Hebrews 11:3 – Understanding Origins by Faith

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church of Manhattan, KS, 14 July 2019

Intro: Origins is a matter of faith.

• No scientist has ever observed where life came from, or where matter came from, or where energy came from. That is a matter of the unobservable past and no science experiment can ever prove what happened in the past. (You can prove that something could not have happened in certain circumstances, and you can prove that a theory you have seems to match the neces­sary conditions for having happened, but that is different from proving that it did happen.)

• In fact, it is a matter of faith to know anything. You may think that you are a rational person, but every fact you believe is based on trusting at least a few things to be true that you have not – and even can not – prove.

  • For instance, when a scientist does a laboratory test, he or she always starts with a priori assumptions such as:

    • the belief that what their eyes see and their fingers feel are accurate ways to perceive,

    • the belief that there are no additional factors which cannot be discerned in some way by their 5 senses.

    • Add to that the paradigms of thinking passed down to them by their families and teachers which are intuitively trusted,

    • and then the trust reposed in other people from whom the laboratory tools and experimental elements were purchased.

    • That’s a lot of assumptions and blind faith!

• As we approach the topic of origins, it might be a bit challenging because there are Christians with fierce loyalties to different views on origins. But just because it is controversial doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at scripture about it together.

• In fact, we must do so because the matter of origins is important. Where you believe you came from will affect everything you think and do.

  • If you believe that your existence is merely by random chance and that there is nothing spiritually different between you and a slug, you will either:

    • worship yourself (and perhaps the slug) because you believe that nothing in the uni­verse exists that is greater than you – and therefore you must take up the mantle of godhood and create your own meaning in life,

    • or you will despise yourself (and the slug) because you believe that your life is meaningless and that death would be just as good as life.

  • “The biblical doctrine of creation is such that it excludes, on the one hand, dualism, and, on the other, pantheism: dualism, because the self-existent God is the sole source and principle of all existence; and pantheism, because God, though infinite and omnipresent, is absolutely other than and above his creation… It is precisely in his sovereign otherness that he who fills all in all [Eph 1] is Creator (else the very idea of creation would be an absurdity), and that he who makes and redeems also judges and destroys.” ~P. E. Hughes

• Remember from verse 1 that “faith is the understanding of things being hoped for; it is the making of a case concerning matters which are not being seen.” (NAW)

• Hebrews 11 now starts back at the beginning of the Bible, at Genesis 1, and proceeds through the book of Genesis. It is important that we start at the beginning. Too often we start with the birth or death of Jesus, but

  • there is a reason why the first page of the Bible starts with God’s creation of the world,

  • there’s a reason why the Apostle Paul started with God making the world, in his sermon to the Athenian philosophers (Acts 17),

  • and there’s a reason why Hebrews’ treatise on faith starts with the same event.

• And here is our text: Hebrews 10:3 By means of faith we figure out that the worlds have been fixed up by the word of God such that it was not out of visible things that what is seen came into being.

  • I want to point out 3 truths in this verse and apply it in 4 ways. The 3 truths are:

1. Faith encourages us to figure things out about our world and understand them.

2. Faith informs us that God made the world and therefore is the ultimate authority.

3. The world we see now did not visibly exist before God created it.

A. Verse 3 begins with an affirmation that faith empowers us to use our minds to “reason out” things – to “understand/figure out” things.

• Unlike Humanism, which always turns into totalitarianism and eventually requires everyone to follow what the men in power dictate, Biblical Faith is an engine of thinking. “By faith we understand/figure out...”

• This use of our mind to “figure out” and “understand” begins with submission to God as the starting point of our knowledge:

  • “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge...” (Prov. 1:7, NKJV)

  • This epistemological submission to God, rather than being a bottleneck (as many would expect), instead is a launching-pad for all kinds of derivative knowledge.

  • Indeed, Biblical Christianity was the engine of the scientific revolution, as Christians left the restrictions of human authority and ran with the freedom of God’s authority.

