|
THE FAITH
OF ABRAHAM.
"By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to
go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went
out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner in the land of
promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the
heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for the city which hath the
foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. By faith even Sarah herself
received power to conceive seed when she was past age, since she counted Him
faithful Who had promised: wherefore also there sprang of one, and him as good
as dead, so many as the stars of heaven in multitude, and as the sand, which is
by the sea-shore, innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the
promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having confessed
that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such
things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own. And
if indeed they had been mindful of that country from which they went out, they
would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better country,
that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their
God: for He hath prepared for them a city. By faith Abraham, being tried,
offered up Isaac: yea, he that had gladly received the promises was offering up
his only-begotten son; even he to whom it was said, In Isaac shall thy seed be
called: accounting that God is able to raise up, even from the dead; from
whence he did also in a parable receive him back."-- Hebrews 11:8-19 (R.V.).
We have learned that faith is the proof of the unseen. We
must not exclude even from this clause the other thought that faith is an
assurance of things hoped for. It is not stated, but it is implied. The
conception of a personal God requires only to be
unfolded in order to yield a rich harvest of hope. The author proceeds to show
that by faith the elders had witness borne to them in God's confession of them
and great rewards. He recounts the achievements of a long line of believers,
who as they went handed the light from one to another. In them is the true
unity of religion and revelation from the beginning. For the poor order of
high-priests the writer substitutes the glorious succession of faith.
We choose for the subject of this chapter the faith of
Abraham. But we shall not dismiss in silence the faith of Abel, Enoch, and
Noah. The paragraph in which Abraham's deeds are recorded will most naturally
divide itself into three comparisons between their faith and his. We venture to
think that this was in the writer's mind and determined the form of the
passage. From the eighth to the tenth verse the Apostle compares Abraham's
faith with that of Noah; after a short episode concerning Sarah, he compares
Abraham's faith with Enoch's, from the thirteenth verse to the sixteenth; then,
down to the nineteenth verse, he compares Abraham's faith with that of Abel.
Noah's faith appeared in an act of obedience, Enoch's in a life of fellowship
with God, Abel's in his more excellent sacrifice. Abraham's faith manifested
itself in all these ways. When he was called, he obeyed; when a sojourner, he
desired a better country, that is, a heavenly, and God was not ashamed to be
called his God; being tried, he offered up Isaac.
Two points of surpassing worth in his faith suggest
themselves. The one is largeness and variety of experience; the other is
conquest over difficulties. These are the constituents of a great saint. Many a
good man will not become a strong spiritual character because his experience of
life is too narrow. Others, whose range is wide, fail to reach the higher
altitudes of saintliness because they have never been called to pass through
sore trials, or, if they have heard the summons, have shrunk from the
hardships. Before Abraham faith was both limited in its experience and untested
with heaven-sent difficulties. Abraham's religion was complex. His faith was
"a perfect cube," and, presenting a face to every wind that blows,
came victorious out of every trial.
Let us trace the comparisons.
First, Noah obeyed a Divine command when he built an ark
to the saving of his house. He obeyed by faith. His eyes saw the invisible, and
the vision kindled his hopes of being saved through the very waters that would
destroy every living substance. But this was all. His faith acted only in one
direction: he hoped to be saved. The Apostle Peter[258]
compares his faith to the initial grace of those who seek baptism, and have
only crossed the threshold of the spiritual life. It is true that he overcame
one class of difficulties. He was not in bondage to the things of sense. He
made provision for a future belied by present appearances. But the influence of
the senses is not the greatest difficulty of the human spirit. As the lonely
ship rode on the heaving waste of waters, all within was gladness and peace. No
heaven-sent temptations tried the patriarch's faith, He overcame the trials
that spring out of the earth; but he knew not the anguish that rends the spirit
like a lightning-stroke descending from God.
With Abraham it was otherwise. "He went out, not
knowing whither he went."[259] He leaves his father's house and his
father's gods. He breaks for ever with the past, even before the future has
been revealed to him. The thoughts and feelings that had grown up with him from
childhood are once for all put away. He has no sheltering ark to receive him. A
homeless wanderer, he pitches his tent today at the well, not knowing where his
invisible guide may bid him stretch the cords on the morrow. His departure from
Ur of the Chaldees was a family migration. But the writer of this Epistle, like Philo,
describes it as the man's own personal obedience to a Divine call. Submitting
to God's will, possessed with the inspiration and courage of faith, obeying
daily new intimations, he bends his steps this way or that, not knowing whither
he goes. True, he went right into the heart of the land of promise. But, even
in his own heritage, he became a sojourner, as in a land not his own.[260] God "gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so
much as to set his foot on."[261] Possessor of all in promise, he
purchased a sepulchre, which was the first ground he could call his own. The cave of Machpelah was the small beginning of the
fulfilment of God's promise, which the spirit of Abraham is even now receiving
in a higher form. It is still the same. The bright dawn of heaven often breaks
upon the soul at an open grave. But he journeyed on, and trusted. For a time he
and Sarah only; afterwards Isaac with them; at last, when Sarah had been laid
to rest, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the three together, held on bravely, sojourning
with aching hearts, but ever believing. The Apostle brings in the names of
Isaac and Jacob, not to describe their faith--this he will do
subsequently,--but to show the tenacity and patience of "the friend of
God."
