The Just Shall Live By Faith

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. Bryan Broome is not with us today, but we hope he’ll be back soon.

Two weeks ago we were talking about the nature of faith, and we didn’t end up recommending books about faith that I recall. Maybe you did, Greg.

I think I recommended something, but we were looking for something very specific and at that point none of us came up with anything totally relevant.

No, but since then I have read a book that I would like to recommend in that context. It’s called Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund. It’s been all over the internet lately. Everyone seems to love it, and with good reason. It’s called Gentle and Lowly because of the one verse in the Bible where Jesus says something about his heart. It says he was gentle and lowly of heart, and the book is about Jesus.

Last time we kind of came to this trouble where we were trying to talk about faith, but it’s not really faith that’s important so much as the object of our faith, that our faith is in Jesus. So here was a wonderful book about Jesus and what he’s like and getting to know him and rejoice in him.

I have a couple of quibbles with how the author went about framing the content of the book. He hangs his hat on the Puritans a lot more than I would like, but the Puritans talking about the heart of Christ is probably the Puritans at their best, so I highly recommend that book.

Today we are continuing our discussion of faith and going to Hebrews 11, which we meant to do last time but we just ran out of time. We talked for an hour and had not yet approached Hebrews 11, so that’s where we’re going today.

Let me begin to read actually from chapter 10 and then read a little bit into 11. We may not read the whole chapter before we’re done, but we’ll read some of it here and there as we go. The writer, whoever he may be, says –

Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.

We’ll stop there. We’ve talked a great deal about justification by faith, sort of in the abstract – justification of the individual when he comes to Christ, that moment of belief when Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us and we are accepted as children of God, holy, beloved, righteous, sinless, spotless in God’s sight. That’s not all there is to the doctrine, though. There’s the ongoing cleansing, sanctifying, setting apart of our lives, of our daily works, of our obedience in this life.

Peter, speaking to his audience, says –

Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.

John says something similar in his first epistle –

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

So there is an ongoing application of the blood of Christ to the life of the believer, so in that sense we continue to live through the justification, live out the justification, have the justification applied to us not simply in the generic sense of once for all, but with regard to everything we are, everything we do, every action, every act of obedience we perform. As Luther has said, all of our good works are mortal sins unless they are forgiven by the blood of Christ.

I think those who champion justification by faith would all agree with that. There’s never a point where we go beyond Christ or outside of Christ or above of Christ or around Christ or are finished with Christ, where justification becomes a thing of the past. Yes, we can say it’s definitive, but it’s definitive with ongoing application. How exactly you want to phrase that and what words you want to use may be a matter of discussion, but I think in the end we’re just working with what Peter and John say. The cleansing by the blood is a thing that keeps going, not just the cleansing by the Spirit.

We often think of sanctification as the renewing the Spirit works in us whereby we are more and more conformed to the image of Christ, where the law of God he writes in our heart goes deeper, burns brighter, comes out more clear. That’s certainly true, but the problem is that even the best saints in this life have only the smallest beginning of obedience, the catechism says. So all of our past sins are covered by Christ, but with all of our present sins and all of our future sins we have to go on asking for the blood to maintain our fellowship with God.

Here we have to be careful. I’m looking for the word, and I’ve tried a couple in my head already and it hasn’t worked. We don’t want to say that the born-again Christian walks outside of God’s blessing, because we don’t. We are always God’s children, and all things are for our good, and all things are ours, no matter what, even when we sin egregiously. But there is a difference between when we are walking with God faithfully and trusting God, and when we decide to go do our own thing for a few months or a few years.

And the Lord chastises us.

Yes, so we have our Father’s chastening hand. Now, that is a blessing most assuredly, but it’s not the one we normally covet. I mean after the fact we look back and say, “I’m glad God did those things to bring me back to himself, to get me in line,” and ahead of time we generally say, “Isn’t it great to know that God will never let me wander, that he will always chastise me?” It’s just when we’re beginning to waver and fall away that we don’t generally says, “All right, God bless me with lots of chastisement. Bring it on.”

There was a song I used to listen to and sing when I was much younger, “Let it rain, let it rain, let it pour, let trouble keep knocking at my door, it will teach me right from wrong, it will help to make me strong. If it never, never rains, then we’ll never, never grow.”

You know, in some ways that’s a good song, but it’s most certainly a song of faith, to call for tribulations and persecutions and chastening, not simply to be corrected from old sins but to be strengthened for new obedience.

I don’t know how I got on this tangent, except to say that yes, we continue in the blessing of justification always, and we always continue to live in the grace of sanctification, but it may take different flavors, depending on how we’re responding to the gospel at any given time. “We are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the saving of the soul,” as the writer says here.

So we want to talk a little bit about what it means to live by faith, living not only on the basis of Christ’s finished work, his death and resurrection, but knowing that not only was that the starting point for this journey, this adventure we call the Christian life, but it is the ongoing reality of the Christian life. We don’t go on to something better. We don’t get past Christ or get past justification. We live in that righteousness that he’s procured for us, but we live, and living involves some really basic things, not only the breathing heart-beating part of it. That’s life after a fashion, I guess, but as we are going to see in Chapter 11, it also means that there’s stuff to do.

The writer, as he comes to this chapter, has a target audience. He’s writing to Jewish Christians who were beginning to feel the first winds of persecution from their own sort, from their Jewish families, relatives, and friends who have not come to Christ. Their friends are pointing to the temple, to the rituals, the priesthood, to 1500 years or more of tradition and saying “This is the old-time religion. What are you guys all doing? Stay here. You don’t need to go off and do this weirdness. Just live it out and believe in your heart what you will, but just stay in this framework. This the framework we’re used to.”

What the writer has to do here is say, “You’re misunderstanding all the Old Testament history if you say that. It was never like that. It was never just maintain the norm.” And the people that the writer is going to talk about are people who challenged the norm over and over again, sometimes in little subtle ways and sometimes in big confrontational ways. They did it because their eyes were fixed on the promise of the Messiah to come.

