33 - Heb_11:8-22
CHAPTER X X X I I I. THE PATRIARCHS.
Hebrews 11:8-22. WITH the election of Abraham commences a new period in the history of revelation. Hitherto God’s dealings had been with mankind as one family; but after the destruction of the tower of Babel, mankind was divided into languages and nations. That tower was the expression of a deep-seated apostasy, a type of the God-defying infidelity which in the last days shall rise against the Lord and His anointed. Judgment was sent, and, as we notice in all God’s dealings, judgment according to His infinite wisdom pre paring greater manifestations of redeeming love. The origin of nations, apparently coincident with the beginning of idolatry, is the occasion of the election of Abraham, to be the father of a divinely-given nation, which was to be the witness of God and the channel of His revelation. And the other nations, though for a season left in ignorance, are reserved, to be brought by the Son of Abraham unto the knowledge of God, and the unity of peace.
Since mankind is now divided into nations, salvation is ultimately to be brought to mankind by a nation. Hence the restoration of humanity, which we yet await, shall be through the medium of Israel. The promises shall be fulfilled, when all nations of the earth, with Israel, and round Israel as a center, fear the Lord, and confess Him with one accord in unity of spirit.*(*Compare my Lecture on Heathenism in "Christ and the Church: the Apostolic Commission.") This chosen nation must needs have a peculiar origin and character. It is to show forth God’s praise; it is to bring to fallen, helpless, guilty humanity God’s salvation. Now, as Christ the Saviour, though true man, must come from above, as He is God-given and conceived by the Holy Ghost, though born of the Virgin Mary, so Israel, the nation, must likewise have a supernatural character. As Jesus among men, so Israel among nations - He a real and true man, yet God’s Son; they a real nation, with a true human history and development, but different from all other nations in the manner in which God by direct interference originates them, forms them, and gives them His guidance. The election of Abraham and the birth of Isaac show at once the supernatural character of Israel’s history. Their history throughout is an embodiment of the principle, "Salvation is of God." It illustrates the contrasts of divine omnipotence, and the utter weakness of nature; the promise of grace, and the utter inadequacy of the present actual condition; heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, worm Jacob, God-conquering Israel. Abraham, nearly a hundred years old, and childless, is to be the father of a multitude like the stars of heaven; the dwellers in tents, who have to purchase a burial-place for Sara, the inheritors of the land; nay, heirs of the world. Such from the beginning was the contrast, stamped upon, and infused into the God-chosen people.
Now, what else but faith could bridge over these contrasts? How could Israel have any other life than the life of faith? What was their history but a continuous declaration: With man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible? From the song of Hannah to the song of Mary, Israel was in the low estate of the hand maiden, and God, who is mighty, did great things to her. The same principle is declared by the gospel. The life of the apostle Paul eminently illustrates the kindred truth, that Christians have been crucified with Christ, and die daily; but, raised by Divine power, walk in newness of life before God.
Why does God call Himself so frequently and with such peculiar emphasis the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? It was not on account of their excellence, because there are many other saints of the old covenant who are equal to them in faith and devotedness. God never calls Himself the God of Moses, of David, or of Daniel. He calls Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because they are the fathers, unto whom He revealed Himself as the Covenant-God, and unto whom He gave the threefold promise of the nation, the Seed, or Messiah, and the land of inheritance. God’s promise to the fathers, the relation in which He stood to them, was the foundation on which the confidence and hope of Israel rested; with the invocation of this Name they drew near. And since this covenant is for all ages, and centers in the salvation which is by Jesus Christ, God, in calling Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is revealing a name which can never lose its importance and significance. Jesus the Son of Abraham has come, and Israel, fallen through unbelief, is still reserved for the ultimate fulfillment of the promise at His second advent. Then shall the promise be fulfilled to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and that which they never saw during their life, but realized by faith, shall then be revealed. The thoughts and ways of God are indeed very different from our thoughts and ways; and even after they are revealed in Scripture, man is slow to receive divine teaching. The history of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is received as a very instructive record of the past, and as illustrating- spiritual truths; but few recognize the covenant with Abraham as the basis of history, and look forward to the fulfillment when, according to God’s promise, all nations shall be blessed with God’s chosen nation Israel. Hence the apostle calls it a mystery; that is, something which man could not discover without divine revelation, but which he is anxious the Gentile Christians should understand. The unbelief of Israel, rejecting the Lord of glory, has made no change in the divine counsel. For a season Israel as a nation is rejected and scattered; they are dead - cut off. But the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. What He promised to Abraham, what He announced by all the prophets, can never be revoked. Messiah, the land, and the glory, are theirs. Jehovah-Shammah must yet be the name of Jerusalem. From Zion shall go forth the law of light and love and peace to all the nations. Israel’s resurrection shall be the regeneration of the earth. As was typified by all deliverances from captivities, the ultimate deliverance shall be wrought by Jehovah Himself, and Israel shall be glorified, and the Gentiles shall come to her light, and kings to the brightness of His rising. As the angel, descending from the heavenly heights, and declaring the divine counsel, announced unto Mary, "The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end."
