to a certain point, but ultimately everything has to fall under the scrutiny of Scripture. If it doesn't square, you've got to reject it. Sola Scriptura. Simple thing.
And then justification by faith, which is something we're going to look at in a little bit more detail a little bit later on, but how is a man to be saved? Do you work your way in? Is it by faith alone, in Christ alone, through grace alone, or is it faith plus works? Faith plus indulgence is faith plus something else.
Can you work or buy your way in? And so he wanted an honest debate about these various issues. That's all he wanted to do. Well, Pope Leo X would have nothing of this.
And what he did was, in June 1520, he issued a document called, it was a papal bull, entitled, Exsurge Domine, translated, which means, Arise, O Lord. And here's what Leo X said about Luther. Arise, O Lord, and judge your own cause. Remember your reproaches to those who are filled with foolishness all through the day.
Listen to our prayers, for foxes have arisen seeking to destroy the vineyard whose winepress you alone have trod. When you were about to ascend to your father, you committed the care, rule, and administration of the vineyard and image of the triumphant church to Peter as the head and vicar and his successors. Now, here's where he refers to Luther. He calls him the wild boar from the forest. seeks to destroy it, and every wild beast feeds upon it.
Lying teachers are rising," that's Luther and other reformers, introducing ruinous sects and drawing upon themselves speedy doom. Their tongues are a fire, a restless evil full of deadly poison. They have bitter zeal, contention in their hearts, and boast and lie against the truth. So much for a friendly theological discussion.
Luther was summoned to appear before the Pope, and the date of the examination was April 16, 1521, and the castle at Worms, Germany, was chosen as the appointed place for disputation. Remember, Luther's coming into a room. There's a media circus outside that wants his head. You've got the full array of military regalia from Germany arrayed in the room.
You've got all the bishops and cardinals in the room. You have the chief inquisitor of Rome comes in the room, and he's asked the question, do these writings truly represent what you believe about the Bible and about the Lord Jesus Christ? Well, Luther's reaction was, like probably what most of us would be, he gets knock-kneed. He gets scared.
He has a moment of doubt. Fear grabs a hold of him. And rightly so, because you're one man in a room who's read scripture by himself, come to certain convictions, and you've got this whole battery of people who are standing there against you. And they're saying you're wrong.
And so Luther has this moment of doubt where he goes, am I really right? Have I truly understood scripture? Is this worth laying my life down? Because he knew full well that what he says next could very well end his life.
They didn't mess around in those days with people. If they wanted you dead, you were dead. There was no court of appeal. You couldn't call the media.
You couldn't call Amnesty International. You couldn't have courts of appeal stand up for human rights advocacy. If they wanted you dead, you were dead. He knew that.
This is costly. They weren't playing games here. So Luther asks and is granted a 24-hour recess where he can prayerfully examine scripture, prayerfully examine his own heart and mind, and ask the question of himself, have I actually got it right? Is this worth dying for?
The theologian R.C. Sproul calls this Luther's Gethsemane moment, his garden moment. And he goes up into the room, to his private room, and he begins a prayer session. And we are thankful that Luther had some faithful attendants, a valet with him, a scribe. couple of scribes, and the scribe diligently recorded the prayer that night that Luther prayed.
I'll read it to you. Luther writes, oh God, almighty God everlasting, how dreadful is the world Behold how its mouth opens to swallow me up, and how small is my faith in thee. Oh, the weakness of the flesh and the power of Satan. If I am to depend upon any strength of this world, all is over.
The knell is struck. Sentence is gone forth. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Oh, thou, my God. Help me against the wisdom of this world. Do this, I beseech thee. Thou shouldst do this by thy own mighty power.
The work is not mine, but thine. I have no business here. I have nothing to contend for with these great men of the world. I would gladly pass my days in happiness and peace.
But the cause is thine, and it is righteous and everlasting. O Lord, help me. O faithful and unchangeable God, I lean not upon man. It were vain.