Well, Messiah has already come for us, so the application is not straight across one-to-one, but we look to a Messiah who was crucified and risen and reigning, and we look to his second coming and to the gospel promises that belong to this age, and to the command to disciple the nations.

Can I plant the seeds of one more herb to flavor this discussion? You mentioned a moment ago that your heart beating and your breathing is living after a fashion. I think we see that in a lot of literature and a lot of thought, especially in the last couple centuries, this idea that there is more to life than just existing. That might be an exact quote from Pollyanna, I’m not sure, but this is the same question that Aristotle posed after a fashion, “What is the good life?” For us in Christ, we’re still asking, “How are we supposed to live?”

How Should We Then Live? Yes, that is it. It’s one thing to say that by faith we’re made right with Christ, but from here to eternity how shall we then live?

The danger that I have seen recently, especially among some of those great champions who have defended justification by faith against Federal Vision and the New Perspective on Paul and such, is they get us back on track with justification and then they just kind of drop the ball and say, “Well, so here we are trusting in Jesus, going to church where we hear the gospel, coming to sacraments which point us to Christ, so we’re believing in Jesus and we’re righteous. There’s not really anything else we need to do, because there just isn’t because Jesus has done everything.”

There are a lot of problems with that, and I’m not sure of all the theological sources that played into that attitude, nor am I sure that everyone who says things like that says it for the same reason, but I think it’s something worth addressing.

We’re still kind of answering Kim’s question from before about the relationship of faith and works. I think we have to say at the very least that faith leads us to obey. The faith which justifies is the faith which sanctifies, and sanctification has led to obedience.

The question then I think becomes two-fold. First, is that obedience more than just the bare bones that are presented in the Pauline epistles, like “Love your wife. Obey your husband. Love and nourish your children. Children, obey your parents. Masters, don’t beat up on your slaves. And go to church.” Is that the sum and total of the Christian life? If we’ve done that, does that exhaust our obedience? After a fashion you could say, “Well, if I’ve done that and I’ve done it in faith, then haven’t I kept all of God’s commandments?” and I think we need to step back and see the other dimension.

We look at someone like Nehemiah or Esther, who in a crucial moment said, “No, that’s not enough, because the place that God by his providence has placed me…” – one the cupbearer of the king, the other the queen to the same king – they’re able to say, “Maybe I’m here for such a time as this. Maybe I can do something that actually will change the course of history.” In those two cases, Esther and Nehemiah, neither one had a prophetic word that said, “Thou shalt do this.”

We have lots of things in the Old Testament where God’s people were told to do particular things. The prophets were often told to do very weird things, honestly – marry a prostitute, walk around naked, cook your food with dung – but there was nothing that these two had, beyond the realization that something really important is hanging in the balance, and I’m in a position where I might be able to shift the balance, and therefore I am obligated to try, even though I have no promise, no command, and I literally could get myself killed.

Esther knew this. It says it very plainly. If the king doesn’t reach out the golden scepter, you’re dead. And with Nehemiah it’s implied. One does not appear sad in the king’s presence. “’This is nothing else but sorrow of heart,’ so I prayed to God.”

We have just in these two people examples of people who were moved by faith to go beyond the 9-6 kind of job into something else, something bigger.

And they had to be faithful in that 9-6 job. It was a humble life there, but there was more of a purpose that they were there for.

Something at least that for us is bigger. Now, how God weighs all that out on the last day we have no way of knowing. It’s none of our business. But certainly for us it was far more important that Esther stopped the slaughter of the Jews than it was that she kissed her husband good night before they went to bed.

Again we’re back to obedience is of various sorts, and there are some actions, some obediences that at least historically have a more profound effect, and such effects can ripple into eternity. Jesus says that a cup of cold water given in his name does not lose its reward. It has to be cold and it has to be given in his name.

As an elder in my church once put it, “Providence is like Hebrew. You can only read it backwards.”

This is so. Trying to figure out God’s plan in advance, what’s important to him and why he’s doing things, does not work. As a friend of ours often says, “Trust the storyteller, but then when you start trying to read the storyteller, you end up down the wrong alley.”

You get into meta-gaming, and it’s not good.

It’s not a good thing. So anyway, all of that to say that I want to look at some of these people, our fathers and mothers in the faith, and see what faith led them to do, and at the same time see that this is not a faith that’s apart from justification and the righteousness we have in Christ, but it’s exactly that.

For instance, we come to verse 2 of Chapter 11 – “By faith the elders obtained a good report.” That’s the summary, and he’s going to come back to it at the very end. We need to understand what a good report means, and a good report to whom.

By the way, in all the years since I memorized this as a kid, and I’m sure I memorized it more than once, probably two or three times, no one ever explained to me who the elders were or what a good report was. And I confess I’ve been just as bad with some of the Bible verses I assign to my kids. “They’re teenagers. They can figure it out.” Well, you know what? Not always.

A couple of my kids recently picked a team verse for Field Day and I had to actually sit down with them. It was the verse you mentioned up front, “I am meek and lowly of heart. Take my yoke upon you.”

“What’s a yoke? What’s Jesus’ yoke? What does that mean?”

They were trying to memorize it, and they couldn’t memorize it because English was their second language and these were some obscure words for them, and I needed to talk them through it. Once I did, the memorization became much easier. So a lesson to all of us. Let’s remember to explain verses, even when they seem easy.

The elders in this chapter are what in other places you would call the fathers, but there are mothers, too, so elders are those who lived in the elder days, as Tolkien would say. Those from a long time ago. Those whose lives are recorded for us in the Old Testament.

They obtained a good report. It doesn’t say they earned it. It says they obtained it. It’s not specifying the method. And the good report, as will become clear as we go along, is God’s good report. God was pleased with them. We’re going to see that phrase show up, too.