See then what significance this name has, and shall have as long as sun, moon, and stars endure; for as God said through Jeremiah, "If those ordinances depart from before me, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me forever." Thus through the millennial ages Israel shall praise God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and all Gentile nations shall thus praise God, and rejoice in the world-wide covenant made with these fathers; and the patriarchs themselves shall behold with joy the fulfillment of the promise - the land of blessing, the whole earth of blessing, until finally the city descends from heaven, and the tabernacle of God is forever with man.
Jesus is of the seed of David, of the seed of Abraham.* Israel is chosen in Him for all ages. Israel’s history has scarcely yet begun. The faithful Israelites, the kernel of the nation, though a minority, waited, believed, hoped. At the first coming of the Messiah the nation rejected Him, yet a remnant according to the election of grace believed. Throughout the period of Israel’s national unbelief and dispersion, there are at all times some who as representatives of the true seed believe; but the real history of Israel, according to the eternal counsel and the prediction of prophets, and the announcement of the angel Gabriel, has not commenced yet. The land is Palestine, the King is Jesus, the Son of David; the beginning of the reign is the return of Jesus, when His feet shall stand upon the mount of Olives, and when He shall pour out the Holy Ghost upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah. After this Israel shall never turn back. Their true David shall reign over them, and all nations shall rejoice with the Lord’s people. (*Matt. 1.)
Thus the history recorded in the book of Genesis contains the outlines of the world’s history. It is not an ancient or antiquated narrative of events which have served their end, but it is the foundation upon which rests the yet future history of earth. The next direct interference of God, the next personal and visible manifestation of Jesus, will introduce a new period of national and earthly history. It will not be the end of the world’s history, and commencement of a heavenly and endless eternity; we are waiting for the coming of the Lord Jesus from heaven to fulfill the promises given to the fathers, and by the prophets, concerning Israel and the nations.
How clear and striking is the reply which our Saviour gave to the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection from among the dead! "Ye do err greatly," the Lord, the heavenly wisdom, said unto them, "because you know not the Scriptures, the written Word and revelation, nor the power of God, by the inward experience of the Holy Ghost." But how does Jesus prove from Scripture the resurrection? There are many pas sages which we should have deemed much more appropriate, such as Joseph giving commandment concerning his bones; or such passages in the prophet Isaiah "Thy dead men shall live;" or the prediction in Daniel: "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." The Lord goes, however, to the very root of the question. God called Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob long after they had died; and God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
They to whom God vouchsafed to reveal His name, whom He drew into communion with Himself, with whom He established His covenant, must needs possess a life which death cannot terminate or extinguish. Knowing and loving God, known and loved of Him, they possessed even in time life eternal; and since the everlasting God called Himself their God, immortality was theirs. And not merely immortality, but resurrection; for redemption must be connected with resurrection, as sin is connected with death, and moreover the promise of the covenant referred to the land; and as the psalmist and prophets, so the patriarchs looked beyond the grave to the time when the meek shall inherit the earth. The period of the patriarchs has a very peaceful and lovely character. God appeared and spoke to them. There was as yet no law. God revealed Himself, and simply said: "Walk before Me, and be thou perfect." The word "patriarchal" has in all languages of Christianized nations the meaning of simple, childlike, transparent, peaceful. But this character attaches more or less to all nations in the early stage of their history. What is the real peculiarity of the patriarchal life? What else but faith; that they lived before and with God, waiting for the promise, the heavenly country? They were not worldly, they were other-worldly. God was a very present God to them; while the future, the tabernacle of God on earth with man, was their constant hope.
