IT TAKES FAITH (part five)
Hebrews 11:8-10
INTRODUCTION: As we continue our journey through Hebrews 11 we come to Abraham. Abraham is known as the patriarch or father of the Israelites for he was the father of Isaac who was the father of Jacob who became Israel and fathered 12 sons who would become the twelve tribes of Israel.
Abraham was known as one who believed God and was credited with righteousness. Paul used this truth in Rom. 4 to support that it isn't by observing the law or works that one became righteous but by faith. Therefore, in Gal. 3:7 says that those who believe are also children of Abraham.
James 2:23 calls Abraham God's friend. And in John 15:14 Jesus told his disciples they were his friends if they did what he commanded. Therefore, in Abraham being called God's friend he must've been doing what God commanded. That's what we'll be looking at as we look at Abraham's example and see what it takes faith to do.
1) It takes faith to step into the unknown (8).
Vs. 8, "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going."
Picture yourself in Abraham's position. You're settled in your home and life is good; you're doing well. Then, out of the blue, God tells you he wants you to gather up all your possessions, your wife, your workers, your livestock and leave town.
I'd be like, "where am I supposed to go?" God's like, "I'm not telling you".
"What? Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"I think the least you could do would be to tell me where I'm going."
"Don't worry; I'll lead and you follow."
"But what about..."
"Never mind that. Just get ready and go."
Can you imagine what state of mind you'd be in as your head spins from your world getting rocked? How much faith do you think it would take to blindly obey such a ridiculous request? Well, Abraham did exactly that.
Gen. 12:1-5, "The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there."
Perhaps you noticed that instead of Abraham it said Abram and instead of Sarah it said Sarai. Abram means exalted father; which was interesting considering he didn't become a father until he was about 85 years old! But he was one who exalted the heavenly Father. And no doubt he was exalted by the heavenly Father.
Abraham means father of many. When God established his covenant with Abraham he gave him a name that signified what he would become.
Both Sarai and Sarah relatively mean the same thing: princess. But in establishing his covenant with Abraham, God is commissioning Sarah to be the mother of nations and kings as Gen. 17:16 states.
But, in getting back to the text, Abraham is being asked to pack it up and head out. Take all your stuff, get all your people and livestock together and go. And so he did. Abraham's faith prompted his obedience to trust that God would lead and guide him to the unknown.
A.W. Tozer said, “The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith. The two are opposite sides of the same coin.”
So, in faith, Abraham sets out at the ripe old age of 75. It's one thing to do this when you're young and flying solo. If you want to be adventurous and pack up and move you can do that. I'm not saying it doesn't take a certain amount of courage to follow through with that but it's a lot easier to do when you're young and single.
But Abraham does this when he's old and when he knows it will affect more people than just himself. Granted, he didn't have any kids at this point but he had a wife and many servants, as well as a lot of animals. So, this wasn't a pack a suitcase and start walking kind of trip; this was get the caravan ready cause we're moving on.
And this was not going to be just a week-end journey; no this was going to take some time. From Haran to Canaan was a journey of hundreds of miles. Remember this is in a day when you walked or rode a camel or a donkey and the average daily travel was about 10 miles! This was through country that he had never been in before, passing through strange cultures, tribes and people. Knowing this helps us to better understand the magnitude of his decision to follow God.
And what made it harder to go to the unknown was leaving what was known. Abraham had it pretty good where he was. Having servants signified an element of wealth so between his possessions, livestock and servants he was probably doing pretty well for himself.
So I doubt he would've responded to God's call to leave by saying, "This is awesome! What took you so long? I've been waiting years to get out of here. My life stinks; I've got nothing going for me." It wasn't like that. Abraham had been prosperous. He was settled and life was good. But here's God coming along and disrupting Abe's life! What's up with that?
It's understood that in the land of Ur (Iraq) people worshipped the moon/moon god (interestingly Islam has a symbol of a crescent moon). And I'm sure in Haran it was no different. So, although Abraham was prosperous, his surroundings weren't conducive to spiritual prosperity. So, God wanted him to leave that region to establish and begin a new nation with him.
In the book of Acts, Stephen was spreading the gospel and doing signs and wonders and some people didn't like that so they slandered him. He was brought before the Sanhedrin to answer to his charges so Stephen gives them a history lesson; starting with Abraham. In his words we get some clarity on the situation surrounding God's call to Abraham.
Acts 7:2-4, "To this he replied: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran. ‘Leave your country and your people,’ God said, ‘and go to the land I will show you.’ “So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living."
So we see God was no doubt continuing the journey that started when Abraham's father was alive. Since there was sin in the land (and probably within the family since God told him to leave his father's household), God told Abraham it was time to get moving.
God was calling Abraham to go although he didn't tell Abraham where. Abraham was on a need-to-know basis. And whether or not Abraham liked that it didn't matter; it didn't affect his faith and obedience. He trusted in the God who saw what he couldn't see.
During the War, a father, holding his small son by the hand, ran from a building that had been struck by a bomb. In the front yard was a shell hole. Seeking shelter as quickly as possible, the father jumped into the hole and held up his arms for his son to follow. Terrified, yet hearing his father’s voice telling him to jump, the boy replied, “I can’t see you!” The father, looking up against the sky tinted red by the burning buildings, called to the silhouette of his son, “But I can see you. Jump!” And the boy did. He was able to obey his father with confidence because he had learned to trust him.
