Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews

by H. C. G. Moule

So we approach the chapter, familiar as it is (and it is so familiar because it is so great), with a peculiar and reverent expectation. We look forward to another visit to this great gallery of "the portraits of the family of God" with a pleasure as natural as it is reverent and believing. True to our plan in these expositions, however, we shall not attempt to comment upon it in the least degree fully or in detail. Our aim will be rather to collect and focus together some main elements of its teaching, particularly in regard of their applicability to our own days.

The first question suggested as we read is, what is the connexion of the chapter? Why does the Writer spend all this wealth of example and application upon the one word Faith?

The reason is not far to seek. The tenth chapter closes with that word, or rather with that truth: "My righteous man shall live by faith"; "we are of them that have faith, unto the saving of the soul." And this close is only the issue of a strain of previous teachings, going far back towards the opening of the Epistle. "The evil heart of unbelief," of "unfaith," if the word may be used, is the theme of warning in iii. 12: "They could not enter in because of unbelief" (iii. 19). "The word of hearing did not profit them" because of their lack of faith (iv. 2). It is "we who have believed" who "enter into God's rest" (iv. 3). Looking to our great High Priest and His finished work, we are to "draw near with a true heart, in fulness of faith" (x. 22), for the all-sufficient reason that such trust meets and appropriates eternal truth: "He is faithful that promised" (x. 23).

These explicit occasional mentions of faith are, however, as we might expect, only a part of the phenomenon of the great place which the idea of faith holds in the Epistle. When we come to reflect upon it, the precise position of the Hebrew Christians was that of men seriously, even tremendously, tempted to walk by sight, not by faith. The Gospel called them to venture their all, for time and eternity, upon an invisible Person, an invisible order, a mediation carried on above the skies, a presentation of sacrifice made in a temple infinitely other than that of Mount Moriah, and a kingdom which, as to all outward appearance, belonged to a future quite isolated from the present. On the other hand, so they were told by their friends, and so it was perfectly natural to them to think, the vast visible institutions of the Law were the very truth of God for their salvation, and those institutions appealed to them through every sense. Why should they forsake a creed which unquestionably connected itself with Divine action and revelation in the past, and which presented itself actually to them under the embodiment of a widespread but coherent nation, all descended from Abraham and Israel, and of a glorious "city of solemnities," and of a temple which was itself a wonder of the world, and of which every detail was "according to a pattern" of Divine purpose, and in which all the worship, all the ritual, done at the altars and within the veil, was great with the majesty of Divine prescription? There the pious Israelite could behold one vast sacramental symbol of Jehovah's life, glory, and faithfulness. And the living priesthood that ministered there, in all its courses and orders, was one large, accessible organ of personal witness to the blessings assured to the faithful "child of the Law."

It demands an effort—and it well deserves an effort—to realize in some measure what the trial must have been for the sensitive mind of many a Jewish convert to look thus from the Gospel to the Law as both shewed themselves to him then. Even now the earnest and religious Jew, invited to accept the faith of Jesus, has his tremendous difficulties of thought, as we well know, although for so many ages Jerusalem has been "trodden down," and the priesthood and sacrifices have become very ancient history. But when our Epistle was written it was far otherwise. True, the great ruin of the old order was very near at hand, but not to the common eye and mind. It may be—for all things are possible—that the Papal system may be near its period; but certainly there is little look of it to the traveller who visits Rome and contemplates St. Peter's and the Vatican. As little did the end of the Mosaic age present itself as probable, judging by externals, to the pilgrim to Jerusalem then, when, for example, the innumerable hosts of Passover-keepers filled the whole environs of the city, and moved incessantly through the vast courts around the sacred space where the great altar sent up its smoke morning and evening, and where the wonderful House stood intact, "a mountain of snow pinnacled with gold."

Think of the contrast between such historic invitations to "walk by sight" towards the bosom of Abraham, and the call to "come out and be separate" in some Christian upper-room, devoid of every semblance of decorative art and dignified proportion, only to listen to the Word, to pray and praise in the name of the Crucified, and to eat and drink at the simple Eucharist, the rite of Thanksgiving for—the Master's awful death!

Recollecting these facts of the position, it is no wonder that the Writer emphasizes the greatness and glory of faith, and that now he devotes this whole noble and extended chapter to illustrate that glory.

We come thus to the opening words of the passage, and listen to him as he takes the word "faith" up, and sets it apart, to look afresh at its significance and to describe its potency, before he proceeds, with the tact and skill of sympathy, to illustrate his account of it from the history so deeply sacred to the tried Hebrew Christian's heart.

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen." So the Revisers translate the first verse. They place in their margin, as an alternative, a rendering which makes faith to be "the giving substance to things hoped for, the test of things not seen." I presume to think that the margin is preferable as a representation of the first clause in the Greek, and the text as a representation of the second. So I would render (with the one further variation, in view of the Greek, that I dispense with the definite article): "Now faith is a giving of substance to things hoped for, a demonstration of things not seen." And we may paraphrase this rendering somewhat thus: "Faith is that by which the hoped-for becomes to us as if visible and tangible, and by which the unseen is taken and treated as proven in its verity."[L]

[L] A friend has pointed out to me that in the recently discovered papyri, which, although a relatively small part of them only has been read as yet, have thrown much deeply interesting light on the character and vocabulary of Greek as used by the New Testament writers, the word ὑπόστασις is found with the meaning of "title-deeds." On the hypothesis of such a meaning here (we can only speak with reserve), we may paraphrase: "Faith enables us to treat things hoped for as a property of which we hold the deeds."