On Being Weird

God willing, over the next four Sundays in this great eleventh chapter of Hebrews, we will learn about faith—what it is and what it does—through this great cloud of witnesses that chapter twelve, verse one tells us are the saints that have gone before us.

Over the last ten chapters, the author of Hebrews has been leveraging the Old Testament to make this one, controlling point for the book of Hebrews: That Jesus is better than all of his Old Testament forerunners and all of his rivals.

Now, in the eleventh chapter, he will move to telling us how we ought to respond to the glory and surpassing supremacy of Jesus—namely by faith. And so we need to know what faith is and what it looks like in the wild, what it does.

And the best way to see that is by seeing what it has looked like and has done. This is a chapter, then, of Bible stories. Especially those Bible stories we love to tell our kids.

We have a good instinct, it seems, when we reach for collections of stories from the Old Testament to read to our kids at dinner time and bedtime, from kids’ Bibles like the great one Catherine Vos put out some time ago.

That’s a good instinct; the mistake would be to stop reaching for those stories when we grow up. What makes us think that hearing of the great faith of the saints that have gone before us—who by their faith won kingdoms and suffered death rather than recant, saints who had the kind of faith that could handle both winning and suffering for the sake of the Lord—is only something that edifies children?

The author of Hebrews seems convinced that we need them, too. Look with me, if you would, at Hebrews 11, and we will make our way this morning through the first seven verses, God willing. This is the Word of the Living God:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.”

-Hebrews 11:1–7

We’ll handle these first seven verses in five basic chunks, and we’ll do so very simply. In the first two chunks, we’ll set up some prolegomena for the whole chapter—stuff we’ll need to know to handle these stories of faith properly. Then in the final three chunks, we’ll take a quick glance at the faith of our spiritual forefathers Abel, Enoch, and Noah, and see what they have to teach us about this life of faith.