His faith, thus sorely tried by God's long delay, is
rewarded, not with an external fulfilment of the promise, but with larger
hopes, wider range of vision, greater strength to endure, more vivid
realisation of the unseen. "He looked for the city which hath the
foundations, whose Architect and Maker is God."[262] In
the promise not a word is said about a city. Apparently he was still to be a
nomad chief of a large and wealthy tribe. When God deferred again and again the
fulfilment of His promise to give him "this land," His trusting
servant bethought him what the delay could mean. This was his hill of
difficulty, where the two ways part. The worldly wisdom of unbelief would argue
from God's tardiness that the reality, when it comes, will fall far short of the
promise. Faith, with higher wisdom, makes sure that the delay has a purpose.
God intends to give more and better things than He promised, and is making room
in the believer's heart for the greater blessings. Abraham cast about to
imagine the better things. He invented a blessing, and, so to speak, inserted
it for himself in the promise.
This new blessing has an earthly and a heavenly meaning.
On its earthly side it represents the transition from a nomadic life to a fixed
abode. Faith bridged the gulf that separates a wandering horde from the
cultured greatness of civilization. The future grandeur of Zion was already held in the grasp of
Abraham's faith. But the invented blessing had also a heavenly side. The more
correct rendering of the Apostle's words in the Revised Version expresses this
higher thought: "He looked for the city which hath the
foundations"--the city; for, after all, there is but one that hath the
eternal foundations. It is the holy city,[263] the
heavenly Jerusalem,
seen by the faith of Abraham in the early morning of revelation, seen again in
vision by the Apostle John at its close. The expression cannot mean anything
that comes short of the Apostle's description of faith as the assurance of
things hoped for in the unseen world. Abraham realised heaven as an eternal
city, in which after death he would be gathered to his fathers. A sublime conception!--eternity not the dwelling-place of the
solitary spirit, the joy of heaven consisting in personal fellowship for ever
with the good of every age and clime. There the past streams into the
present, not, as here, the present into the past. All are contemporaries there,
and death is no more. Whatever makes civilization powerful or beautiful on
earth--laws, arts, culture--all is there ether ealised and endowed with
immortality. Such a city has God only for its Architect,[264]
God only for its Builder.[265] He Who conceived the plan can alone execute the
design and realise the idea.
Of this sort was Abraham's obedience. He continued to
endure in the face of God's delay to fulfil the promise. His reward consisted,
not in an earthly inheritance, not in mere salvation, but in larger hopes and
in the power of a spiritual imagination.
Second, Abraham's faith is compared with Enoch's, whose
story is most sweetly simple. He is the man who has never doubted, across whose
placid face no dark shadow of unbelief ever sweeps. A virgin soul, he walks
with God in a time when the wickedness of man is great in the earth and the
imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually, as Adam
walked with God in the cool of the evening before sin had brought the hot fever
of shame to his cheek. He walks with God, as a child with his father; "and
God takes him" into His arms. Enoch's removal was not like the entrance of
Elijah into heaven: a victorious conqueror returning into the city in his
triumphal car. It was the quiet passing away, without observation, of a spirit
of heaven that had sojourned for a time on earth. Men sought him, because they
felt the loss of his presence among them. But they knew that God had taken him.
They inferred his story from his character. In Enoch we have an instance of
faith as the faculty of realising the unseen, but not as a power to conquer
difficulties.
Compare this faith with Abraham's.
"These,"--Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,--"all died in faith," or,
as we may render the word, "according to faith,"--according to the
faith which they had exhibited in their life. Their death was after the same
pattern of faith. Enoch's contemplative life came to a fitting end in a
deathless translation to higher fellowship with God. His way of leaving life
became him. Abraham's repeated conflicts and victories closed with quite as
much becomingness in a last trial of his faith, when he was called to die
without having received the fulfilment of the promises. But he had already seen
the heavenly city and greeted it from afar.[266] He
saw the promises, as the traveller beholds the gleaming mirage of the desert.