Whatever is of man is tottering. Whatever proceeds from him must fail. My God, my God, dost thou not hear? My God, art thou no longer living?
Nay, thou canst not die. Thou dost but hide thyself. Thou hast chosen me for this work. I know it.
Therefore, O God, accomplish thine own will. Forsake me not. For the sake of thy well-beloved Son, Jesus Christ, my defense, my buckler, and my stronghold, Lord, where art thou? My God, where art thou?
Come, I pray thee, I am ready. Behold me prepared to lay down my life for thy truth, suffering like a lamb, for the cause is holy. It is thine own will. I will not let thee go, nor yet for all eternity.
And though the world should be thronged with devils, and this body which is the work of thine hands should be cast forth, trodden underfoot, cut in pieces, consumed to ashes, my soul is thine. Yes, I have thine own word to assure me of it. My soul belongs to thee and will abide with thee forever. Amen, oh God, send help, amen.
What do you think of that prayer? That's the prayer of a tortured mind, a troubled mind, a troubled soul, and yet a soul that has absolute confidence in the finished work of Jesus Christ. This moment, this prayer, this evening, this day, is a day that forever marks Luther's footsteps. He went into Worms one man.
He came out the back end of a totally different transformed individual. Forever from this day forth, he would be a reformer of the church, an enemy of the pope, an enemy of Roman Catholic theology from this day. He was a marked man for life because of this. And I also want you to listen.
If you were listening very carefully to the words, these were written 1521. Perhaps the greatest hymn of the church came by Luther's pen seven years later in 1528. It's called Ein Fest der Burg in German, which means a mighty fortress is our God. He says here, and though this world be thronged with devils, and though this world with devils filled, sure threatened to undo us, this prayer becomes a template and the formula for what would eventually become, in my opinion, the greatest hymn of the church in the last 2,000 years.
It's his Gethsemane moment. Well, Luther returns to the assembly the next morning. What Luther wants to do is get into a debate with John Eck. He really wants to challenge him on his doctrine.
But John Eck is a clever manipulator. All he wanted Luther was to give an up and down statement, yes or no. They would not engage Luther in a public discourse. They wanted to shut him down at this point.
And they got him to the point where he said, do you recant yes or no? Is this what you truly believe, yes or no? And then Luther says perhaps the most often quoted phrase in church history. He says, unless I am convinced by scripture and sound reason, my conscience is held captive to the word of God.
For to go against conscience is neither useful nor profitable. Here I stand. God help me. I can do no other.
And the rest, as they say, is history. And we stand in that tradition today because of some of the work that he did.
Introduction: Faith Across Redemptive History
Now, I realize that is an extended, historical introduction and illustration. I wanted to hammer that illustration home from two different points for a very specific reason, because I want you to walk away, understand what it is the writer of Hebrews chapter one had in mind when he penned these words. I'm sorry, Hebrews chapter one, Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11, one to three.
Hebrews chapter 11, verses 1 to 3, where the writer says, now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it, the elders obtained a good testimony. By faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that the things which are seen were made by things of which are visible.
Sola Fide: Faith from the Beginning
Well, let's make a couple. We'll be talking about justification by faith, or sola fide, as the reformers called it in Latin. Just a couple of comments about faith in general. While we hold that people are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, and I think that's right, and it's accurate, and it's biblical, faith is not a brand new concept that was suddenly invented by God in the New Testament era.
Justification by faith, sola fide, has been the way God has saved his saints from the beginning of time forward. He saves people the same way today as he did in the time of Moses and the time of Abraham. It's by faith and faith alone. By the time we get up to the New Testament era, the time of Jesus, we have 1,400 years have passed since the day of Moses, and the law was given on Sinai.
And what was given as a simple, divine, supernaturally revealed revelation on how God works through his covenant people had been perverted into a cult of works. And that's what Judaism was in the first century. It was nothing more than a cult of works. They had built layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of man-made regulation on top of the simple words that were given in Torah.
