And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
J.E. Smith in his commentary on the Pentateuch noted: “Hebrews 11 emphasizes the faith of Abram. He believed God when he did not know where (v. 8), when he did not know how (v. 11), and when he did not know why (vv. 17–19).”
In point of fact, Hebrews 11 is an entire list of people who, although they did not know the where or the how or the why, were driven by faith in what they could not see, being obedient to the promise of a hope they had not yet attained and by that faith won the pleasure and the approval of God.
They understood and believed that He knew all the wheres and all the hows and all the whys, and it was simply enough for them.
Now here we are in this information age, this time of greatly increased knowledge, with relatively little understanding of what is really important I might add, and where is the faith and the evidentiary love obedience and power that marked the lives of O.T. saints and the first century church?
Why have we come to demand and expect a clear statement of every where, how and why before we’ll commit ourselves to the gospel cause?
Could it be that there is an increasing tendency in the church to use the ‘many convincing proofs’ that have been made available to us in recent years as tools to win people over by some mental assent to the facts, thereby drawing people into the church community who have never said ‘I’m sorry’ to God, nor knelt in the blood-soaked earth at the foot of the cross of Christ?
Without faith it will be impossible to please God and disbelief is not the only obstacle to saving faith. The preponderance of information being stuffed under people’s noses concerning scientific and archeological proofs and hidden messages in the Hebrew text and any number of other things designed to help belief may very well become a stumbling block instead.
So the church is becoming a business place with its hierarchy and its pecking order, and every potential venture must be presented with graphs and powerpoint slides and marching music played softly in the background before the bean-counters will break loose with funds and resources to get the job done.
“What, you want to support a new church start over there in that part of town? Where all those people live in trailers and work blue-collar jobs for low pay? What will replace our expenditures for that? Those people certainly don’t have the money. We’ll have to cut back on some of our staff; maybe just cut the youth minister’s salary and let him get a second job. Yeah. That’ll work.”
Don’t think it doesn’t happen.
If you’re wondering how I got here from my beginning remarks and you’re wondering what all this has to do with saving faith let me assure you that it has a great deal to do with how people have attempted to come to God in the first place, and how they presume to approach Him now as one who wears the name of Christian.
Because, friends and family, our text does not apply only to the unsaved seeker coming to God for the first time. This statement of the writer that the one who comes to God must believe that He is and that He rewards those who seek Him applies to every child of God every day of his or her life.
The Christian life is a life of faith or it is a walk away from God and when a church congregation has turned to the ways of the world to manage itself it is no longer functioning as the true church of God, and it marches on without Him, under its own power, until it destroys itself from within.
It is an historical pattern, and it will happen in every local body when first the leadership and then the laymen cease to lean on God for help and direction and then do Kingdom work God’s way by faith.
And Christian, it is true of you and me as individuals.
COMING TO GOD
Let’s take a closer look at this phrase, “…he who comes to God…”
It speaks of approaching God. Not just coming to Him in the sense that we use it when we say, “Oh, I’ve been witnessing to my neighbor for three years and last Saturday morning he finally came to Jesus”.
No, it is a coming to Him in the sense that Paul was talking about in Ephesians 3:12 when he says that it is through faith in Him that we have confident access to Him.
There simply is no access to Him, no approaching Him, no confidence in drawing near, apart from faith.
Doesn’t this shed some bright light on the nature of our worship and our prayer? How many times have we entered into a time of private devotions or even corporate prayer in church; how often have we gathered to worship, or maybe I should say ‘gathered to do church’, and there was no faith involved?
It doesn’t take faith, does it, to sit and read a few chapters of the Bible and then spend three minutes in prayer over the concerns of the day. We can be doing that while thinking about picking the kids up after the soccer game or doing the bills.
It doesn’t take faith to come together and chat and chuckle and then sit and sing some songs and fight to stay awake through a 20 minute sermon and then gather up our stuff and go home.
People, the exercise of faith is a deliberate act, and I can’t help wondering if the times we leave faith out of the equation are an expression of a deep down almost subconscious failure to believe that God is even there!
Because according to the Bible the very first prerequisite to approaching God is believing that He exists! And that sounds rather silly, doesn’t it?
Y’know why I don’t go out looking for unicorns? Y’know why I don’t go on a quest for the pot of gold at the end of every rainbow I see? Because I don’t believe they exist. Simple as that.
