Now faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen.
For by it the elders obtained a good
report.
Through faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God, so that
things which are seen were not made of
things which do appear.
We'll stop there because he plunges on then,
illustrating what he has to say by Abel
and the rest of them.
Now this is the faith chapter of the
Bible, and here faith is demonstrated.
Its deeds are recorded.
And yet there is no definition of faith
given here, nor is there a definition of
faith anywhere given in the scriptures.
For let us remember that when it says,
Now faith is the substance of things hoped
for, and the evidence of things not seen,
it is not giving us a definition.
Just as when it said, God is love,
it is not giving us a definition of
God, nor a definition of love.
There are very few definitions in the Bible.
The reason being that definitions have to do
with philosophy and reason, whereas the Bible is
not a book of philosophy and reason, but
a spiritual book directed to the heart.
It is a book of morals, and it
is not a book of ethics.
Ethics is another word for righteousness or morals,
and the ethical book reasons concerning good and
bad.
But the Bible is not a book of
reason about good or bad.
The Bible is an authoritative book telling us
what is good and what is bad.
We need no textbook on ethics when we
come to the word of God.
God has written the only textbook there is
that is valid and that is binding upon
all men.
So there is no definition of love given,
and there is no definition of righteousness, and
there are very few, if any, definitions given
in scriptures.
There is none of faith here.
Faith is demonstrated, not defined.
And I should like to point out to
you that this is God's ideal for his
church.
Not that love should be defined from the
pulpit, but that it should be demonstrated in
the pew.
Not that faith should be defined from the
pulpit, but that it should be practiced by
the people in the pew, as well as
by the man in the pulpit.
So we have here faith.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for.
Now, let's get a little illustration to know
what we mean by this.
Suppose that a father tells his boy that
he is going to give him a bicycle
on his 10th birthday.
And he just tells him that.
The boy is yet a couple of months
away from his 10th birthday, but he says
to him, Now, Junior, on the morning of
your 10th birthday, you may have a bicycle.
I am ordering one for you, and it
will be here, and it will be yours.
Now, the boy knows his father, and he
knows that barring death or illness, the father
will make good on his promise.
He has known that from the time he
can remember.
So he has faith in his father.
He has faith that he will have that
bicycle on the morning of his 10th birthday,
and he expects it with the keen and
enjoyable anticipation.
Now, that is giving substance to the thing
that's coming.
It's the faith he has in his father
that gives substance to those.
So he talks to his friends about the
bicycle, and he dreams about the bicycle.
And he plans what he'll do and where
he'll go and where he'll ride and how
he'll share it with his friends.
To him, it's just as good as if
he had it, because it has been promised,
and he has faith in the Promiser, so
faith gives substance to the promise.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for
and the evidence of things not seen.
And the boy talks excitedly about his bicycle,
and his cynical little sister says, You don't
have any bicycle.
She ribs him about it, but he's talking
about it just as if he had it,
because faith has given substance to it, and
there is evidence of it.
Now, that doesn't define faith.
That doesn't even describe it.
That simply tells how it's demonstrated.
Now, it is by faith that we have
to walk here.
God compels us to live in a state
of benign ignorance.
I want you to know that.
I like to hear it, but it's true.
We live in a state of benign ignorance.
Now, there are various kinds of ignorance, you
know.
There is the ignorance of the man who
refuses to learn, and there is the ignorance
of the man who just will not learn.
And then there is the ignorance of the
person who has never been anywhere much.
He lives, say, in the country.
And there's a difference, you know, between lack
of intelligence and ignorance.
It means not knowing.
A person can be totally ignorant on a
subject or on many subjects.
Everybody's ignorant on a certain number of subjects,
but some of us just...
And so you can be ignorant, or we
can be.
I can be on very many subjects and
yet be intelligent, and sharply intelligent, but ignorant.
For instance, I'm ignorant on space flight.
All I know is what I read in
the papers and hear over the radio.
But I couldn't run one of those things.
I would not.
I'd have overshot the thing.