We want God to be pleased with us. He’s pleased with holiness and righteousness, and the only holiness and righteousness available to us is that of his Son, so right up front we are talking justification by faith, but we’re talking of it now not in the narrow theological sense of that moment we trust in Jesus, but of a life lived out in terms of that faith.

Again it’s the faith that justifies, not the actions. We’re avoiding the whole Federal Vision covenant faithfulness thing. But at the same time we are saying, as we’ve formerly said so many times, faith alone justifies, but faith is never alone, so we want to see some of that.

We’ll skip down to verse 4.

By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.

Abel offering the sacrifice was not faith, but it was motivated by faith. Again, the author is very careful to distinguish the motivating faith from the actions which the faith motivates. It motivated Abel to offer a better sacrifice than the one that Cain offered, objectively better. It wasn’t that he had a purer heart or better attitude. The sacrifice was the right sacrifice, which means that God had revealed the nature of the sacrifice, or it wouldn’t be.

I once knew a pastor who said he thought he was really good at not going beyond what the text said, and since the text never actually said that God told them to offer a lamb, obviously God hadn’t, so Abel just made it up.

Just taken his best guess. That’s not a good place in your life to play guessing games.

No, it really isn’t, and I’ve played on that a number of times with my students. “What would God like?” Usually I say, “I know God would love a dead animal. I want a dead animal. Everyone wants a dead animal.”

Today I went with chocolate. “I would want chocolate. Isn’t that what we should bring to God on Sunday, chocolate? Because I love chocolate. What could be better than chocolate? Let’s bring God chocolate. I’m sure that would make him very happy and warm his soul.”

No, it doesn’t work that way. That’s called will worship, and the whole Bible is opposed to it. But here the sacrifice is objectively excellent in that God had told them what to do, and Abel was doing it and Cain was offering something else.

Against the background of the book of Hebrews we have the Christian Jews who are coming out of Judaism considered as a system of works religion, and are coming to trust in their Messiah apart from their works. But their family members and their friends are still stuck in this, “Do this and live” kind of mentality. In that respect they are like Cain. Bring your own work and God will be satisfied. What more could God possibly want than my best?

At this point the writer is contrasting Abel and Cain, but doing it to say, “And you people are just like this. You should be in Abel’s position where you’re rejecting the thought patterns of the kings of this world, those who delight in will worship and manmade worship and offering your works to God.” And what did Abel get out of this? He obtained witness that he was righteous.

There it is again – a witness. As we go along it’s going to become much, much clearer where the witness is, or who the witness is, but the witness is God. God accepted his sacrifice. We’re not told how. The obvious thing would be that the flaming sword came down and lit the sacrifice. That’s how God normally receives sacrifices, by igniting them, but whether it was that or something else doesn’t matter. Somehow objectively God indicated that he took delight in what Abel had done because he brought the right sacrifice, and he brought the right sacrifice because his faith motivated him to do so. In contrast, Cain moved in unbelief and thought his “good enough” was good enough.

That’s another area where you don’t want to rely on human logic. “How do I know my gift has been accepted? He lit it on fire.” That’s real clear.

Yes, so he obtained a witness that he was righteous. Again we can misread that. “Oh, it means that Abel kept the commandments of God.” That’s not the context here. The context is the just living by faith. The righteousness is not Abel’s righteousness, it’s an alien righteousness, the righteousness of Messiah. He obtained witness that he had been justified by faith, God testifying of his gifts. God himself is the one, on the basis of that single sacrifice, who said, “Yeah, I’m your God, you’re my son. You’re righteous before me,” and he rejected Cain. By this one act of worship, “he being dead yet speaketh.”

We come to Enoch.

By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.

So we’re back to that. How does one please God? Is it by our works? No. “It’s by our faith. Our faith is so cool and special that it takes the place of our works. That’s it. My faith is strong enough.” No.

No, no, no.

No, no, no. That’s classic Arminianism. “God knows that we can’t keep his law, but he’ll accept one thing in place of the law and that’s faith, which we conjure up out of our own wills.” No, we don’t.

Without faith it is impossible to please him.

So there it is. There is no righteousness except that which comes by faith. Any attempt we make at righteousness outside of faith or beyond faith does not please God, because it’s not going to be righteousness. It’s going to be sin.

For he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.

That seeking is called faith, and God rewards it with righteousness, the righteousness of his Son. This continues to become clear as we go along.

By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.

In case we missed it…

Righteousness by faith.

Righteousness by faith. It’s something he inherited. There is an act of obedience in the midst of this, and yet it was the faith that moved the act, which God sealed by saying, “Here’s your new world. Go enjoy it.”

Plant a vineyard.

Go plant a vineyard and relax. Heirs of the righteousness which is by faith – that’s justification by faith. That’s what we’re talking about.

I mentioned before one pastor, for whom I have slight regard, a writer who said, “If we were to pull the book of Romans out of the Bible, where would we even go to prove justification by faith?”

Everywhere.

How about this whole chapter? This whole chapter is about justification by faith.

If you try to read it any other way, you’re going to distort scripture horribly and create a fleshly religion that has nothing of God’s grace in it.

You get your trading card heroes and that’s about it, which turn into your patron saints, which turn into your household gods.

That was good, I like that. Yeah, very much so. Or you push it off into Bible people, Bible times, Bible lands. “Well, they did that then, but we have Christ so we don’t have to do anything now. So that was alright for them. The Jews can have their saints, but we are saint-free. We have no heroes.”

I wrote a couple articles about the nature of heroes for Christians. Christians have heroes. Many times we are told “be followers.” Paul says, “Be followers of me, as I am of Christ,” and here are pointed out people that we should follow and imitate. Paul’s epistles are full of that kind of thing. There are people we should look up to, not because they autonomously did good things or were some sort of neutral good, accomplishing so many good things in a non-theistic universe, but because they do live by faith.

Sometimes we need to see it worked out in the lives of other people, so in the best sense biblical heroes are not only legitimate, they’re necessary, or God wouldn’t have given us so many.