Ponce De Leon searched what we know as the Bahamas for the fountain of youth because he was told it existed and he believed it was there somewhere. Fool’s errand? Of course. But he searched diligently because he believed.
Hebrews 11:6 says that if anyone is going to come to God he must first believe that He exists. Now we might be tempted to respond with ‘well, no duh…’ to that, but we won’t because we know the Holy Spirit inspired the scriptures. So we hold our tongue and shake the cobwebs out of our little sheep brains and think deeper.
What are we really being told?
I think it is this. That we must believe that God exists as He reveals Himself, not as our sorry imaginations try to make Him.
When men fashion an idol out of wood or clay or silver or gold or jade and then pray to it are they approaching God? Are they coming to God? No.
But if you ask them if God exists they would answer, ‘yes, and this image you see represents Him’. Depending on the culture they may even say that the image is Him. But will their prayers be answered? Will they receive the reward promised in Hebrews 11:6? No.
And Christians, I want you to understand very clearly today that however you identify yourself, whether it be as a Christian or a Southern Baptist, or a Lutheran or Roman Catholic, or a free-thinking non-denominationalist or whatever, the faith you have that God exists must be a faith grounded in the God of the Bible, not your own ideology or your philosophy of God or your misconceptions stemming from error you’ve been exposed to around you, or you’re not coming to God any more than the half-naked painted inhabitant of the jungle on his face before a hunk of ivory.
“Well, I think of God as…” is a dangerous way to start an expression of a thought.
No, no. You don’t think of God as anything. You go to the Bible and you read, and you learn who and what God is from the Bible and you believe it, and you approach Him on that basis alone or you don’t go. If you think you are, you’re kidding yourself.
Let me add a thought to the tail of that. If what you think you know of God causes you to not want to approach Him, not want to know Him, to be afraid to come to Him, then you haven’t believed in the God of the Bible. You haven’t believed He exists.
WHAT IS ‘SEEKING’?
The next thing I want to make clear is that I’m not saying by this that you need to or even can understand God completely.
“I don’t want a God that I understand. I have a God Whom I can trust where I can’t understand. He keeps much in the background so that ‘we walk by faith and not by sight’. So I won’t understand every last thing. If you would understand God perfectly, there would be no place for faith, and He wouldn’t be God.” - John Wright Follette
But you must believe in the God of the Bible to the degree that you have come to know Him and to the degree that He has revealed Himself to you. That will increase as your relationship grows. But you must have a correct and Biblically accurate beginning place.
Having said that, the best beginning place is Jesus. I think a lot of Christians spend a lot of years thinking of God the Father and God the Son as such different entities that when they think of God or God the Father, they have this Old Testament picture of a solemn-faced old man with a long grey beard scowling down at some people in the desert.
But Jesus said that if you’ve seen Him you’ve seen the Father, which means if you know Jesus you know the Father, which means the Father has from eternity been what you know and see in the person of Jesus Christ.
In “My Utmost for His Highest”, Oswald Chambers wrote:
To turn head faith into a personal possession is a fight always, not sometimes. God brings us into circumstances in order to educate our faith, because the nature of faith is to make its object real. Until we know Jesus, God is a mere abstraction, we cannot have faith in Him
So when we’re seeking for God, we find Him when we find Jesus. And we are not then done. It is a pursuit, in the spirit of the Psalmist when he wrote:
1 As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God?” Ps 42:1,2
Are you beginning to get a sense in this that there is simply no place for casual Christianity? And I point the finger at myself more than anyone when I say that we are a bunch of slugs.
We are far too complacent; far too yielding to the flesh when it comes to any real and deliberate pursuit of a meaningful and fruitful relationship with our God.
If we’re in agreement that we have to fight a tendency to put an idol on the throne of our heart and mind when we drift slightly from the Biblical revelation, and that in our worship and service we are called to seek, pursue, approach the true God with purpose and diligence, then we have to look at our present selves and circumstances and agree that we are sorely lacking.
Yes, we here in this place and the American church in general. I’ll let the rest of the world speak for itself.
‘You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13) God said through His prophet. When He said ‘…with all your heart... He was speaking of a deliberate purposeful diligence in pursuit.
