WITHOUT faith it is impossible to please God," for no moral association exists between man and God where man lives in independence of God. A heathen does not believe that God is; he is, therefore, without compass or guiding star upon the waters of life. The mere professing Christian believes as an article of his creed in the fact that God is, but does not believe God Himself; he is like a mariner accepting the theory of the compass yet setting sail without it, and knowing that the pole star is overhead yet refusing to cast his eye up to it. The genuine believer takes God at His word, and shapes his course by its directions. Faith is the great principle upon which the people of God go holily through this world to heaven.
The believer needs faith for his daily life. Our daily progress in the life of faith only commences after our hearts have truly taken in the tidings of His love to us in His Son.
In the eleventh chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews, we have the activities of faith presented to us in a series of groupings, which, like a picture in partitions, unfolds the life of faith from the moment God is believed by the sinner, till the time when, life's pilgrimage being over, the saints shall be perfect in resurrection bodies.
The first three verses of the chapter are preliminary to these groupings.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"; he who has faith, has in him the assurance, the giving substance to, of things hoped for. Knowing about a truth, and having the truth in the heart, are vastly different things. No amount of infidel argument can thrust out of the soul of the dependent child of God this substance, or drive from him this divinely given conviction of what he sees not. The believer dependent on God has in him the God-given assurance and conviction of the truth of what God says to him.
In our chapter, before faith in God for salvation is spoken of, faith in Him as Creator is set forth. What these eyes behold, what these feet tread upon, of this material world, was not made from what appears. The believer has faith to know God as the Creator, as well as his Savior.
In the persons of Abel, Enoch, and Noah, three great traits of faith are grouped together. The lives of these three men picture, first, faith which is wise as to the sacrifice; second, faith which waits for translation to heaven; third, faith which saves others, and condemns the world as it hastens on to its judgment.
Abel recognized his own sinful state, and trusted in God for the remedy for man's ruin. He brought to God "the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof," and God testified of Abel's gifts—the sacrifice and its excellency. Those gifts, the outcome of obedience to God's Word, declared the worthlessness of self and the worthiness of the sacrifice of God's appointment. By them Abel obtained witness that he was righteous, even as in this day do all who believe God and rest in the finished work of His Son.
“Enoch walked with God." The world-crowd of his day rushed on one way; the solitary man of faith went in the opposite direction. We find the difficulties of our short lives very great—to walk with God for three years is no light thing. "Enoch walked with God... three hundred years”!
Sin was lusty and strong in those primitive times; and as, year by year, the world grew older in iniquity, Enoch walked with the never-changing God. Walking with God, we are like God, and not like the changing times in which we live.
“And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him." What a short, sweet history of a long life I We are not told what great works he did; these will be known hereafter in heaven; but he had this testimony, "that he pleased God." Enoch believed that God is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." Cain had his all in this world—Enoch looked for his reward in heaven.
Nor was Enoch an inactive spectator of the growing sin around him; he lifted up his voice against the evil of his times; he warned men by the Spirit of coming judgment. "Behold," said he, "the Lord cometh with ten thousands of His saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
We may say that our life of faith should be made up after Enoch's testimony. Our first aim should be to please God, and it is our privilege to wait for His Son from heaven. Pleasing God in walk and ways is the active part of the life of faith; waiting for His Son from heaven, even Jesus, who hath delivered us from the wrath to come, is the patient side of faith's career on earth.
Trusting in the sacrifice of Jesus, rejoicing in its efficacy and its worth, walking with God, and waiting for His Son from heaven, are the first principles of the life of faith.
The testimony of Noah completes this early picture of three panels of the way of faith. The things around him were apparently as secure as are the things of the world this day. But the solemn word of God respecting coming judgment stirred Noah's soul.
There are two distinct characters in Noah's faith as here presented to us; he built an ark for the saving of his house, and he condemned the world. When the Christian is truly energized by the faith of coming judgment, he cannot fail to seek the salvation of his house. Those who do not believe that Christ is coming, to take His own out of the world to heaven, and that having thus come to the air He will next come to the earth to judge its iniquity, may perhaps afford to be indifferent to the salvation of souls. But such as have faith in God's Word respecting the coming of His Son, dare not cease seeking for the salvation of their houses.
The jeering of the, multitude, who heard Noah's hammer ringing against the gradually rising sides of his ark, would only call forth from him more earnest preaching of righteousness. How he must have warned the godless world of impending wrath He had the word, "My Spirit shall not always strive with man.... yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." But year by year the number of those years diminished, till at length the last day of the last month of the last of the one hundred and twenty years came. Noah entered into the ark, the door was shut, and the flood came and swept the rest away.
Let us add to our faith, which trusts the blood of Jesus, that faith which we have seen gave Enoch his footsteps, and to that, the faith which gave Noah his energy. These three things should be found in all their intensity in each believer. They are all necessary in living the life of faith, and when they are all found in holy proportion in the soul, the result is a fine type of the man of faith.