And those words, those man-made laws are given in a book called the Talmud, or actually not a book, it's a series of, it's a massive multi-volume set like this called the Talmud, which incorporates the thinking of the rabbinic scholars down through the ages. And I think they started off well, trying to understand how do we apply some of the implications of Torah. But as time evolved, they had added layer upon layer of stuff that God had never intended man to do. So when God condemns them for the works of the law, it's not that he's condemning them so much for works of the law as enshrined in the Old Testament, but works of the law that had been added on top of what God had decreed already.
I'll give you one example, the Sabbath. How many verses in the Old Testament are there with respect to Sabbath keeping? I don't know the exact number, but it's not more than a couple of dozen verses at best. There is not a lot of detail that's been given to us about how to keep or how to not keep the Sabbath.
We have some general principles and some general guidelines. By the time we come up to the first century, the laws regarding Sabbath keeping comprised two volumes of the Talmud and represented about 670 regulations. that defined you as either being a good Jew or a bad Jew. For example, if you were a doctor and you got sick on the Sabbath and you went to see your local Jewish doctor, according to Talmud, you could only give as much first aid as was necessary to stabilize the patient. That's all you could do.
That was permissible. If the patient got better, that was considered to be work and you were a covenant breaker and a Sabbath breaker. You were a bad Jew, you're going to hell. It's perverse.
Or if you were a tailor, you were a tailor. You sew tunics together, right? If you were to walk out of your home on the Sabbath to go to synagogue and you forgot to take a needle out of your pocket, You're considered to be a Sabbath breaker and a covenant breaker because with that needle in your pocket represents a temptation that you might, you might do something that could be constituted as work. You were a bad Jew.
You're going to hell. Or you weren't allowed to walk more than a thousand feet on the Sabbath. That's all you could do. At mile marker 999, if you put a post in the ground that had a line from your house to the post, that was considered to be an extension of your home.
And therefore, your 1,000 feet began at that point again. So you draw another 999 feet, draw another line out to it. And so you have this infinite number of postings that allows you to break the Sabbath while still trying to keep it. I mean, it was that perverse.
And so when Jesus comes in the first century, what he condemns is all this perverse additions of scripture that had never been intended. It was faith plus works of these man-made laws that Jesus had in mind. It was no longer a supernatural system of faith and religion given by God. It was a twisted, perverted, a perverse, legalistic institution where you could ethically work your way into heaven, maybe.
But the laws were so odious, nobody could keep it. And one of the ways he condemns the Pharisees in his own day was the fact they had this outward, perfect persona. They were spot on, they were perfect, but inside were dry men's bones. They were dead in their sins and trespasses.
And the one thing the Bible teaches clear front to back is that he detests any way, any manner of trying to work your way into heaven, even if you do it by God-appointed means and laws. How many times, just think about your Old Testament prophetic passages where God condemns leaders of Israel for new moon Sabbaths, for your wine festivals, for all your sacrifices and offerings, even though they were prescribed by law, if they were done by the wrong motive, he says, your sacrifices are stench in my nostrils. You could be doing all the right things, but for all the wrong reasons. If you do it for all the wrong reasons, God will spit you out of his mouth.
That's clear from scripture. You cannot work by or ethically manage your way into heaven. That's clear. And there's never been a time in redemptive history where God has saved people otherwise.
Hebrews 11 and the Cloud of Witnesses
The beauty of chapter 11. The intro to chapter 11 and the balance of chapter 11 is that the writer gives us a history, snapshot biographies, little snippets of great men and women of God who saw through the eyes of faith, who believed what they had heard, who although they had only that much revelation in their hands, they didn't have full disclosure. We have the glory of the resurrection. We have the glory of the ascension.
We have the glorious promise of Christ's return. We have all these glorious fulfillments at our hands. These people didn't have it. They had this much.