My version does not make this clear in Hebrews 11:6 but others do. The King James says “…He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him” and the NIV uses the word ‘earnestly’. The Amplified employs both, ‘earnestly and diligently’.
The other thing I want to point out about the verse I quoted from Jeremiah
is that He said “…you will find Me…”
That’s encouraging, isn’t it?
Don’t let me frighten you off with this talk of worshiping the true God and being more energetic in seeking Him out and approaching Him. He promises that when we do that we will find Him. Not that we might, but that we will. That promise alone should give us all the drive and all the assurance and all the confidence we need to put forth a daily effort to worship Him in spirit and in truth.
REWARDS
“Faith is believing what you cannot see, and the reward of that faith is seeing what you believed.” - St Augustine
“…he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him”
God rewards those who seek Him, with Himself.
What do you pursue? What do you see the church in general in our culture pursuing? I say ‘what’, not ‘Who’.
Let’s be honest. Our days are spent pursuing what is most important to us. If we’re a lazy couch potato then nothing is really being pursued other than to be left alone with the clicker and a bag of chips.
If we have any drive at all though, we are actively pursuing that which is most important to us. So let’s think about it.
Success at work? Passing grades at school? If we’re single then maybe it’s that certain someone with the pretty eyes or the manly chin.
How much time in the course of any given week is devoted to the pursuit of the Lover of our souls?
What about the church? Well, if we who are the church are not on a quest for God then the church as an organization certainly won’t be, will it?
What do we see the church pursuing? More members, better and more attractive programs, workers and training for our workers, the next catchy phrase or popular book to come along and give us an emotional boost so we can have something new to be excited about…
What if the American church suddenly dropped to her knees and pushed all else aside and earnestly and diligently sought after the God of the Bible, not for anything He can give but just for Himself?
St Augustine is also quoted as saying “Oh Lord, Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our souls are restless until they find their rest in Thee”.
We are a restless bunch, aren’t we? Again, be honest as you examine yourself. Don’t we all labor under a weight of general dissatisfaction with life? Not all the time; just when we run out of things to occupy our mind with; just when whatever new thing has come along or been drummed up to make us feel happy and fulfilled for a while fades and gets old.
I wonder how many Christians have given up on praying the prayer of Jabez? “Ah… I didn’t get blessed…didn’t get what I was asking for…it didn’t work”.
Then there comes a day when in the quiet of a moment we just feel unfinished, unexcited, unsettled, lacking something, blah.
I hope you know what I mean; if not I have a big problem…
It is a restlessness. The soul is restless and God will not allow us as His children to find real and permanent rest from that in anything the world has to offer. He is a jealous Lover, and He wants us first to believe in Him and then to diligently seek His closeness.
But praise God, believer, He promises to reward the seeker.
Now I want you to take note that He does not promise to reward the doubter. He does not promise He will be found by the one who wants to have all the answers before he’ll come.
This takes us back to the beginning and the things that were said about Abram and the others listed in this chapter.
They didn’t step out in what we call ‘blind faith’. They weren’t ignorant. They knew what they needed to know; believed what they needed to believe.
That God exists, and that their diligence and obedience would not be in vain. So they acted according to their faith and they found their reward in the face of Christ.
When John saw Jesus coming back out of the wilderness he pointed to Him and declared Him to be the Lamb of God. So two of his own disciples left him and began to follow Jesus. When they did Jesus turned and asked, “What do you seek?” (John 1:38)
Well fortunately for them, they were seeking Him, and their lives changed forever.
What are you seeking, Christian? What do you pursue? We can blame no one, especially God, for our restlessness and our general dissatisfaction if we are not coming to the God of the Bible in belief, and diligently seeking Him out.
But we do have Him and only Him to be thankful to that when we believe in what we cannot see our reward will be that we will ultimately see what we believed.
All of us wait for that day when we will be there and see Jesus face to face. We think of Heaven and although we can only imagine what it will be like we do know that our greatest delight will be just to be in His presence, to hear His voice, to see His glory, to be touched by Him and never have to leave.
So what holds us back from seeking those things now? He never said we have to wait until then to know Him and enjoy Him. Quite the contrary.
He said that we would seek Him and that when we search for Him with all our heart we would find Him. That means being in His presence, hearing His voice, seeing His glory, being touched by Him, never having to leave.
And He has never said we have to wait for that.