We see perfection in Christ. We don’t see sin and repentance in Christ. We need others to show us that.

That is excellent, yes, absolutely.

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

Something that Noah and Abraham both have in common, and Enoch too in a sense, is they left one world for another world. Now, from Enoch’s point of view, it was walking straight into eternity when God said, “We’re out for a walk. Let’s go to my house. It’s closer.” That’s staggering, but not scary exactly.

But with Noah, “You’re about to lose the entire world and I’m going to give you something in some senses better, although you’re going to be like Robinson Crusoe on his island with whatever you have on your ship and whatever you can fabricate with your hands over the next few hundred years, and it’s going to be a drastic change. You’re going to abandon an old world and receive a new one.”

And Abraham doesn’t even know exactly where he’s going, but he too is called to leave the world he knew, with all of its paganism, and to go out into a place which God would show him and which he would receive as an inheritance, although eventually he understands that he receives the inheritance not while he’s alive but long afterwards.

His inheritance is a token. He doesn’t even have a place to lay down a foundation for a house. “He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” He ain’t never built a house with solid foundations. He lived in tabernacles and tents, as did his sons and grandsons, because their eyes were fixed on something eschatological. They were looking for the new Jerusalem, the Zion that our podcast talks about, and they were halting toward that heavenly city.

They understood that it wasn’t over the next mountain or around the next hill, that it was something in the future, tied to the coming of Messiah, the seed through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed. That they understood, and that civilization, that kingdom, that culture would be founded in the grace of God in Messiah. So that they were looking for, not in the sense of pulling out binoculars and looking around, but by faith looking into the future, we would say waiting for, expecting, hoping for, waiting it out, not having a clear time reference.

They knew it was in the future, but they didn’t know how far. They probably didn’t guess, for them, about 1500 years, but of course by that time it had already been 2,500 years or more. Obviously God was playing a slow hand here. So they left what they knew for what they would only get a down payment of, but they saw beyond the moment. Their faith moved them to do something that all of their friends would have considered flat-out crazy.

“You’re here in Ur of the Chaldeans. You’re successful. You have slaves. You have cattle. You have a thriving business. Everyone knows you. You have your relatives here, and you’re going – where was that, again?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“You got a name or a postal address?”

“No. It’s over there someplace. God will show me.”

“Uh huh, and what are you going to do there?”

“I imagine I’m going to raise cattle.”

“You can do that here.”

“Yes, but God wants me to do it there.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I’m going to have a son.”

“How old are you?”

“Kind of old.”

“Yeah, um, this is not making any sense, Abram. Intervention is necessary here.”

Maybe his friends sat down with him and tried to talk him out of it, because it seemed crazy. And if Abraham had said, “This is the will of God…”

“There’s nothing about this in scripture that we know, such as we have scripture and the traditions that our fathers have handed down, and the book of the law written in the hearts of men. There’s nothing here about giving up everything and moving.”

“God spoke to me directly.”

“Uh huh, really? Got any confirmation on that?”

“Well, it was God.”

“Maybe a return address? Can you hit redial?

“No, but it was God,” and so he goes, leaving all that behind, into a strange country he goes, looking for Zion, looking for Jerusalem, the true Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem.

Then this is an interesting shift.

Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.

There’s nothing unusual about a woman getting pregnant, except Sarah was pretty old at the time, past the time when women normally can have children, and apparently rather frail, judging by what this says. She received strength to conceive seed.

The Greek, as I recall, is “for the laying down of seed,” that is for making love to her husband. She was at a point where it might be pleasurable, but it could actually be physically challenging, and then bringing a child to term? This was a hard thing.

It may not be as grand as riding a huge boat through a worldwide ocean into a new world, or walking out of time into eternity, and in some respects it’s kind of mundane, and yet it most certainly was miraculous too. It was miraculous on a very personal level, and Sarah had to have faith to do this.

She could actually have said, “You know what?” – and she actually did try this once – “I’m too old. Try her,” and that didn’t go well. So in the end she believes, and as such receives strength for the receiving and bearing of the seed.

It’s interesting that one of the Hebrew names – forgive me, I’m calling on knowledge that I haven’t thought about since freshman year of college – but in Hebrew there’s a set of chapters in Genesis that are called the Book of Sarah. Are you familiar with that?

No, I’m not, although I can guess about where they would be.

There’s just so much more emphasis on Sarah and her faith, that this verse doesn’t come out of nowhere, compared to Genesis. I think I’ve missed that a lot in reading Genesis.

When we come to Isaiah, not only is Abraham held up as our father, but “Sarah who bear you.” She is put right there beside him. And the author of Galatians uses it, too. “Sarah, who is the mother of us all,” so she was in on this one, and it had to be because virgin birth and Mary is one thing, but virgin conception with only the guy – that doesn’t work. There’s got to be a woman here. There’s got to be a wife, and Sarah was the one God chose, and in humility she submitted to it and she trusted God for the physical strength.

Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

Even then God was in the process of preparing the city, insofar as it’s eternal and heavenly. That work was in some sense done from the foundation of the world, Jesus says, and yet he says, “I go to prepare a place for you.” And there’s this ongoing process called evangelism, whereby we give birth to the citizens of that kingdom. God is still filling up the holy city and it’s an age-long process.

It says they died in faith. We’ve been talking about living by faith, but there’s also this dying by faith, which is something we don’t talk about very much, it suddenly occurs to me. There was a time when an older saint died and went home to be with the Lord, big deals were made out of it. Not only were there elaborate funeral services, but getting the family together at the death bed, the final testimonies, final blessings and prayers, celebration and hymns to mark the passing – the death was surrounded by faith.

We are afraid of death these days. I think this pandemic we’ve passed through in some ways testifies to this. People have been so afraid, not that they’re going to get sick but that they’re going to die. And of course early on we were told this thing was fatal, and a lot of people never got over that. They remember the early death counts and they’ve just hidden themselves because they can’t come to terms to death.

