Living by Faith: The Faithfulness of God

So far in this series I’ve said that faith is hoping or trusting in God by clinging to his promises through his Word. To put it another way, faith is simply trusting in the faithfulness of God. So much can be said about faith, but if you will remember just this one sentence, it will be enough—faith is trusting in the faithfulness of God. You don’t need a great education or the right background or the right family or the right skills or good looks or straight teeth or money or possessions or anything other than this: simple childlike trust that God is faithful and will do all that he has said he will do. If you have this faith, you can stand in the company of the giants of faith because in the end those giants aren’t giants at all. Rather, they’re simply people who trusted in the infinitely giant faithfulness of God. 

So it is that the author says in verse 2 that faith is the reason the people of old received their commendation: not condemnation but commendation! By “people of old” the author means all of those he goes on to talk about in the rest of the chapter. He means the biblical ancestors who went before us and the early believers who trusted in Christ. And what he’s saying is that these people received commendation, or more literally a testimony, because of this one thing: they trusted in the faithfulness of God. 

As we progress through this chapter, we’ll see that the one testifying of them, the one commending them, the one lifting them up and saying, “Pay attention to this and that one,” is God himself. These men and women are not fleshly heroes, rather, God himself has lifted them up and bid us to carefully consider their way of life. And again, the reason he is willing to do that is because they had faith in him. That is to say, the main thing God wants us to know and notice about these people is not that they were amazing but that they found God to be amazing as they trusted in his faithfulness. God spoke to them and led them, they listened to what he had to say, they trusted in what he had to say, and they discovered that God does what he says he’s going to do. In other words, they discovered that God is faithful. 

So, whereas some people call Hebrews 11 “The Hall of Faith,” we really should call it “The Hall of the Faithfulness of God” because all of the people in this chapter point away from themselves and toward God saying, “The Lord is truly faithful. He is truly amazing. All that he promised came to pass in his time and way. We had to suffer, and there were many hard times. We struggled with our flesh and we failed at so many points. But along the way we discovered that God is truly faithful and we bid you to trust in him, hope in him, and cling to him with us.” 

This is why God is not afraid to draw our attention to these people and say, “Imitate their way of life.” Their way of life was to look to God, listen to God, and walk in the ways of God because they believed that God is faithful: and indeed, God is faithful. So again, faith is simply trusting in the faithfulness of God. It’s not a feeling. It’s not a force, as the word-of-faith people say it is. Rather, faith is the trust a child has in her Father. Faith is the heart of a child that says, “I can only be sure of what I hope for when I hope for what is sure, and what is sure is my Father and his will, words, and ways.” 

With this definition in mind, the author goes on now in the rest of the chapter to give us a number of examples of faith, all of whom learned what it means to trust in the faithfulness of God and even now are encouraging us to join their number. I pray that as we consider the examples of faith-filled people, that the infinitely faithful God will fill us with faith and teach us to live the same kinds of lives as those who’ve gone before us.