I couldn't handle it because I'm ignorant on
it, but I don't sit my chin down
on my chest saying that I'm unintelligent.
It's not unintelligent.
I had had his training, so I'm not
going to...
Now, it's...
I say God keeps us in a state
of benign ignorance.
By that, I mean that everything that matters,
we're ignorant of, and the things that don't
really matter, we know.
That's the odd thing.
The things that matter, we don't know and
we can't know.
And this is that God, no flesh should
glory in God's presence, but that he that
glorieth let him glory in the Lord.
You know, human reason has always been the
rival of God.
The race fell in the day that the
devil persuaded the first pair that if they
were to eat of the fruit, and when
they said, ye shall be as God's knowing,
and the devil said that, they fell for
it and took the bait.
And the result is, instead of being as
God's knowing, human reason has always been God's
rival, I say.
And yet, there is nothing which a man
is surprised by as man's reason.
God hasn't allowed him to understand one fundamental
fact of life.
We use a word there at the end
of that sentence, life.
Now, I don't know, nobody knows.
You can't explain life because you can't understand
life.
You can explain anything you can understand.
But life is one of those glorious things
that escape us.
Now, consciousness.
I was thinking this morning about consciousness.
You know you have consciousness, but you don't
know what consciousness is.
I said to myself, well, conscious.
Very good, brother, very good.
But what is awareness?
And so we define one with the other,
because nobody knows.
And when you're unconscious, you don't know it.
And after you've come back to consciousness again,
you don't know what you've come back to.
Now, that's literally true.
I'm not trying to be facetious.
It's literally true.
We don't know.
The psychologists talk about state.
Then there is love.
Nobody knows what love is, and nobody knows
if it is a thing or not.
And trying to explain it or define it
makes us foolish, because it's wonderful that we
can enjoy and experience things that we cannot
define.
And you know to experience without understanding is
the act of a child.
The child eats its food and hasn't the
remotest idea of what's in it nor whether
it's good for it or not.
And it experiences many, many of life's varied
facets and doesn't understand any of them.
It just enjoys them.
When we were in Florida, we saw our
seven-month-old, a dandy little fellow, and
we really fell in love with him.
His name is Raleigh Browning.
Raleigh for his father, and Browning for his
wife's grandmother's maiden name.
I don't know where they went astray for
that one, but they got it.
And little Raleigh Browning is a lovely little
chap.
And he just experiences without knowing.
They have two huge Great Dane dogs, big
as ponies running around the place.
First thing I'd do with them would be
tie them in the backyard.
But they came around the house, and this
little guy can't walk yet.
If you hold him on his two little
wobbly legs, he just yells with delight, looking
at those two huge dogs.
Now, he doesn't know that one of them
could just reach over and bite him in
two.
He doesn't know that.
And enjoying it tremendously, and a big smile
breaks out on his little face when he
looks at these two huge dogs.
He's experiencing them without understanding them.
My father used to say about horses, he'd
say when he saw them pulling and leaning
forward in their great body tents, he'd say,
if a horse only knew his own strength,
he couldn't handle them.
They didn't know.
They experienced without knowing.
And it's this experiencing without knowing that we
find delightful about a baby.
So God smiles at our vaunted reason and
compels us to live all the time like
children.
And it's just as we should, for our
Lord says, that except you become as little
children, you cannot enter into the kingdom of
God.
That's why the learned college professor tries to
come in head first and never gets in
at all.
And that is why the simple-hearted man,
he can come in and spend.
So God compels us, I say, to live
by faith, a kind of a sub-faith
it is indeed.
The so-called thinker who scorns religion because
it requires faith is forced to live by
faith every moment of his life, a kind
of a sub-faith.
He gets up in the morning and he
expects the sun to be in a certain
position, the time.
And when he eats, he expects that food.
He doesn't really give it much thought because
he's in the newspaper while he's eating.
But he knows in a general way where
it is and where he's mouth has managed
to get through it while he's reading the
report of the hockey or baseball game the
day before.
But the point is, he has faith.
It's a kind of a sub-faith.