And if it’s not their own death – “I’m not afraid to die, but my wife, my children, my grandmother” – and meanwhile grandmothers and grandfathers were dying by scores and hundreds and thousands, alone in care facilities because no one was allowed to visit them, and they died of loneliness because the fear was so great.

But God’s people’s track record for 2,000 years or 6,000 years – they’ve not been afraid of death, by faith, because by faith we see beyond. We see where we’re going. We know whom we have believed. That was my mother’s verse she quoted so many times. When she was coming to her deathbed I asked her once again, just to make sure. “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I’ve committed unto him against that day.” She knew where she was going and she was not afraid to die. I’m not afraid to die.

Now, the dying part itself – I don’t like pain, so that’s a little different, but I’m not afraid of what lies beyond it. As I get older I am more and more anticipating it, mostly the dying to sin once for all. That’s going to be so great, but also the little stupid aches and pains and IRS worries and all those kinds of things.

We come back to Abraham.

By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.

We’ve talked about this in connection with Soren Kierkegaard many episodes back. Abraham had two things. He had a commandment that amounted to “Go kill your son,” which is how he would have understood it, and God didn’t correct him. But he also had a promise that through this boy the world is going to be saved. This is the boy who is the seed, who will bring the seed, and Abraham did not doubt the promise of God.

That meant, as far as Abraham could see, that he was going to have to plunge a dagger into his child’s heart. That part was not fun, and I’m sure he dreaded that, but he also saw that beyond that, if that’s where God was going to let this go, God would then immediately perform some sort of resurrection. He told the young men that went with him, “I and the lad will go yonder to worship and come again.” That wasn’t making excuses or providing a cover-up. That was him stating in faith exactly what he believed would happen. He lived his life. He made an incredible choice.

The Hebrew Christians at this point are saying, “You’re asking us to give up everything!”

“You mean like Abraham?”

“Oh, yeah, like Abraham.”

“He gave up his son. He gave up Israel, as it were. Are you willing to give up Israel? Are you willing to give up everything in the flesh in order to walk with God? You have the promises of God. They’re sure.” You give up the externals and God provides the reality, one way or another. God is able to perform resurrection, if necessary.

By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come. By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph; and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff.

Those things may not seem monumental, and yet after a fashion they are. The whole story of Isaac and Esau and Jacob would require a discussion. Fortunately we’ve done it before, and listeners who are interested in such things can go back and find it.

First of all, Isaac believed that what he said would come true, because he was speaking for God, and before he was done, what he said was correct. He said it to the right person, and in the end even for the right reason. We look at the initial blessing he gave Jacob and say, “Well, that was connived and forced.” He comes back a little later and does it all over again and gets even more specific, stronger, better, clearer. So yes, he blessed both of these boys – young men, actually. Actually, they weren’t even young men. They were about 70.

“Concerning things to come” – He has an eye on the future. He’s about to die, at least that’s what his family reckoned. He actually lives for a lot longer. But even with death staring him down, he looks beyond death to a future. His Christian life is not limited to “what I’m going to do in the next 20, 30, 40 years.” He sees beyond that into future generations of what God may do. And even though he does not understand all of his own words as he delivers the prophecies, yet he delivers them in confidence.

Jacob too blesses the sons of Joseph, leaning upon the top of his staff. He had been halting toward Zion for a long time, and even here he is leaning on his staff as he rises to worship. His feet will not bear him properly, and yet that thing that has helped him to halt and limp along now becomes the pennant for his worship and for his own prophecies and his own blessing of inheritance. He too doesn’t focus on all the things he’s done. He looks into the future at what God will accomplish, and God does a great deal through this.

By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones.

Here again Joseph had done a great many things, and it would be easy to point out any of these things as something he did by faith – rescuing Egypt, rescuing his family from famine.

Stepping out to interpret the dream, even.

Yeah, stepping up to interpret the dream of the king. And yet here the author is pleased in this collection of saints to emphasize that living by faith looked beyond their own lives. They looked into the future, and Joseph even nuanced the future by giving commandments concerning his bones. Jacob they’d taken back to Canaan and buried immediately. He says, “Don’t do that to me. Keep my bones here out in the open as a constant reminder that this is not your home and that we’re going someplace. I may be dead, but I’m going with you. As long as my bones are here, that’s going to remind you.”

I want to know whose job it was to carry the suitcase full of Joseph’s bones.

That sounds far too much like Blacklist, dumping the bones in a suitcase?! I think it probably was a coffin of some sort.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s Blacklist?

Oh, you don’t? Blacklist is a TV show, and one of the sub-plots is there’s a mysterious set of bones, and we don’t know who they belong to. The whole show spins on finding out who they belong to, and they’re constantly being moved about in a suitcase. That’s another story for another time. No, I’m not recommending Blacklist.

Again, the idea here is his life for Christ does not end with his death. He is looking beyond the present and he’s setting an example.

We’ve talked a little bit about the need for heroes. Here’s a heroic action. “It’s not all about me, but insofar as you’re inclined to remember me, good. Do this in remembrance of me. Remember my bones. They’re kind of gross and dead and dry, but carry them so that you’ll always remember that you don’t belong here, you belong there. Let my own bones, my own death, be a constant reminder to you that you’re not done yet.”

Then we come to Moses.

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not afraid of the king's commandment.

I remember when some of your students were memorizing this and coming up with hand motions to help them remember, and they always came up with, “A proper child!” picking up their pinky to drink their tea with their pinky extended, because it’s proper. What does it mean by proper? Presumably it does not mean perfect etiquette for tea with the queen.

That’s one of the interesting mysteries of scripture. We are given comments here and in Stephen’s sermon, and of course in the original text, and all of them are equally vague. “Beautiful to God…” it’s not clear. They saw something objectively in the child. Maybe the child was glowing, I don’t know, probably not. But they saw something in the baby and they said, “This child is different.”