  • I like the way Dr. Cal Beisner put it in an apologetics lecture he gave a couple of years ago, “[T]aking the Bible as axiomatic yields a great deal of knowledge. And coupling that knowledge with opinion that we gain by other means [such as reason and scientific observation], taking the Bible as axiomatic yields also a great deal of highly defensible opinion about such things as history, chemistry, astronomy, economics, art, & music.”¹

• Knowledge of any truth as absolutely-true is a matter of faith. The only way a Christian can know something to be absolutely true is for God to reveal it to us. Biblical Christianity recognizes that God has revealed absolute truth to us in the Bible. We don’t have to first prove the Bible by some other means, because divine revelation is a valid way to get truth directly (indeed, it is the only valid way)².

  • Now, anyone who hates God has a hard time accepting God’s Word as the starting point of all absolute truth; they would rather insist that absolute truth can’t exist and insist that you prove God’s Word using whatever inferior standard of truth they use instead.

    • Maybe they’ll say that the creation account of the Bible is based on some older pagan mythology like Gilgamesh and therefore is neither original nor true.

    • Usually, they are starting with the unproven assumption that God can’t exist, therefore Christianity can’t be right and absolute truth can’t exist. Their problem goes much deeper than mere ignorance; it is actually rebellion against God, so giving them rational proofs won’t fix that problem.

  • To be sure, the logical integrity of the Bible can be rationally demonstrated, and the cor­respondence of the Bible to what is physically observable can be scientifically demon­strated, but these things are not what make the Bible absolutely true; such “proofs” are merely the ramifications of it being true in the first place.

  • The knowledge that it is true comes by faith in God who revealed the Bible.³

B) And it is by means of Godly faith that we put it together that the universe (literally “the worlds” – including the world we live in now and the world to come⁴) were fixed up/framed/prepared/formed/created by the spoken (rhema) word of God.

• This raises the classic issue of historiography. How can we know what is true about what happened in the past if we were not there to observe it ourselves?

  • We discover the events of history primarily through witnesses who were there at the time to observe and write about them.

  • But we also recognize that human witnesses to the past

a) didn’t know everything about what they bore witness to and

b) they allowed their personal biases to skew what they did report.

(For instance, in the 8^th century BC, the Syrian army under Ben Hadad laid siege to the Israelite city of Samaria. Those Syrian soldiers reported that, on the last night of the siege, they heard the sound of a huge army with chariots and horses approaching them. 2 Kings 7 explains that the noises they heard were actually caused by God to frighten them away, but the Syrians didn’t know that. Because of their biases, they concluded that the Israelites had gotten the Hittite and Egyptian armies to come out and defend them, so the Syrians fled to their homes, even though there was no army chasing them.⁵ They didn’t know everything about what they bore witness to, and they would also have been biased in what they reported. A hundred years later, when almost the same thing happened to the Assyrian king Sennacherib, he didn’t admit defeat, rather, he boasted that he had “shut [King Hezekiah] up like a caged bird… in his royal city.” That biased report is what archaeologists found in his court records!⁶

• Because of these problems, a good historian will try to sift through the journals of different people who were eye-witnesses and try to identify whose perspective is the least biased and who understood the most about what happened, and rely more on those witnesses to reconstruct the history of that event.

• Now, when it comes to reliable witnesses and written records, no one knows more about history than the God who created and orchestrated all things in history, and no one is more unbiased than God, who stands outside all of mankind’s controversies. God’s testimony therefore, is of ultimate value historically.

  • And God’s history of how the universe came into existence is that He spoke and it was created/fixed up/framed/prepared/formed.

  • Notice that, here in Hebrews 11, the history of Genesis One is put right next to the history of the rest of the book of Genesis. Creation is not treated as though it were a non-historical event; it is treated right along with the historical events of the murder of Abel, the walking with God of Enoch, and the ark of Noah.

• Now, in contrast with God’s account of creation, what were the other prevailing views of origins at the time? According to 19^th century Scottish seminary professor John Brown, “The opinions of the ancient philosophers may be reduced to two. They either thought that the world had existed from eternity, or that its material were eternal, which the Divinity at some very remote period had put into order.”

  • The view of modern scientists that matter and energy have always existed is nothing new.

  • However, decay is so hardwired into the universe that it is just as ludicrous and un­scientific for modern scientists to assert that matter and energy were not created as it was back when the ancient pagan philosophers imagined it.