Abraham didn't know where he was going but God did. Therefore, Abraham stepped out in faith because he trusted that God would not lead him somewhere to harm him but to take care of him and prosper him (like he already had been doing). Abraham had already seen how God had taken care of him and caused him to prosper. So he concluded that God would continue to do that; just in a new location.
Spiritually, God calls us to do what Abraham was called to do. John MacArthur wrote, “When anyone comes to Jesus Christ, God demands of him a pilgrimage from his old pattern of living into a new kind of life, just as Abraham’s faith separated him from paganism...and started him toward a new land and a new kind of life”.
God calls us up and out. He calls us out of the darkness and into the light. He calls us away from corruption and into a land of promise. When we respond to that call we will be rescued so we can be in a better place. And God doesn't just do that once; but continually-as needed. Sometimes we still find ourselves slipping back into the land of darkness. And we might even be prosperous and comfortable there. But God will call; wanting us to leave.
We might not be in a land of darkness but God is still calling us out. We generally do not like to leave our comfort zone; we don't like stepping out into the unknown. We like our predictable routine. But God will sometimes come in and "rouse us from our slumber" and tell us to try something new. It takes faith to obey the command.
We need to be like Abraham and heed God's call to move when he says move-even if we don't know where we're moving to. We just need to trust and obey-believing, in faith, that we are being called to a better place than where we are now.
2) It takes faith to commit to a future promise (9-10).
Vs. 9, "By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise."
Abraham made his home in Canaan but he wasn't established there; he was still a foreigner. He didn't build houses; he continued to live in a tent. The promise was given to Abraham but the true benefit would come later to Abraham's descendants.
As Stephen said in Acts 7:5, "He gave him no inheritance here, not even a foot of ground. But God promised him that he and his descendants after him would possess the land, even though at that time Abraham had no child."
Although God took care of Abraham in the land of Canaan, he didn't really become established there. Many years later God would settle his people there when the Israelites left the desert and entered and eventually established themselves in the Promised Land, which was Canaan. But Abraham didn't own any property while he was there. When his wife Sarah died, he had to go and purchase a plot of land to bury her.
Gen. 23:1-6, "Sarah lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven years old. She died at Kiriath Arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went to mourn for Sarah and to weep over her. Then Abraham rose from beside his dead wife and spoke to the Hittites. He said, “I am an alien and a stranger among you. Sell me some property for a burial site here so I can bury my dead." The Hittites replied to Abraham, “Sir, listen to us. You are a mighty prince among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our tombs. None of us will refuse you his tomb for burying your dead.”
Obviously Abraham was respected among the Hittites, but it still wasn't his property; he had to ask for it. Abraham stayed faithful to God in a place that God led him to but never firmly established him in. But he still provided for him and protected him. This shows Abraham's devotion to God. To stay committed to a promise when he wasn't going to be the true beneficiary is to be faithful to the cause.
Sometimes God may have us do the work but allow someone else to reap the rewards. Parents do that when it comes to their kids, right? We work hard to provide a future for our kids. When a parent starts a business from the ground up and it succeeds and grows the kids reap the benefits of all that hard work and determination when it gets passed on to them. Abraham was the patriarchal father establishing a presence in the land of Canaan for his future descendants.
But regardless of not having a permanent dwelling in the land of Canaan, Abraham knew there was something better and permanent waiting for him.
Heb. 11:10, "for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God."
Abraham didn't get to lay foundations in the land of Canaan but he looked forward to the heavenly foundation. He didn't live in a city built by human hands but he looked forward to dwelling in the one built by the hands of God. For us, the spiritual descendants of Abraham, this is not our home; we're just passing through. We stay the course and keep the faith because we know there's something better for us over the horizon.
E. M. Bounds said, “Earth is but a pilgrim’s stay, a pilgrim’s journey, a pilgrim’s tent. Heaven is a city, permanent, God-planned, God-built, whose foundations are as stable as God’s throne.” This is, in essence, the crux of our faith-believing in what is yet to be for us; the hope of things unseen.
In his commentary William Burkitt said, "God's promise, and not God's power, is the ground of faith; it is not what God can do, but what he will do, and what he has engaged and promised to do, that is the ground of faith."
It takes faith to believe that what promised will be fulfilled. Our faith solidifies our hope that we will someday be with Jesus. The hope that all the sufferings and troubles are achieving for us a glory that far outweighs them all. Our faith in what God has promised carries us. We're like Abraham-going to a place which God will later show us. We believe it is there because God said it is there.
Abraham staked his whole livelihood on the trust that God would fulfill his promise. We stake our eternal livelihood on the same trust. But that takes active faith and perseverance to stay committed to the cause while we're here waiting for that promise to become fulfilled.
Heb. 6:9-15, "Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.
We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised. When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, saying, “I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.”
And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised."
Abraham had faith and patience. He had obedience and determination. That's what will work for us as well. We cannot become lazy in the faith and expect to persevere. Laziness produces disobedience. Laziness is being indifferent instead of purposeful; apathetic instead of passionate.
We need to imitate those who were zealous; those who were steadfast and immovable in their faith. We need to imitate Abraham, who through faith and patience received what was promised. It takes faith in order to do that.