If we knew the circumstances leading up to it, that might clue us in. Maybe it was a hard labor. Maybe they were expecting the child to be deformed. Maybe they were expecting the child to be weak and faint because of the circumstances. We don’t know, that’s the thing, but for some reason when the child came out it was healthy and strong and beautiful in such a way that it made them think of the promises of God.

They knew that Abraham had been told, “You’re coming out of Egypt in the fourth generation,” and they could count. Moses’ mother was a true daughter of Levi. If you take Levi as the first one who went down with Jacob, then Levi, then her (the daughter, Jochebed), then Moses – but if you start with Jacob then Moses is the fourth generation.

Isn’t there also tracing it through Amram?

You can go through Amram, in which case it’s a little longer.

Then it’s Levi, Levi’s son, Amram, then Moses, so there’s four there.

There’s four that way. And of course, there’s the question of how long is a generation anyway. Do we have to tie it to a specific line or is it an average number of years? Anyway, they would understand that time is running out, and most of their friends and family are not having babies, or the babies they’ve had had been killed. So there’s something there that they see that makes them think, “This is the one.” They may not have had a prophetic voice, or maybe they did. We’re not told, but somehow they understood that this child was special.

I think that they probably would have done what they did in any case, but the author is making the point here that it was more than just an ordinary mother saving an ordinary child, because that’s what ordinary mothers do. There was Messianic hope here that somehow this child was wrapped up in the hope of the world, and for that reason, not something out of maternal love but out of saving faith, they needed to make sure that this child survived, and therefore they were not afraid of the king’s commandment.

They weren’t afraid of external threats. They were not afraid of what consequences this could have for them with regard to the local bureaucracies and the red tape and the job permits and “Is the Secret Service going to be watching us from here on out?” They ignored all of that. It wasn’t that they weren’t afraid of danger, but they were not motivated by that to not do this. They were not afraid to the point where they said, “Well, the king will kill us so we just can’t do that.” They took the threat seriously and then they worked to get around it, not simply run away from it.

By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward.

Christ – recompense of reward. In the Old Testament…what? Jesus isn’t in the Old Testament. Moses didn’t know about Jesus.

He knew about Christ. He knew about the Messiah. He may not have known his name yet. He was raised in a pagan family, but with a godly nurse, his own birth mom. He had survived the worst pagan education he could receive, and came out on the other end still believing the promises of God and knowing that mom had said probably something along the lines of, “You’re it. You’re the deliverer.”

I think this would be a good point to go back and remember what exactly Jochebed did, because we miss it so much, thanks to Disney and Cecil B. DeMille. The idea we get is that she took Moses and put him in this boat and threw him on the Nile and crossed her fingers and hoped something good would happen, but to read the text accurately, especially with a little historical knowledge, she knew exactly what she was doing. She did not put the ark in the Nile. She put it in some little alcove surrounded by papyrus reeds, which crocodiles stay away from, the place that the princess used for bathing. She set this up. What she did not know is what the princess would do.

She could do the psychoanalysis – “She’s an older woman. She doesn’t have a child. There’s a great deal of pressure from her dad to come up with an heir to the throne. Society is looking at her, and of course that’s making it all worse. In addition, her own internal clock is telling her she’s running out of time. What’s going to happen? If we put a baby in front of her with no strings attached, maybe she’ll take it. Of course, the baby is circumcised. Maybe she’ll pick it up and say, “Ha!” and immediately throw him over the papyrus into the Nile and drown him.” Jochebed was not sure, but she probably had a pretty good idea what would happen, and she stationed Miriam there with the immediate offer of, “I can get you a nurse!”

This was an act of faith that this was the best action that she could perform, even though there was risk involved. If it succeeded, it was best for the child and the odds of success were high. Yet as far as we’re told, there was no divine revelation that said, “Do this.” She acted in faith. She trusted that “God has brought me to a point where, although I have no divine command, I have an incredible opportunity that could bless the world,” just like Esther, just like Nehemiah, and she took it.

I don’t know how many moms would do that with their babies. The temptation is to say, “No, I’m not letting go of my baby. I will hold my baby. I will run with my baby. I will keep my baby safe. My baby belongs with me.” Had she done that, even if she had succeeded, she’d be off in the wilderness someplace living in some caravan somehow, and Moses would not be a thing.

She acted in faith, just like Abraham, who was willing to give up his son. She was willing to give hers up, and she did give him up in a very real fashion. She was no longer mom. She was “the nurse.” Presumably at some point she explained what was going on, but initially she’d have to be very careful about that, because even Pharaoh’s daughter doesn’t know she’s the mom. That would have come along later when the child was older and capable of discretion.

Again we have this thing where faith leads a woman to do something. Yes, she has all kinds of promptings and suggestions, but no clear command from God to take a chance, as this world reckons chance, and to trust the goodness of God and to see, “This is an obvious way that God could fulfill this. He could use me. He could use my baby, and I will not be cowed down through fear. I will take this step of faith.”

And so with Moses. He refuses to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. This seems to be undoing it all. Jochebed had got him there. He’s the son of Pharoah’s daughter, which means he’s next in line to the throne. He can be the next Pharaoh. Think of the power you could have as emperor of the world. You can free the Hebrews. You can fund them. You can send an army to protect them.

“Hey, the army can go through and smash Palestine so they don’t even have to fight. Wouldn’t that be great? All you have to do is claim to be the Son of the Divine Sun and embrace polytheism. But, you know, what’s a little of that? You can always repent later.”

“All the kingdoms of the earth would be yours.”

Yeah, and the glory thereof. And yet when he realizes these are the options, he rejects his role. He apparently reveals that he’s an adopted son, and at some point word must get out that he’s a Hebrew. He gives up the throne, and the throne passes to another family, which at first glance seems disastrous because that other family is hostile to the Hebrews, and the persecutions increase.