He walks out on the sidewalk and he
expects that sidewalk to hold him up.
He knows, or thinks he knows by faith,
that it won't suddenly collapse.
And so would everything.
He lives by faith all the time.
Goes down to the university and stands and
argues learnedly before his class that religion is
a passé and a burnt-out thing because
it doesn't rest on reason.
He only goes by reason.
From the time he got up in the
morning and shook himself awake to that minute,
he'd been living by faith.
Kind of a sub-faith, I admit.
Certainly not saving faith because saving faith is
on a much higher level.
It is a mystery, you see.
I mean biblical faith as distinguished from ordinary
faith which I have described.
At the door of the kingdom, the god
Reason is dethroned.
And instead of being a king, he becomes
a servant.
And as soon as we're in the kingdom
of God, then Reason takes its right place.
Reason waits on us as a useful servant
instead of ruling us as a false god.
And so the Christian is not unreasonable.
He simply suddenly plunges into a realm where
Reason becomes a servant.
He lives by faith.
By faith, you see.
By faith.
And any attempt to equate faith and Reason
is ridiculous.
It can't be done.
Jesus said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord
of the heaven and earth, that thou hast
made.
And so faith becomes an organ of knowledge.
Now it says here in the opening verses
that through faith we understand that the worlds
were framed by the word of God so
that things which are seen were not made
of things which do appear.
You see, he had in mind here when
he wrote this the doctrine of the eternity
of matter.
If you will remember, there was a doctrine
held that matter is eternal.
That there never was a time when things
were not.
They all were.
And that all that we see is the
result of a rearrangement of matter that never
began to be, but always was.
That's the doctrine of the eternity of matter.
That there is no invisible eternal world back
of the visible temporal world.
But the Holy Ghost here gives us the
truth.
The Holy Ghost says that the visible came
out of the invisible.
That things that are seen came out of
the things that are not seen.
That matter came out of spirit, and before
all things was God.
And so faith becomes an organ of knowledge.
What I cannot know with my reason, I
can know by believing.
Faith becomes an organ of knowledge.
By faith we understand.
And by saying faith we understand, we mean
by faith we know.
So faith is an organ of knowledge.
Faith is not a substitute for reality, but
it is the organ that apprehends reality and
God and spiritual things.
Now faith doesn't create these things, and faith
doesn't certainly imagine these things, but faith gives
evidence to them.
The little boy waiting on his bicycle doesn't
imagine he's going to get it as far
as human knowledge can go.
And he doesn't create the bicycle by believing,
but he just gets it because his father
is true and doesn't lie to his boy.
And so you and I don't create these
things by believing.
That's the mistake that a lot of them
make.
They write books to the effect that if
you just project out of your subconscious...
I remember one time going to take in
a series, and that fellow said that the
subconscious was that, and that there it was
underneath there, and you...
It was the boss of your whole life,
really.
Not your consciousness, but your subconscious.
So that if your consciousness...
That, incidentally, was the fellow.
Every day and every way I'm getting better
and better.
He even had a rosary.
And you get up in the morning, take
a hold of your string and go down.
Every day and every way I'm getting better
and better.
And people...
It was an odd thing, but he just
dropped off one day.
Every day and every way...
So I know a better way.
Instead of telling your stomach, now digest, eat
and thank God and go about your business.
If the Lord cares.
Now...
I say faith is an organ of knowledge,
but it's not an organ of imagination.
It doesn't project imaginary things and look at
them and say, there they are.
It sees what is with the eye of
faith.
We do not project out of ourselves a
millennium to come, but we see the millennium
to come by the eye of faith and
know that it will come.
We do not by faith project out of
ourselves heaven and say, someday I'll enter that
heaven.
I wouldn't want to enter a heaven that...
I'd want something more substantial than a projection
of my intellect or imagination.
And there is such.
Jesus Christ our Lord said, If I go
and prepare a place for you, I will
come again and receive you unto myself that
where...
He went to prepare a place.
It's a real place.
How do I know?
I know by faith.
It's the organ that tells me it's true.
I know because he said it was so.