And yet, through the lens of faith, they saw there was something bigger, there's something better, there's something greater than themselves. And with the eyes of faith, they were able to obey, they were able to trust, they were able to march forward in the faith and testimony of God's promises. Because they saw through the eyes of faith, there's something bigger out there. And you didn't get there through human effort, through human will, through human achievement.
It's only through the grace of God.
Abraham: Father of Faith
Romans chapter 4 is a chapter that talks about Abraham as being the father of faith to all the Gentiles. Why? Because he believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. He didn't get the honor because he went to the Ur of the Chaldees.
He didn't follow a prescribed checklist. If one thing, Abraham is an example of how not to do religion in many ways. He stumbled, he fell, he did a number of stupid things. It wasn't until Genesis chapter 20 where he suddenly sees the glorious hand of God pulling back Isaac after he gave away Sarah, the means of covenant fulfillment.
He's able to go in Genesis 22 up to the Mount of Moriah with his son and say to his servants, wait till the boy and I return, for the Lord will provide the sacrifice on that day. You can't do that through human reason. It's only through the eyes of faith. And God grants that by his Holy Spirit.
The good works that we do, anything that we do that has any merit can't get us into heaven. It's always a byproduct of faith. It is a consequence of faith. It is a result of faith.
It is an outflowing of faith. It is our response to God in love and adoration for what he has done through us through Jesus Christ. We can't help but be transformed in how we live and how we act and the things that we do. This is why the social gospel is no gospel at all, as far as I'm concerned.
All the good works that you can do, all the blessings that you can pour out in society, all the money you can give to charity, all the work you can do with widows and orphans, as commendable as those works are, and I think as Christians we need to do those things. However, they cannot atone for your sin, only Christ can. And when we understand that Christ has atoned for our sin once for all, never to be duplicated, we understand that we worship Him, we live for Him, we do things for Him out of adoration and worship and love, not to get us into heaven. Works has always been a byproduct of faith, never the result of faith, never the cause of faith.
Well, the writer of this magnificent epistle is a Hebrew scholar of the first order, and he is writing to a Jewish set of believers about Jesus Christ. Now, we know it's a Jewish set of believers because the book is heavily laced with Old Testament symbolism, and he doesn't take the time to explain what those symbols mean. If you're writing to a Gentile audience that have never encountered this Old Testament language, you've got to take the time to explain what it all means. There is an inherent assumption that the people who read this document understand what it is.
So it's a Jewish set of believers who have walked away from Pharisees. They've walked away from the religion of the Talmud and have embraced Christ the Savior. And the church is being turned upside down by the pressures of the state. Remember the illustration of Luther?
Remember the opening illustration I said about Canadian law? The state and the religious authorities are pressing it upon these Jewish converts. And they are confiscating property. These people are being jailed.
They're facing torture. No one's died yet. That's one thing that's clear from the text. No one has died yet.
But they're facing enormous pressure. And some of these folks, if you look at the front side of chapter 10, some of these folks are beginning to walk away. They're beginning to turn away from the faith. The letter is written as a means to encourage them to keep pressing on because the hope they have is far more certain than anything they ever had before.
It's a motivational document is what it is. In fact, there are five references to persecution inside the epistle. And two of them take place right here, just before chapter 11 begins and right after chapter 11 ends. And there are two verses that talk about carrying out their persecution.
And chapter 11 is designed to say, Here's the example you need to hold before you, why you need to press on. For example, 1032 begins by saying, but recall the former days in which after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings. Partly while you were made a spectacle both by reproaches and tribulations, and partly while you became companions of those who were so treated. For you had compassion on me and my chains, and joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods. knowing that you have a better and enduring possession for yourselves in heaven.
Therefore, do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward." I mean, this is persecution. These people are going through real pressure. In those days, the religious authorities didn't mess around. Rome did not mess around with you if you were a troublemaker.
If you were a troublemaker, they had no compulsion about putting you to death. Life was cheap. So the pressure is real. Well,
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 11:1–3
Parallelism in Verse One
In verse 1, of chapter 11, the writer uses a technique called parallelism. That's a 10-gallon word, which simply means that he's saying the same thing two different ways. He's not saying two different things in verse one. He's saying the same thing, but using two different sets of symbols to accomplish the goal of communicating what he needs to communicate.
