Hebrews 11: 20-22: “It was by faith that Isaac promised blessings for the future to his sons, Jacob and Esau. It was by faith that Jacob, when he was old and dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons and bowed in worship as he leaned on his staff.”
It’s much easier to believe that God exists than that he’s good.
It’s much easier to have faith that he’s here than that he’s here for us.
Yes, we know that the heavens declare the glory of God, but what do the things that happen to us declare? Do they suggest the same brilliance about God the stars do?
I have a friend who, in one year, lost her mother to a sudden aneurysm and her 36 year old sister to cancer.
It was tough to imagine God appointing both her mother and sister to die in the same year.
Why did he have to pencil both in the same calendar year?
And while we were trying to cope with that, Kate found out that she, herself, had breast cancer. At 34. She is the most wonderful mother to two young children.
So again, the heavens declare the glory of God, but as we prayed for her, for them, what was all that saying about him?
Our theology might say, “It’s this broken world,” but underneath the hood, we see God behind everything because somehow he is. He appoints man once to die, right?
That’s why we feel so stale when we hear, “the heavens declare the glory of God.”
We question God because of what life, and not heaven or theology, seems to declare about him, and all the verses about streams, rivers, and stars showing God’s brilliance mean nothing to us when a young mother is diagnosed with cancer.
That’s the trouble. We have faith in the reality of God, but not faith in the best about God.
We all struggle like this, and if you don’t, good for you, because you probably belong in Hebrews 11.
We know Hebrews 11 is the faith chapter, but if faith is the secret sauce of the Hebrews 11 saints, then it’s not something that billions of other Christians haven’t had over time. Christians all have faith in God.
So there’s something different about the faith here.
And it’s this — the saints of Hebrews 11 had an unshakable belief in the best about God. The faith that God is here, and that he has the best for us because he is the most for us.
When God told Abraham to leave his country and start a new one somewhere awful, Abraham didn’t just obey for the sake of obedience.
Instead, he “was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations” because he felt certain that, however dismal the new land, it somehow offered proof of a better one ahead.
When God told Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Abraham didn’t say, “I have faith in you, God.”
He had faith in the best about God and thus, “Abraham reasoned that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again.”
Go through, verse by verse, and you’ll see that when the saints of Hebrews 11 were tempted by life (and sometimes, it appears, God himself) to believe the worst about God, they chose instead to believe the best about him.
It’s not their faith in God that set them apart. It was their faith in the best about God.
Further, they weren’t driven by some dutiful obligation to obey a command that they didn’t understand.
That’s often the way we think of faith.
Instead, they obeyed a command they didn’t understand because they understood God.
God was good, so the plan was good.
Hebrews 11, after all, is the “Faith Chapter” and not “The Dutiful Obligation to Obey Chapter.”
And so faith in God’s goodness started the dominos, and isn’t it interesting that faith is defined at the outset as the “substance of things hoped for?”
Hope is a belief in goodness. It is not a pessimistic or even neutral word. So if hope undergirds faith, then faith has to be confidence in God’s goodness.
And if you believe the best about God – if that’s your faith – then everything else falls in line and you’ll obey.
Too often, we obey God because we truly believe he’s there, and we truly believe he’s commanded us to do something.
But that’s obedience from a faith in his existence and his Lordship.
Obedience from obligation. That’s us.
And there’s nothing more painful than painful obedience, and it won’t last long because we weren’t made for it.
Now, right in the middle of the chapter, we come to the strangest set of verses, and you can see how odd they are by thinking of a cliched IQ test.
“Which one of these doesn’t belong? A car, a train, an airplane, or a refrigerator thermometer.”
Well, on the face of it, verses 20-22 are the refrigerator thermometer of Hebrews 11. They just don’t seem to belong there.
The chapter starts off with the giant dramas every writer tries to tell – they’re believable enough to think we could face them, but too unbearable to imagine facing.
You know — Noah, Abraham, Abraham, and Abraham. There’s a lot of crazy stuff there.
Building giant boats, getting pregnant at 80 years old, potentially sacrificing your son (gulp).
But suddenly, the author switches gears from floods, miraculous conceptions and potential murder to…deathbed blessings.
“It was by faith that Isaac promised blessings for the future to his sons, Jacob and Esau.”
“It was by faith that Jacob, when he was old and dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons and bowed in worship as he leaned on his staff.”
Stop the presses.
Some elderly folks passed from natural causes and blessed their children.
Why does this belong next to Moses, the Passover, and Rahab?
These were just a couple of patriarchs, ready to die like billions of other have.
But being the faith chapter, this has something to do with faith. And with what we’ve just learned, faith in God’s goodness.
If you asked me, “At death, what is your faith in God’s goodness going to lead you to do?” I would say, “I’m going to have faith that God will take me to heaven.”
That seems the faith-at-death thing to do.
But Isaac and Jacob’s examples of unusual faith are very different – the patriarchs simply bless their children.
Why was that so unusual?
It could be that the situation was so rough and uncertain that it took extraordinary faith to believe things could turn out for their children. Or that they could become what God said they would.
Whatever the case – clearly, these deathbed blessings showed the saints’ great faith in God’s plan for their children, in his favor.
And I think any parent can learn something from this.
I’m a terrible pessimist.
I don’t worry about my kids because I don’t have faith in them, I worry because I don’t have faith in God’s goodness.
And why not?
Because under the brilliant stars at night, the police hunt for children who are never found.
On God’s sea, a tent city reflects where some child lives for drugs, and will soon die because of them.
And somewhere, every night, there’s a parent on a walk, looking up, praying to the heavens for their dying child on earth – and the heavens, those heavens that declare the glory of God – never seem to answer, they seem so lost in their own world of oblivious space and so removed from cancer and crying.
When you look at what could and does happen to children, it’s easy to see why deathbed blessings require great faith in God’s goodness.
You and I tend to beg the Lord for our children more than bless them.
But here’s what we need to do.
We need to believe the best about God.
We need to, like each of these patriarchs, bless our children, with all of our hearts, and believe that God will bless them with all of his.
I don’t know if these patriarchs indulged doubt and fear about their children at death. If they did, it certainly didn’t enter their blessing.
I think, instead, they put their hands on their children’s heads and felt the hair they’d kissed since they were so small they could sit on their lap – and remembered the innocence and love and protection and it all came back to them, and they looked up to heaven and said, “Oh God, bless these children. You know how much I love them. Bless them.”
In some way – in this life or the next — I know that God will honor our prayers for our children.
We may never see the blessing, we may never recognize the blessing, but it’s faith in God’s goodness that says, “even if I won’t see your blessing, I will believe it is there, or that it will find its way to my child, and somehow Lord, whenever it is, however it is, the morning light that broke when Jesus came will finally and fully shine on them.”
Perhaps, if not in this life, then the next.
Perhaps if not salvation now, then after death.
You don’t have to be a universalist to think that could happen. You just have to believe in God.
After all, Abraham had to know that everyone who dies…dies.
That’s how God had set things up. Hadn’t God even declared it?
But what did Abraham say when God asked him to offer up his precious son, Isaac?
“God will raise him from the dead.”
When had that ever happened?
What made Abraham believe it was possible?
Not what he knew of life or doctrine, but what he knew of God.
That God could do impossible things, and that he was impossibly good.
And that’s what Hebrews 11 is all about.
That is the thing about life that reigns supreme, that is the doctrine that reigns supreme, and that is the thing that will hopefully lead us to say, with faith, “Lord, I believe you will bless my children, either in this life or the next, because you are a good God.”
[Painting: Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, Luc Olivier Merson, 1879]