And he's never failed on anything.
Everything that his mouth promised, his hand has
fulfilled or will yet fulfill.
So we can count on that.
So you and I are not living in
a world of imagination.
It's the world that lives in imagination.
I hear things all the time and read
things all the time that I don't believe.
I haven't any faith in it.
I heard a speech made by that fellow
whose name I never can pronounce.
Hugh Fent, is that his name?
The acting Secretary of the United Nations.
Pretty good speech, I suppose.
But it's all imaginary, you see.
We take for granted that all people mean
well and that if we just trust people
we'll be all right.
There are people that don't mean well.
And only a fool will take it for
granted that Khrushchev means well or that Mao
Zedong means well or that any of them
mean well.
They mean to conquer and enslave you.
And only an idiot, if a man is
rushing at him with a bloody knife, will
stand and say, he means well.
That'll be the last thing he ever says.
Some people don't mean well.
Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and
worse till the end comes.
Read the book of Revelation and see if
all men mean well.
And all you have to do is stroke
their dandruff a bit and scratch their necks
and they'll be all right.
And, oh, my brother, you've got to face
up to reality.
There's a reality that we can see and
grasp and then there's a reality that we
can't see nor grasp but we can believe.
And I want to live for that reality,
for all the things, however real, however many
Hitlers and Stalins and Lenins and the rest
that there are.
They're only temporary.
They're real.
They were real, but they're temporary.
And they're now gone.
And these others will go with them.
But that eternal city that has foundation whose
builder and maker is God did not begin
on the earth and it won't end in
the earth.
It is not a victim of time nor
a child of the passing years that came
out of the heart of God.
And the mansions there are made by the
hands of God for the people of God.
By faith we know this.
Faith is an organ of knowledge.
So we are not imaginary men filled with
vain imagining running about, trusting things that aren't
so, pulling ourselves up by our shoelaces.
We are those who have heard the voice
from beyond matter, the voice from beyond creation,
the voice that called creation into being.
We have heard that voice and we believe
it.
And that voice says, matter was not eternal,
there's only one eternal, that's God.
But that matter is the hand the work
of the eternal.
And that the things visible were made by
the things that are invisible.
The things material were made by the things
spiritual.
So you and I, we're Christians, live for
another world than this.
If you want to be disappointed, now if
you're just a child and you're in the
wrong sense of the word, and you're ready
to believe anything that's got pretty paint on
it and makes a nice noise, okay.
But if you've got something up here, you'll
be disappointed when you go to Florida.
I've been down there before, but I never
got a chance to look it over quite
as much as I did this time.
At Causeway, across from Miami to Miami Beach,
they call it the Jewish Passover.
Because the Jews pass over that to get
over to their beautiful mansions on the other
side.
I went over there twice and looked it
over and I was sick to my...
It represents decadence.
If it wasn't for things like that and
other things like it on the North American
continent, Communism would be stopped dead in its
tracks.
It's because we accept that artificial, corrupt, putrefied
decadence as being real, that they can push
us and push us and push us and
erode and take away our...
I see another city.
Another city.
Abraham saw it and never would live in
a city after that.
He lived in tents from that hour on.
Every time that somebody said, Abraham, why don't
you build a city?
He said, after seeing that city, I'd be
ashamed.
He said, I'll stick by a tent, just
an old tent, till I see the city
that has foundations.
That's faith.
So we're saved by faith.
And our Lord says, Come unto me and
believe on me and follow me.
Come and believe and follow.
That's it.
Come is not a journey, as I have
said often, for the feet, but a journey
for the heart.
Believe is not an act of reason, but
an act of the will.
And following is not an act once done,
but a continuous act that begins when we're
converted and never ends while the long ages
roll.
So that's faith.
Faith is substance.
Faith is assurance.
Faith is the rock foundation.
Faith is that which translates the invisible into
the visible, the things that are not and
makes them as though they were.
In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, we see
faith busy at work, being demonstrated over the
centuries.
It's a good chapter, and I hope that
Sunday after Sunday, you'll come and hear it
expounded.