He's also not giving us a full definition of faith, but he's giving us certain characteristics and attributes that he deems most important to this audience for this hour to get them through their trials.
First Mark: Assurance of Things Hoped For
He says about something called the assurance of things hoped for. In the Old Testament era, men rested on the promises of God with whatever little revelation they had at the time. Some of those promises included the future promise of a savior who would one day undo the fall. That's the seat of the woman promise in Genesis 3.16.
We note in the Old Testament we are promised a redeemer who would take away the sin of the world. We are promised a Davidic monarch whose kingdom would have no end. We are told about the suffering servant, and we are promised the resurrection of the dead. Oftentimes, when we speak of Old Testament revelation, we speak of it in terms of progressiveness.
We have a little today. The next era, we've got a bit more. And as time goes on, we have a fullness of revelation which comes to the Lord Jesus. And the highest pinnacle, the writer of Hebrews says in chapter 1, is that God has spoken in these current days by the Lord Jesus himself.
Whatever the era, the men and women of old responded in faith to what little information they had. But faith for these folks was an absolute assurance, an absolute certainty, living in a hope that is real and substantive. Hope for them was not wishful thinking, not a we pray, we keep our fingers crossed. We hope.
We sure darn wish there's something good there at the end of the day. There's no certainty there. I've heard certain Christian scholars and certain so-called Christian pastors describe faith and hope as merely stepping off a cliff with your eyes closed, and you pray and trust that maybe something, somewhere, somehow, there'll be a trampoline at the bottom to catch you before you hit rock bottom. You're stepping into abyss without a certainty that somebody's going to catch you at the bottom.
That's not what biblical faith is all about. It's absolute certainty, rock-solid certainty. It's a foundation that's built on granite, on rock, not on sand. It's not wishful thinking about uncertain future.
They believed it to the point that they put their lives and their hopes and their dreams together based on all these future promises. Some of these future promises, many of these folks never saw. They saw them from a distance, but never realized the fulfillment in their own day. But the certainty of these future promises was so real that they changed the way they lived today.
They were so rock solid in the promises of God, the fulfillment of God, the redemption of God, it altered the way they conducted their lives today. The way government was managed was changed under the Davidic monarchy. The way people managed their money, the way they managed their lives, the way they managed their marriages, the way they managed their relationships with each other, the way they managed their fellowship, the way they managed their worship, where it's all transformed because if you understand there is a better day coming, there's a judgment forth hence, there is a great and certain hope of redemption that awaits in the future where God will reclaim his people. You cannot help but live with that priority in view.
You can't. If you don't, if that doesn't change the way you live, I got to question whether or not you're a redeemed believer. You really understand what the gospel is all about. It has to.
It must. It should. It has to change the way you live. Your priorities need to be completely rearranged.
And that's part of the hallmark of faith in Hebrews chapter 11. These people went to their deaths. These people were martyred. These people underwent persecution.
Moses left home. Moses gave up, the writer says, the pleasures of the palace for a short season in order to endure the blessings of God. It has to change the way you live. And if it doesn't, I think there's a problem in paradise.
One writer said that true faith is an absolute certainty, often of things the world considers unreal and impossible. Christian hope is belief in God against the world, not belief in the improbable against chance. If we follow a God whose audible voice we have never heard and believe in a Christ whose face we have never seen, we do so because our faith has a reality, a substance, and an assurance that is unshakable. In doing so, Jesus said, we are especially blessed, John 20, 29.
Assurance refers to the real content, the real essence, the foundation, the bedrock, the reality upon which we stand, and not merely outward appearance. We don't have a philosophy. We don't simply have a way of life. We don't simply have a lifestyle preference over a host of lifestyle preferences that our culture affords us.