Abraham is the father of the faithful; and he is also the model of a believer. His faith is recorded that we also may learn from it the nature, energy, trial, and victory of faith. How great is this man, called the friend of God, the father of all them that believe, the father of us all (Jews and Gentiles) who trust in the living God. How great is the honour of Abraham when the apostle says: "And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise."* God, who chose him to this eminent position, appointed him also to be to us an example of faith. First, in obeying the call of God, to leave his kindred and to go whither he knew not; secondly, in believing impossibilities, looking away from facts simply to the promise of God; thirdly, in cherishing the God-given promise of the land though as yet only a stranger and pilgrim; fourthly, in sacrificing the visible fulfillment of the promise, believing that God would bring Isaac from the dead. (*James 2:23;Romans 4:11-16;Galatians 3:26-29. Sara’s faith is also mentioned. At first she doubted, but then she "also" received the promise. As Eve is the mother of all living, Sara is the mother of the faithful, (1 Peter 3:5-6.) She symbolizes "Jerusalem which is above and free, and the mother of us all." (Galatians 4:26-27.) God spoke of her: "I will bless her: yea, I will bless her." (Genesis 17:16-19; Genesis 18:10.) And she received the word by faith. She is the only woman in Scripture whose age is recorded. A whole chapter is devoted to the narration of her burial.)
Abraham’s faith was the substance of future things hoped for, and a conviction of things not seen. It triumphed over reason; it laughed at impossibilities; it looked beyond death and the long night of the intermediate state; and in all this it gave glory to God; for this is the only glory we can give to God, believing that He can and will do what He promised. To leave home and kindred, and to go forth into a new land, was at that time common enough among Shemitic tribes; but to do this in obedience to the call of God, and in sole reliance on His guidance and help, was the obedience of faith. Abraham was called to become a servant of God, and to found a society of men, whose center was to be God. They were gathered round the name of the Lord, and His worship and service. The reward which was promised him was, that God would make him the father of a great nation, and that God’s blessing would come through that nation to all the earth. Only faith could even understand this reward; for only faith knows what it is to be blessed of God. Only faith could grasp the promise; for reason could only reject it. Reason, considering the circumstances, could only stagger at the promise. But this was the excellence and strength of Abraham’s faith, that he did not consider his own body now dead; that he did not reason; that he did not look at difficulties and impossibilities; but that he honoured God by "being fully persuaded that, what He had promised, He was able also to perform." "If you would believe," says Luther, "you must crucify the question, How?" To believe God when reason says it may be so, and when sight says it is possible and likely, is not to honour God; for under these conditions you would believe any one. But if you cannot look away entirely from difficulties to God’s promise, then look first at God’s promise; and in the light of God’s Word consider your difficulties, and see them vanquished.
How sorely was Abraham’s faith tried! How long had he to wait for the fulfillment of the promise! Meanwhile, though living in tents, and though not possessing any portion of the land, and knowing that in this life he would not see it, yet he believed the inheritance was his; and that God Himself had prepared a city, a permanent, substantial, organized dwelling-place for him and his seed, and all the nations to whom the blessing was to come. He and his sons after him waited for that country, which would be heavenly in its character, given and established by divine power. It is not necessary here to enter into a distinction between the heavenly and the earthly Jerusalem;* the expectation of the patriarchs and the prophets is the renewed earth in which Israel and all nations dwell in righteousness - the prospect stretches forth into the boundless ages when ultimately the tabernacle of God shall be with men. The patriarch’s hope reached beyond death, and it had reference to themselves and their children and all the righteous, they expected that God would give to them and their seed the earth, that they would live then before and with God in their inheritance, and that from this centre blessings would flow to all lands. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit"- because chosen of God unto adoption - the earth." (*As is remarked by Delitzsch, the promise given unto the fathers never goes beyond Canaan as their future home and inheritance; not even when Jacob calls the place where God appeared unto him the gate of heaven, does the divine promise go beyond the land "upon which thou sleepest." The apostle applies New Testament language to the faith of the fathers, because in substance their desire was after the promised permanent inheritance, in which God in His glory and love will be their everlasting portion. Compare the concluding remarks of Lecture 18.) In this hope of Messiah and Messiah’s inheritance, Isaac and Jacob and Joseph lived and died. As illustrations of their faith, the apostle refers to their last acts of blessing. It is only by faith that we can bless; for God alone is the fountain of blessing, and it is only in communion with Him, and in reliance on His promise, that men are able to pronounce benediction. The fathers, realizing the fulfillment of the promise, treated the future possession as if it was theirs already, and disposed of it, as the Spirit directed them, by their last will and blessing. It is this firm and assured conviction of the future things, the things hoped for, that is so strikingly illustrated in the last words of the patriarchs. Isaac looked to God alone, and to His will and promise. The weakness and sin of Jacob in obtaining the blessing did not disturb Isaac’s conviction that he had declared the will of God, which man’s unfaithfulness and unworthiness cannot frustrate.