• A related theory is that God did not create matter and energy, but it was just there, and He organized that matter and energy into the world we see today. This view finds partial support in Hebrews 11:3 because it uses the Greek verb katartizw to describe God creating the world, and this Greek verb can mean “to organize pre-existing things into an orderly system.”

  • The problem with the theory that chaotic matter and energy existed before God created the world is the second half of v.3, which says literally, “it was not out of visible things that what is seen came into being.”

  • Furthermore, the verb katartizw can mean “create,”⁷and the rest of God’s testimony in scripture bears that out:

• God has given us many other statements throughout scripture which describe His creation of the world:

  • Genesis 1 “and God said let there be… and there was...”

  • Exodus 20:11 “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day...” (NKJV)

  • Psalm 33:6-9 “It was through Yahweh’s word that the heavens were made – and all their host – through the breath of His mouth, gathering the waters of the sea like a heap, put­ting the ocean-depths into treasuries. Let all the earth be respectful of Yahweh! Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him! For He is [the one who] spoke and it began to exist; He is [the one who] commanded and it stood.” (NAW)

  • Isaiah 45:18 “For thus says Yahweh: He is the God, Creator [בּוֹרֵ֙א/ ποιήσας] of the heavens. He is the God, form-er [καταδείξας/‎יֹצֵ֙ר] of the earth and maker [עֹשָׂהּ] of it. He Himself established [כֽוֹנְנָ֔/διώρισεν] it. It was not aimless; He created it; He formed it to be inhabited. 'I am Yahweh, and there is not another.'" (NAW, cf. 40:26ff, 42:5)

  • Acts 14:15 "...turn from these useless [idols] to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them..." (NKJV)

  • Romans 1:20 "For since the creation [κτίσεως] of the world [κόσμου] His invisible attributes [ἀόρατα] are clearly seen [καθορᾶται], being understood [νοούμενα] by the things that are made [ποιήμασιν], even His eternal power and Godhead..." (NKJV)⁸

  • 2 Corinthians 4:6 “For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ... ” (NKJV)

  • Hebrews 1:2 “...He has spoken to us through His Son, through whom also He made the worlds.” (NAW)

  • Revelation 10:6 "...Him who lives forever and ever, who created [ktizw] heaven and the things that are in it, the earth and the things that are in it, and the sea and the things that are in it..." (NKJV)

• How can we know where the universe came from? Only faith can lead us to the truth of the matter. Only God can reveal that information.

  • I like the way John Brown put it in his commentary on Heb. 11:3, “Rational as the doct­rine [of creation] is, I apprehend no man ever held it who did not owe it to revelation.”

  • There are lots of theories out there on origins, but for any one to be considered true, it must be stated axiomatically by the Bible (or necessarily derived logically from what the Bible says).

C) Finally, our author makes the point at the end of v.3 that by faith we figure out that “it is not out of φαινομένων/visible things that what is seen came into being.”

• Matter and energy are not eternal; they did not create themselves. The Eternal God made matter and energy. He did not taken pre-existing matter to form it into our universe; He created it, to borrow an apocryphal phrase, ex nihilo⁹ – out of nothing.

• That phrase shows up later in a Christian creed from the year 1215 AD, “We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God… who by his almighty power brought every creature into being from nothing...” But Dr. Phillip Hughes, in his commentary on Hebrews explains that “its history as a doctrine goes back to the earliest times.”

• The end of verse 3 gets translated a few different ways – basically because there are three different words that translators can connect the negative to:

  1. “...what is seen did not come into being out of phenomena.”¹⁰

  2. “...what is seen came into being out of what is not phenomena.”¹¹

  3. “...it was not out of phenomena that what is seen came into being.”¹²

• But any way you cut it, it is denying that God used any kind of pre-existing visible phenomena to make the universe we see today.

• The visible phenomena of what we see in the world are not eternal; God brought them into being by speaking words.

• Humans were not made out of pre-human apes.

• Bacteria were not made out of pre-existing pond scum on the backs of crystals.

• Plants did not come from random associations of carbon and hydrogen, and

• our Milky Way galaxy did not come from a dense ball of matter smaller than a pinhead.

• Scientists might say these things are so, but they have never offered adequate proof, and moreover, the authoritative word of God says these things are not so. All these pheno­mena “came out of what is not visible.”

