The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Hebrews Part 12

FOOTNOTES:

[211] Chaps. ii. 1-5; iii. 1, 6; iv. 11, 16; vi.

[212] Chap. x. 19.

[213] et? ???????? ?a?d?a? (x. 22).

[214] ??a? (x. 21).

[215] ?p? s??e?d?se?? p?????? (x. 22).

[216] Lev. viii. 6, 30.

[217] Eph. v. 26.

[218] Chap. iii. 1.

[219] e?? pa????s?? (x. 24).

[220] ???? (x. 25).

[221] Matt. xxiv. 27.

[222] ????s??? (x. 26).

[223] Chap. x. 29.

[224] p?e?a t?? ????t??.

[225] See chap. vi. 6.

[226] Chap. x. 26.

[227] ????? (x. 27).

[228] Chap. x. 28.

[229] pa?ade??at????ta? (vi. 6).

[230] Chap. iii. 12.

[231] Chap. xii. 21.

[232] ?pese??.

[233] Deut. x.x.xii. 36.

[234] Chap. vi. 10.

[235] f?t?s???te? (x. 32).

[236] ????s??.

[237] p?????.

[238] ??t?? ??ast?ef????? (x. 33).

[239] Reading ?a?t??? (x. 34).

[240] e?? pe??p???s?? (x. 39).

[241] ? ?p????te.

[242] ????? ?s?? ?s?? (x. 37).

[243] Reading ?? (x. 38).

[244] pe??p???s?? (x. 39).

[245] Dean Merivale, _Romans under the Empire_, chap. lix.

CHAPTER X.

_FAITH AN a.s.sURANCE AND A PROOF._

"Now faith is the a.s.surance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen. For therein the elders had witness borne to them.

By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of G.o.d, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear."-HEB. xi. 13 (R.V.).

It is often said that one of the greatest difficulties in the Epistle to the Hebrews is to discover any real connection of ideas between the author's general purpose in the previous discussion and the splendid record of faith in the eleventh chapter. The rhetorical connection is easy to trace. His utterances throughout have been incentives to confidence. "Let us hold fast our confession." "Let us draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace." "Show diligence unto the full a.s.surance of hope." "Cast not away your boldness." Any of these exhortations would sufficiently describe the Apostle's practical aim from the beginning of the Epistle. But he has just cited the words of Habakkuk, and the prophet speaks of faith. How, then, does the prophet's declaration that the righteous man of G.o.d will escape death by his faith bear on the Apostle's arguments or help his strong appeals? The first verse of the eleventh chapter is the reply. Faith _is_ a.s.surance, with emphasis on the verb.

But this is only a rhetorical connection, or at best a justification of the use the author has made of the prophet's words. Indeed, he has already in several places identified confidence with faith, and the opposite of confidence with unbelief. "Take heed lest there be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief; ... for we are become partakers of Christ if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end."[246] "They could not enter in because of unbelief; ... let us therefore give diligence to enter into that rest, that no man fall after the same example of disobedience."[247] "Be not sluggish, but imitators of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises."[248]

"Having therefore boldness to enter into the holy place, ... let us draw near with a true heart in fulness of faith."[249]

Why, therefore, does the author formally state that faith is confidence?

The difficulty is a real one. We must suppose that, when this Epistle was written, the word "faith" was already a well-known and almost technical term among Christians. We infer as much as this also from St.

James's careful and stringent correction of abuses in the application of the word. It is unnecessary to say who was the first to perceive the vital importance of faith in the life and theology of Christianity. But in the preaching of St. Paul faith is trust in a personal Saviour, and trust is the condition and instrument of salvation. Faith, thus represented, is the opposite of works. Such a doctrine was liable to abuse, and has been abused to the utter subversion of morality on the one hand and to the extinction of all unselfish greatness of soul on the other. Not, most certainly, that St. Paul himself was one-sided in teaching or in character. To him Christ is a heavenly ideal: "The Lord is the Spirit;" and to him the believer is the spiritual man, who has the moral intellect of Christ.[250] But it must be confessed-and the history of the Church abundantly proves the truth of the statement-that the good news of eternal salvation on the sole condition of trust in Christ is one of the easiest of all true doctrines to be fatally abused.

The Epistle of St. James and the Epistle to the Hebrews seem to have been written to meet this danger. The former represents faith as the inner life of the spirit, the fountain of all active goodness. "Faith, if it have not works, is dead in itself. Yea, a man will say, Thou hast faith, and I have works; show me thy faith apart from thy works, and I by my works will show thee my faith."[251] St. James contends against the earliest phases of Antinomianism. He reconciles faith and morality, and maintains that the highest morality springs out of faith. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews contends against legalism,-the proud, self-satisfied, indifferent, hard, slothful, contemptuous, cynical spirit, which is quite as truly and as often an abuse of the doctrine of salvation through faith. It is the terrible plague of those Churches which have never risen above individualism. When men are told that the whole of religion consists in securing the soul's eternal safety, and that this salvation is made sure once for all by a moment's trust in Christ, their after-life will harden into a worldliness, not gross and sensual, but pitiless and deadening. They will put on the garb of religious decorum; but the inner life will be eaten by the canker of covetousness and self-righteous pride. These are the men described in the sixth chapter of our Epistle, who have, after a fashion, repented and believed, but whose religion has no recuperative power, let alone the growth and richness of deep vitality.

Our author addresses men whose spiritual life was thus imperilled. Their condition is not that of the heathen world in its agony of despair. He does not call his readers, in the words of St. Paul to the jailer at Philippi, to trust themselves into the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ, that they may be saved. Yet he too insists on faith. He is anxious to show them that he is not preaching another gospel, but unfolding the meaning of the same conception of faith, which is the central principle of the Gospel revealed at the first by Christ to their fathers, and applied to the wants of the heathen by the Apostle of the Gentiles.

If so, it goes without saying that the writer does not intend to give a scholastic definition of faith. The New Testament is not the book in which to seek formal definitions. For his present purpose we require only to know that, whatever else faith includes, confidence in reference to the objects of our hope must find a place in it. Faith bridges over the chasm between hope and the things hoped for. It saves us from building castles in the air or living in a fool's paradise. The phantoms of worldliness and the phantoms of religion (for they too exist) will not deceive us. In the course of his discussion in the Epistle the author has used three different words to set forth various sides of the same feeling of confidence. One refers to the freedom and boldness with which the confidence felt manifests its presence in words and action.[252] Another signifies the fulness of conviction with which the mind when confident is saturated.[253] The third word, which we have in the present pa.s.sage, describes confidence as a reality, resting on an unshaken foundation, and contrasted with illusions.[254] He has urged Christians to boldness of action and fulness of conviction. Now he adds that faith is that boldness and that wealth of cert.i.tude in so far as they rest upon reality and truth.

We can now in some measure estimate the value of the Apostle's description of faith as an a.s.surance concerning things hoped for, and apply it to give force to the exhortations of the Epistle. The evil heart of unbelief is the moral corruption of the man whose soul is steeped in sensual imaginations and never realises the things of the Spirit. They who came out of Egypt by Moses could not enter into rest because they did not descry, beyond the earthly Canaan, the rest of the spirit in G.o.d. Others inherit the promises, because on earth they lifted their hearts to the heavenly country. In short, the Apostle now tells his readers that the true source of Christian constancy and boldness is the realisation of the unseen world.