Moses identifies himself with God’s people and takes their affliction and their suffering for the sake of Christ, for the sake of Messiah, for the sake of the promise. He had respect unto the recompence of the Lord, the righteousness which is by faith, with all that goes with it.

By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king.

See? Like his parents, he didn’t fear the king’s wrath.

For he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.

“Here we are. We’re not really – wait, we were going in and we were going to have our guy on the throne, and now he’s not only refused the throne, he’s running away from it all. That’s not the way this was supposed to play out.”

Faith often leads us to do not what we thought we were going to do. Sometimes we don’t play the odds, because the odds are inherently sinful. They require a disobedience, and sometimes it is right to flee persecution, as Moses did. He offered himself as a deliverer to God’s people, and they wanted none of him. “Who made you a judge and deliverer to us?”

“Are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian?”

Yeah, so when that got about and he realized that was the general attitude, he fled, again not knowing exactly what God had in mind, and he wouldn’t know for another 40 years. He’d go out and keep sheep on the back side of the desert until God finally came and spoke to him at the burning bush, but he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.

Although he didn’t know the plan – God hadn’t laid out the playbook – he saw God by faith. He endured with trust in God.

Through faith he kept the Passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them. By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land.

Now we get to some miraculous things.

Which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.

Faith on occasion has wrought miracles. God has used it to accomplish miracles, and if Moses hadn’t believed the promise of God, these things would not have happened.

Again, referring to the overall context, Jerusalem and Judea and Judaism had become a new Egypt. It was time for God’s people to get out of Egypt, a scene that shows up in Matthew’s gospel and also in the book of Revelation, the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, as the very city they need to flee from. God will make walls fall down before you as you set out on your journey away from that.

By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.

Received – that is, she protected them, which means she lied to the guards. She committed treason. She sided with God’s people. She switched sides in the middle of a war. These are all things that we don’t normally recommend to people to do. People like that usually go down as Benedict Arnolds or Quislings or something, but God commends her, and she has a marvelous testimony. Until Hannah, of all the females in scripture, she has more face time or screen time than anyone else.

She’s given a long passage to explain her understanding of what God’s doing, of God’s total sovereignty in heaven and earth, and how all the nations were just absolutely afraid of this God and they were ready for utter destruction, and she wants to switch sides.

The spies were sent to spy out the land, but what they did was talk to one woman and they come back with her testimony and say, “We’ve got it. We don’t need any more. This is enough.” She’s a Gentile. You want to be like a Gentile prostitute? Here’s one you can be like.

And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:

They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) They wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:

That’s where we started – the elders obtained a good report. Justification by faith. It wasn’t their actions as such, but their actions evidenced the faith that they had, and were a testimony before the world and to God that their faith was real.

We spent some time a couple episodes back talking about justification in James, where we are told that Rahab was justified by her works when she hid the spies and sent them out, and Abraham was justified by his works when he offered up Isaac, and justified before the world, a testimony to his saving faith, which made him righteous with God.

It’s God who puts the stamp of approval. It’s God who seals it and says, “Yeah, you’re righteous. You have the righteousness of my Son.”

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

Whoa! Can we just stop there and be like this grand story, this list of subduing kingdoms, stopping the mouths of lions, all these grand things – they without us should not be made perfect.

God wasn’t done with them. That can mean two different things. When they were done, God was not done. That wasn’t it. Again, the whole “Bible times, Bible stories, Bible people” mentality tends to see that as a closed-off world, where all those things happened and all of that’s finished and they lived happily ever after, but what the writer is saying here is they were just the beginning. They cut the way. They plowed the field. But God would not finish the story until we came along. We’re part of the same story.

Although many of the things that happened to them were very marvelous as the world reckons such things, they didn’t bring the world to Christ. They survived. The kept the promise alive and going.

There’s a place in the story for us.

There’s not only a place, but in some ways a more important place, because we have the ability to bring the gospel to the world, to begin from the seed they planted and to begin to bear tremendous fruit.

So whereas we may not be bringing floods upon the earth, or walking from time into eternity, or stopping the mouths of lions, God does have things for us yet to do, and some of those things might be enduring trials of cruel mocking and scourging, imprisonment, stoning, being sawn asunder, wandering in the wilderness.

There are many, many Christian saints in the last 2,000 years who have had to endure these sorts of things, and we cannot write that off and say, “Well, too bad for them. I don’t know why they made such a big deal of their faith. Didn’t they know they just had to be nice to their families, work hard at their job, and go to church?” No. There’s more to it than that, and it can be very challenging.

“Are you saying you have to do all these things to be saved?”

No, we’re saying that the faith that saves will motivate you to do things like this. As the readers of this book would understand, it’s things that your world, your family, your friends, your church may not understand at all.

“What’s this about starting a Christian school?” – think 1950s. “What’s this about homeschooling your children?” – think 1990s. “Nobody does that. That’s weird. Are you some kind of cult member or something? You people out there with these signs in front of this ‘woman’s choice clinic,’ what’s that about? Surely the Bible doesn’t require any such thing. How about those rescue missions? Those are kind of grimy scummy people. I’m glad the Bible doesn’t require me to do anything like that. Missionaries to the ends of the earth? I’m sure somebody’s supposed to go someplace. I’m glad it’s not me. I’m content with my family life and going to church on Sundays.” In the process, we miss a great deal.

Again, some of these things, like having sex with your husband, that doesn’t seem like such a big challenge, although to Sarah it was, but some of these other things were quite huge. Some were small but they made choices, and they did make choices. Calvinists do believe that man has a will and that man chooses things, thank you very much.

We do indeed.