• If it was not out of visible things that God made the visible world, what did God make it of?

• First, I think it is useful to rule out bad ideas about what God made it out of. E.J. Young, whom I came to respect as I read through his commentaries on Isaiah, criticized the notion that it was chaos that God made order out of. In a 1961 article in the Westminster Theologi­cal Journal entitled, “The Interpretation of Genesis 1:2,” he wrote, “To determine the sig­nificance of [the words translated “formless and void”] in Genesis 1:2 is not particularly difficult. In Isaiah 45:18, it is used as a contrast to the phrase ‘to be inhabited.’ According to this verse, God did not create the earth for desolation, but rather to be inhabited… All too often, the word ‘chaos’ is applied to this condition... as though to suggest that the con­dition described in Genesis 1:2 was somehow out of God’s control. All was well-ordered and precisely as God desired it to be. There was no reason, so far as one can tell from reading the first chapter of Genesis, why God might not have pronounced the judgment, “very good,” over the condition described in the second verse…. Genesis 1:2 presents the first stage in the preparation of the earth for man. It stands out in remarkable contrast with the finished universe, as that is found in the thirty-first verse of the same chapter.”

• Another Old Testament scholar that I have come to respect through reading his commen­taries on Isaiah is Franz Delitzsch, who offered what I think is a reasonable explanation for what God did make the universe out of: “[T]he things which do not appear are speci­fically the ideas or prototypes of the cosmic creation as they exist in the mind of God… [T]he divine plan or idea of the universe that is to be, preceded the realization of the uni­verse as it is… [so that there is] a world of ideas as well as a world of actualities having the divine Logos for its centre and point of union… [I]t is faith, faith only, resting on the revealed creative word, which penetrates through the veil of phenomena to the divine super-sensual ground behind it.”

• So Faith encourages us to figure things out about our world and understand them.
  Faith informs us that God made the world and therefore is the ultimate authority.
  And faith fights against materialism and for the glory of God in believing that this world came into existence only at the command of God.

• Now, I realize that there were a lot of esoteric philosophical ideas in this material, and I apologize if I got too technical, but I want to close with four simple, practical applications based on Hebrews 11:3.

Application

1. We must believe God’s word to be true.

• “Revelation inevitably involves, on the part of the recipient, the activity of the intellective faculty: by faith we understand. The origination of all things by the creative word of God is a truth that can be known to us only through revelation, and accordingly its disclosure demands the response of faith.” ~P.E. Hughes, Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews

• In lay terms, if God tells you something, you’d better believe it! Use your brain and trust God’s word!

• Do you accept that what God has revealed in Holy Scripture to be absolutely true? Trust in God’s word is the cornerstone upon which all knowledge and science can stand securely.

2. Don’t compromise faith in God’s word.

• Many people in Christian traditions try to put other ways of obtaining knowledge above – or on-a-level with – the Bible.

  • This results in changing the Bible to fit unBiblical theories about Creation – and not just Creation but other historical events like the Exodus from Egypt (where Egyptologists try to start with Egyptian king lists instead of the Bible to establish chronologies, and get all tangled up).

  • This invariably results in viewing the Bible’s historical accounts with skepticism, assuming that they are some sort of make-believe, geschisthe-history¹³. It results in assuming that the Bible stories are not accurate unless they corroborate with some other historical account that came from man instead of God.

• You may struggle with that. Doesn’t every credible scientist affirm that the earth is millions of years old and that evolution is the origin of all the species today? Doesn’t that prove our traditional understanding of the Bible wrong?

  • No, there are plenty of PhD’s and MD’s and ThD’s who see no conflict between the traditional understanding of the Bible and the world around us!¹⁴

  • No one has ever been able to demonstrate scientifically how all of life could have evolved from inorganic material. After two hundred years of trying to come up with an explanation that has scientific integrity, every long-age and evolutionary theory is still full of unproven speculations and assumptions.

  • On the other hand, all of the geographic features of our planet which are used to prove long ages of time can easily be explained in terms of the catastrophic water action of Noah’s flood.

• The results of compromise on the foundation of trust in what God has revealed in the Bible are far-reaching.