We do so because we understand who Jesus is, how he lived, how he died, how he rose, and how he promised to bring his church back to himself someday. We stand on the shoulders of the saints in Hebrews chapter 11, understanding, like they did, that we await fulfillment of God's future redemption. Faith is the present essence of a future reality. It says that these folks died in 1113.
These folks died in faith, not having received these promises, but simply have witnessed them from afar. We, like them, need to cling to this as the basis of our day-to-day existence.
Second Mark: Conviction of Things Not Seen
Well, the writer goes on to say that it is also the conviction of things not seen. Well, it means exactly the same thing as the assurance of things hoped for, but has a slightly different emphasis. For the true person of faith, faith is not merely an intellectual, doctrinal, philosophical exercise. It's not merely about knowing and believing the right facts.
It's not merely subscribing to the London Confession of 1689 or the Westminster Confession of Faith. It's not merely about that. as important as those things are. In light of faith, you have to translate the light of faith into action and words and a reality that reflects what has transformed the way you live today. There's got to be action.
Something's got to take place. Something's got to give. You cannot go on living the way you were before. That's what the conviction of things not seen refers to, is that, okay, you believe, great.
Now, let's do. Go out and do. To me, the greatest person of faith is Noah. I love Noah.
Because Noah is approached by God and he said, Noah, it's going to rain. What's rain? Noah, it's going to rain because there's going to be a flood. What's a flood?
Because it's going to rain, there's going to be a flood, Noah. I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? No idea what God was talking about because these things have never happened before.
You didn't need a boat. There was no rain. There was no flood. This is a natural disaster that had never occurred before.
And yet, for 120 years, Noah built, Noah prayed, Noah worshiped, and then the floodwaters came.
Three Components of Saving Faith
Well, the Reformers understood this doctrine, and the Bible teaches this doctrine, sola fide, justification by faith alone. And what the Bible says, and what the Reformers understood, that there are a number of components that comprise saving faith.
Notitia: Knowledge of the Gospel
The first component is what they called in Latin the word notitia. That simply means facts, knowledge, content, the story of Scripture, the story of the redemptive story of God's work through the pages of Scripture. There's content. There are facts.
There are things happen. And you have to understand, in order to understand the gospel, you need to know the facts of the gospel. That's why we send missionaries and preachers and teachers and evangelists to tell people about the good news of Jesus Christ. There are facts.
There's a database. He doesn't simply ask us to believe in a vacuum. There is a storyline that needs to be told. Those are the facts of the gospel.
That's the first thing you need.
Assensus: Assent to the Facts
The second thing you need is what they call assensus. And that means assent. That means agreement. You have to have agreement.
Not only do you know the storyline, but you have to believe that, yes, there was a historical Jesus. There was a historical resurrection. There was a historical atonement. There was a historical flood.
There was a historical Moses. There was a historical Exodus. There was a historical creation ex nihilo. All these things happen.
These are the facts that not only do you have to know, but you have to agree with. There has to be an agreement on these facts. The question to you is, is that enough to consist of saving faith? You know the story.
You agree with the story. Are you saved? Does that save you? I got sad news for you.
If that's what you understand Christianity is all about, what you have is the equivalent of demonic faith. That's all you have. That's the best thing to be said of you. You have the same faith that the demons have.
Because James chapter 2 is very clear. It says, you believe in one God? You got the facts straight? You know the storyline?
You know the facts? You believe there's one God? Good for you. So do the demons, and they shudder at the word.
You know, there's no such thing as a liberal demon. They're all conservative. They're all orthodox. They're all Calvinistic, by the way.
There's no such thing as an Arminian demon. They understand the sovereignty of God. They understand the final judgment. They understand their doom is secured.
There's no way they can get out of it. They're all Calvinists. So the best that can be said for a human being who knows the storyline and has got the storyline correct is that your faith is that of the demons. Good for you.
Fiducia: Personal Trust in Christ
There's yet one item missing. The Bible teaches this. The Reformers understood this. Back in 1982, when I was young, trim, and single, I had oodles of money.