Jacob also, at the end of his long and weary pilgrimage, during which the Angel, the Redeemer, had been his guide and shepherd, blessed the sons of Joseph; and here again faith, and not sight or reason, caused him to give the greater blessing to the younger. "I have waited for thy salvation" was Jacob’s exclamation; and worshipping,* adoring the Lord, who had redeemed him from all evil, he died. (*Genesis 49:18.) The apostle does not speak of Joseph’s varied life, but his faith shone forth brightly in his last injunction. Future things hoped for were present and certain to him. He knew God would re member His people in their affliction, and fulfill the promise given to Abraham; and he was anxious to show that his heart was with the children of Jacob, and that the blessing of the God of Abraham was his joy and hope.*(*CompareGenesis 1:25;Joshua 24:32.) To return to Abraham. His faith was tested still more severely. He was called to offer up Isaac his son, his only son, the son in whom all his affections centered. But the natural affection of a father to his child was in this case inseparably connected with Abraham’s whole spiritual life. In Isaac was the promise. All the hopes and expectations of faith centered in him. To offer up Isaac was to sacrifice the very object of faith. Here God seemed to contradict Himself - to take away His own gift, to revoke His promise. And here faith saw what reason could not see. Faith perceived the hidden meaning of the command. It was to try faith. Before Isaac’s birth Abraham simply believed God’s Word. Faith had no out ward help; it rested solely on God’s promise. Now Isaac was given, faith’s object had become visible, and hence there was not the same exclusive leaning on God. The Lord tested Abraham when He commanded him to offer up Isaac. It was faith’s wisdom which recognized the command as a temptation from God. Now this is the believer’s experience. God takes from us that which by faith was first obtained, because we make a Christ of it, because we rest in our faith, in our peace, in our conversion, in our experience. God teaches us that we must believe in Him always, as we believed in Him at our conversion, when we had nothing else to trust in but His Word. All gifts obtained by faith have to be given up unto death, and that by faith. But Abraham believed again, as at first. Isaac’s non-existence was no difficulty to him when the promise first came; and now Isaac’s death is no difficulty. God can bring him again from the dead. This Abraham believed as the only solution of the difficulty; for God’s word must be fulfilled; and since Isaac is to be offered up, the Lord God Almighty will surely raise him from the dead.
What depth of self-searching, what agony, what crucifixion this trial involved, who can describe? Here was indeed a summing-up of all his previous life and conflict of faith. But faith conquered, and in faith, love and hope. For when we believe God, and only then, and only in that proportion, we love God, and do not withhold from Him the most cherished heart-object, and when we believe God, we hope even against hope; as Luther says, "I could run into Christ’s arms though He had a sharp sword in each hand." Abraham received back Isaac in a figure - a figure of the resurrection of Jesus, the consummation of Israel’s history; resurrection-life after death and burial; the pledge and source of our incorruptible, undefined, and unfading inheritance.
Children of God, on whom the blessing of Abraham has come through Jesus Christ, live by faith! Crucify reason, consider not the things which are visible; confess, manifest it by your character and walk, that you are strangers on earth; wait for the heavenly country, living even now in the spirit of the golden millennial age. Learn from Abraham to believe in God that raised up Jesus from the dead. Reason sees your guilt; faith sees your acquittal, for Christ is risen; reason sees your sinfulness and infirmity; faith sees your power and strength in newness of life, for Christ is risen; reason sees your affliction, sickness, sorrow, old age, and death; but faith sees your glory, renewal of youth, joy, and strength everlasting, for Christ is risen. Live in tents; set not your affections on things below. Live in the tents the patriarchal life of prayer, and a reverent filial walk with God. When the soul is cast down and disquieted within you, when the heart is heavy, when Isaac, in whom you delight, faith’s child, is to be sacrificed, then believe, hope in God, and know that you shall yet praise Him. Thus we give glory to God.