  • For instance, if you do not believe that God created the world, you will be weak in your belief that God has any power to judge this world or to re-create this world. If He couldn’t (or didn’t) make everything, what right or interest would He have in judging or renewing it?

  • And if you don’t believe that God created the world in six days (as Genesis 1, Exodus 20, and Exodus 31 affirm) you will end up denying God’s revelation that death is the result of sin, for all long-age theories of origins require millions of years of death and suffering before Adam & Eve disobeyed God. Long ages of evolution require death as the way to improve life – apart from God, but the Bible says in 1 Cor. 15:26 that death is our “enemy”!

  • Do you see how great the theological ramifications are? What you believe about origins is critically important to what you believe about death, sin, suffering, salvation, judg­ment, and the new earth, so don’t compromise on what the Bible says about creation!

3. Do not fear!

• If God spoke everything in the world into existence, then He is bigger and more powerful than anything in the world. That means that if we are right with Him (through trusting Jesus to make us right with Him), then there is nothing left to be afraid of. Everything and everyone in this world is subservient to God and will end up doing His will.

• Romans 8:37-39 “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created [κτίσις] thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (NKJV)

• Anxiety is a faith-problem. As we trust this all-powerful God, our faith will displace fear and anxiety. If, “by faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God,” we can live lives of peace in the present and in the future, and we can throw anxiety out the window!

4. Faith in God as Creator leads us back to worship Him.

• Psalm 95:5-6 "The sea is His, for He made it; And His hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker." (NKJV)
  When we recognize God as our Maker, it makes us want to worship Him!

• Psalm 136:3-9 “Oh, give thanks to the Lord of lords! For His mercy endures forever: To Him who alone does great wonders... who by wisdom made the heavens... who laid out the earth above the waters... who made great lights... The sun to rule by day... The moon and stars to rule by night, For His mercy endures forever...” (NKJV)

• Revelation 4:11 "You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power; [WHY?] For You created [ἔκτισας] all things, And by Your will they exist and were created." (NKJV) Because Jesus is our creator, He is worthy of our worship.

• Calvin commented: “Now the faithful, to whom he has given eyes, see sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing.”

• Do you see “sparks of [God’s] glory... glittering in every created thing”? So often I find myself praising God when I feel warm sunlight on my face or when I smell a cedar or fir tree, or when I see my beautiful children playing happily. There are so many occasions this world offers to praise God!

• Calvin continued, “The world was no doubt made, that it might be the theater of the divine glory… [T]hey who have faith do not entertain a slight opinion as to God being the Creator of the world, but they have a deep conviction fixed in their minds and behold the true God. And further, they understand the power of his word, not only as manifested instantaneously in creating the world, but also as put forth continually in its preservation; nor is it his power only that they understand, but also his goodness, and wisdom, and justice. And hence they are led to worship, love, and honor him.”

APPENDIX: Side-by-side Greek Text & English Versions of Heb. 11:1-3

The Greek is the Majority text, edited by myself to follow the majority of the earliest-known manuscripts only when the early manuscript evidence is practically unanimous. My original document includes notes on the NKJV, NASB, NIV, & ESV English translations, but since they are all copyrighted, I cannot include them in my online document. Underlined words in English versions indicate a standalone difference from all other English translations of a certain word. Strikeout usually indicates that the English translation is, in my opinion, too far outside the range of meaning of the original Greek word. The addition of an X indicates a Greek word left untranslated – or a plural Greek word translated as an English singular. [Brackets] indicate words added in English not in the Greek. Key words are colored consistently across the chart to show correlations.

A Although used nowhere else in the NT, there are 31 occurrences in the OT of this root, almost all of which are translated “reproof” (although a couple in Job are translated “argument”).

B The majority of Greek manuscripts read plural “things seen” (τὰ βλεπόμενα), and the traditional editions of the Greek NT (Textus Receptus, Patriarchal, and Contemporary Greek Orthodox) follow the majority, as did the Syriac and Vulgate, and King James English versions (and, surprisingly, the NASB and ESV). However, all four of the Greek manuscripts from the first millennium read singular (“what was visible” = NIV). The plural appears to be a style change that began in the 900’s AD, but means the same thing.