I wasn't a believer. I wanted to learn to fly. I had a bucket list before the bucket list became a popular notion in culture. And one of the items in my bucket list was I wanted to learn to fly.
I wanted a pilot's license. Not to become an airline pilot. I just wanted to be kind of cool. To be able to rent a plane, fly places, and do things like that.
So I began the process of studying and training to become a private pilot. And when they start you off in pilots training, you get to fly what's called a Cessna 172, or C-172. That's basically a golf cart with wings, is what it is. It kind of gets off the ground, sort of.
But it can get you high enough to kill you, let me trust you. It'll get you up to 7,000 feet, and if you get the controls wrong, you're dead in 37 seconds. Anyway, so we're flying, got about 35 hours under my belt, and when they first teach you how to fly, they teach you something called IFR. It's called instrument flight rules.
And instrument flight rules basically are such that you learn to fly by trusting what you see out your windscreen, out your canopy. So you make sure that when you're flying that the horizon is relative, is flat and level to the canopy in front of you. You make sure your wings are level to the horizon and to the canopy. And that becomes your lifeline to make sure you fly safe and steady and straight.
That's the first level of training. The second level of training is what's called IFR, instrument flight rules, where you have to forget what's out here for a little while. That becomes secondary. What becomes primary is your dashboard, the instrumentation right in front of you in the cockpit.
And you have to stop trusting what you see with your eyes. You have to trust what the dials say in front of you. That becomes your lifeline, which is rather handy if you're flying at night or if you're flying into a fog bank or into a cloud or into a rainstorm. If you can't see the ground, how high up do you know where you are?
You have to be able to trust the instruments that are in front of you. Now, the elite pilots, like the Canadian Snowbirds, the Blue Angels, the US Air Force Thunderbirds, they have to unlearn everything that they've learned in order to fly 500 miles an hour in tight formation of five planes, nine feet wingtip to wingtip. There's a whole different set of rules they have to learn for that. And what they do is no longer do they go by their instruments, no longer do they go by the land references outside the canopy.
You focus your eyes on the wing commander. who is usually the most seasoned, the most experienced, the best pilot in the group. As the wing commander ascends, you ascend. He banks, you bank. He does a barrel roll, you do a barrel roll.
All your cues come from your wing commander. Now, it's not enough to know how to fly the plane. It's not enough to agree, yes, the wing commander is the best pilot in the group, and I'm going to follow him. You have to actually strap yourself into the cockpit, project yourself as a human missile at over 500 miles an hour.
On January 18th, 1982, in Indian Springs, Nevada, that's out in the desert of Nevada, five members of the U.S. elite Thunderbirds flew upside down into the floor of the desert at over 500 miles an hour. When they did the autopsy of the wing commander, what they discovered is on the last bank, he had suffered a massive coronary. It killed him instantly. So he could not communicate his distress to his wingmates to let them know to pull up.
And they flew, they followed him right into the ground to their deaths. It's not enough to know. It's not enough to believe. It is sufficient to trust.
And that is the third element of what the Reformers knew, what the Bible teaches about what faith happens to be.
Application: Who Do You Trust?
And the question I have to you this morning is, who are you trusting? Today, this morning, in that pew, for your eternal security. Have you lived your Christian life in such a way that you understand their storyline, that you agree with the basic facts of the storyline, but you have never given your trust, your eternal security, over to the Lord Jesus Christ? who has made atonement possible, who has paved the way to paradise, who has secured a room, who has said that someday I will come back to reclaim my own. And so in the quietness of your thoughts this morning, as the service ends, as we enter into the final hymn, as we engage for activities of the rest of the day, I want you to examine your hearts.
Who do you trust? If you're visiting and you want to know more about the Christian faith, what does it mean? Is there a heaven? Is there a hell?
What happens to me when I die? Well, Christ has answered that question for you. He says, trust in me. Trust in me and I will set you free.
Amen.