Often we choose the bad things or the insufficient things for stupid reasons like, “Well, God’s got it covered. Jesus did it all.” Your husband, David, was asking earlier, “Did all what?” Things with regard to our redemption, he most certainly did. We do not have to add to that, but that’s a nice cover for saying, “Oh, you mean there’s absolutely nothing I have to do with regard to my walk with God? Because Jesus died for me, because I’ve trusted in him, my relationship with God is set. Yes, maybe there’s this chastening thing, maybe not, depending on what you hear in church, but the rest is just ordinary living. My soul is saved. I’m going to heaven. I’m a child of God. I’m righteous by faith. The rest is just ordinary being a nice person and loving your neighbor. God’s not challenging me to do anything or requiring me to do anything. That would be presumptuous. That would be trying to take the place of Christ, who has done it all.”

He hasn’t done the good works that he ordained for you to do.

That’s exactly it. Sometimes those good works are blasé and yet difficult, like doing the dishes every night, doing the dirty diapers every day. These can be hard challenging things, especially if you’re in the midst of postpartum depression.

Leaving one job for another, leaving one side of the country for another, starting a Christian school, becoming a missionary, having that last child when your finances are already strained and you already have a lot of mouths to feed, crossing the tracks and making a friend with that person who does not look like you and does not think like you and does not talk like you – there are a lot of challenges in this world that we can take up.

The wonderful thing about life is that life finds a way (from Jurassic Park). That’s in an evolutionary context, but it’s true that true life does. Life by definition is not dead. Life keeps moving and going. Go out and look at a sidewalk. Look at the cracks. Where did those seeds come from? Why right there? Especially if the sidewalk is part of your territory and you’re trying to kill them all.

We have a sidewalk in front of our house, and every two or three months I’m going out there with poison trying to kill those things. Where are they coming from? How did they get there? And why won’t the poison take them out once and for all? Why doesn’t it just turn the ground barren? But life keeps returning – new directions, new kinds, different sorts of weeds. If it’s true with weeds, isn’t it true with a life that’s in Christ? Doesn’t he keep growing us?

And the beauty of it. There’s a beauty too, that it’s not like this pressure of “I have to do this because God will judge me if I don’t.” We’re set free to do this and that’s what we want to do when we’re in Christ, when we’re united to Christ. That’s where our heart’s desire is, and we falter but that’s who we are now.

I think we could do an entire program just on that, the aesthetics of life. Are we content with the mundane, the gray, the ordinary, if we actually are experiencing the resurrection life that’s in Christ? Or does it not move us, as it moved these saints, to do weird, spectacular, funny, and beautiful things? And is that legalism? No, it’s not legalism, it’s being alive.

Set your 3-year-old loose in a park and see what happens, or in the backyard, or with a new puppy. He doesn’t just sit there and say, “I have a puppy.”

The Christian life really elevates those mundane things.

Yes, that’s exactly it. It takes these things and transforms them, because now they’re all for Jesus’ sake and they do all have a purpose, both with regard to us and our own sanctification and to the world around us.

I know we’re running out of time, but I want to look at the next chapter just briefly.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses…

Not witnesses of what we have done, but witnesses to what God has done, to his faithfulness.

…let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us…

The weight and the sin are not the same thing. Weights are those things that distract us and get in the way, which might be good and fine in themselves, but are a problem for us. Sin is what sin is.

…and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

The vision you have of the future will dominate your actions in this life. If faith is the hope that looks to our final salvation that Christ will accomplish on his return, and everything that will go into that, including all the millions and billions of people who will be saved to be our brothers and sisters forever and ever, then faith should be moving us to do more than sit on our thumbs and read the newspaper and go to work. There should be more there someplace.

Now, it’s not for us to tell one another what that is, although sometimes you can think of Farel and Calvin. What if Farel said, “You know, there’s no law that says you have to stay in Geneva. I don’t want to be legalistic about it, so I guess you can go wherever you want, John,” rather than, “God blast your studies if you desert Christ’s church in its hour of need.”

“Okay, I’m staying!”

The world would have been very different. Sometimes faith is of that sort. We can’t dictate to one another, but we can challenge, we can admonish, we can call, we can encourage, and we can hope that the thing we do may accomplish something, and it may not be the thing we think it’s going to accomplish. It may seem to spin out and die real fast, but the echoes, the waves, the ringlets may go on forever and ever.

Amen. Shall we close with some recommendations?

You already made yours. You got another one?

I’d have to think of another one. Do you have one?

Yeah. Along these lines of influencing the future, I’m going to recommend an older book. It’s older now, called The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray – not so much for its theological value. I think its thesis could be challenged. I’m still not sure to what degree I accept it, but the fact is it had a tremendous influence and that’s the point here.

The Puritans and the generation that wrote other books a little bit later came to believe that God had a plan for ethnic Israel, that God would one day restore Israel to the church, not as a separate people, certainly not with a rebuilt temple or anything like that, but that he, having broken off these fruitless branches, would graft them back into his olive tree, and that in doing so he would bless the world.

That was the one thing they could look into scripture and say, “This hasn’t happened yet, so we’re not done. The story’s not over. All these promises about God blessing the world, it’s not over because Israel isn’t back yet. It doesn’t look like it’s over anyway, but now we have a sure marker so let’s get out there and get busy.”

The Puritan Hope chronicles the early missionaries who were moved by this sort of hope, who were what we would call today post-millennialists. The point here is not a particular interpretation of Revelation 20. The point is that they believed that God had a plan to bless all the nations, and that therefore missionary activity was not only a mandate and a priority, but it also had to take on a particular form.

Missionaries went out not just to win their immediate contacts, but to plant the seeds of long-term institutions that would go on ministering into the future, because they did not know how long they had, and they had to assume that they might have many, many generations of fruitfulness, so they planned like that.

Anyway, I think it’s an encouraging book, whether or not you agree with all of his exegesis or not. I think still historically understanding how theology alters history, there’s a lot to be learned from it.

Excellent. I’ll just double down on Gentle and Lowly and we’ll have a Puritan-heavy recommendation section for today.

Thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciate you diving into the Bible with me. Thanks also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Thanks to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. There are lots of thanks to go around.

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