The illusiveness of life is the theme of moralists when they preach
resignation. It is faith only that can transform the illusions themselves into
an incentive to high and holy aspirations. All profound religion is full of
seeming illusions. Christ beckons us onward. When we climb this steep, His voice
is heard calling to us from a higher peak. That height gained reveals a soaring
mass piercing the clouds, and the voice is heard above still summoning us to
fresh effort. The climber falls exhausted on the mountain-side and lays him
down to die. Ever as Abraham attempted to seize the promise, it eluded his
grasp. The Tantalus of heathen mythology was in Tartarus, but the Tantalus of
the Bible is the man of faith, who believes the more for every failure to
attain.
Such men "declare plainly that they seek a country of
their own."[267] Let not the full force of the words escape us. The
Apostle does not mean that they seek to emigrate to a
new country. He has just said that they confess themselves to be
"strangers and pilgrims on the earth." They are "pilgrims,"
because they are journeying through on their way to another country; they are
"strangers," because they have come hither from another land.[268] His meaning is that they long to return home. That he
means this is evident from his thinking it necessary to guard himself against the possibility of being understood to refer
to Ur of the Chaldees. They were not mindful of the earthly home, the cradle of their race,
which they had left for ever. Not once did they cast a wistful look back, like Lot's wife and the Israelites in the wilderness. Yet they
yearned for their fatherland.[269] Plato imagined that all our knowledge is a
reminiscence of what we learned in a previous state of existence; and
Wordsworth's exquisite lines, which cannot lose their sweet fragrance however
often they are repeated, are a reflection of the same visionary gleam,--
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul
that rises with us, our life's star. Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not
in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, Who is
our home."
Our author too suggests it; and it is true. We need not
maintain it as an external fact in the history of the soul, according to the
old doctrine, resuscitated in our own times, of Traducianism. The Apostle
represents it rather as a feeling. There is a Christian consciousness of
heaven, as if the soul had been there and longed to return. And if it is a
glorious attainment of faith to regard heaven as a city, more consoling still
is the hope of returning there, storm-tossed and weather-beaten, as to a home,
to look up to God as to a Father, and to love all angels and saints as brethren
in the household of God, over which Christ is set as a Son. Such a hope renders
feeble, sinful men not altogether unworthy of God's Fatherhood. For He is not
ashamed to be called their God, and Jesus Christ is not ashamed to call them
brethren.[270] The proof is, that God has prepared for them a settled abode in
the eternal city.
Third, the faith of Abraham is compared with the faith of
Abel. In the case of Abel faith is more than a realisation of the unseen. For
Cain also believed in the existence of an invisible Power, and offered
sacrifice. We are expressly told in the narrative[271]
that "Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the
Lord." Yet he was a wicked man. The Apostle John says[272]
that "Cain was of the Evil One." He had the faith which St. James
ascribes to the demons, who "believe there is one God, and
shudder."[273] He was possessed with the same hatred, and had also the
same faith. It was the union of the two things in his spirit that made him the
murderer of his brother. Our author points out very clearly the difference
between Cain and Abel. Both sacrificed, but Abel desired righteousness. He had
a conscience of sin, and sought reconciliation with God through his offering.
Indeed, some of the most ancient authorities, for "God bearing witness in
respect to his gifts," read "he bearing witness to God on the ground
of his gifts;" that is, Abel bore witness by his sacrifice to God's
righteousness and mercy. He was the first martyr, therefore, in two senses. He
was God's witness, and he was slain for his righteousness. But, whether we
accept this reading or the other, the Apostle presents Abel before us as the
man who realised the great moral conception of righteousness. He sought, not
the favours of an arbitrary Sovereign, not the mere mercy of an omnipotent
Ruler, but the peace of the righteous God. It was through Abel that faith in
God thus became the foundation of true ethics. He acknowledged the immutable
difference between right and wrong, which is the moral
theory accepted by the greater saints of the Old Testament, and in the New
Testament forms the groundwork of St.
Paul's forensic doctrine of the Atonement. Moreover,
because Abel witnessed for righteousness by his sacrifice, his blood even cried
from the ground unto God for righteous vengeance. For this is unquestionably
the meaning of the words "and through his faith he being dead yet
speaketh;" and in the next chapter[274] the
Apostle speaks of "the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh a better thing
than that of Abel." It was the blood of one whose faith had grasped firmly
the truth of God's righteousness. His blood, therefore, cried to the righteous
God to avenge his wrong. The Apostle speaks as if he were personifying the
blood and ascribing to the slain man the faith which he had manifested before.
The action of Abel's faith in life and, as we may safely assume, in the very
article of death, retained its power with God. Every mouthing wound had a
tongue. In like manner, says the writer of the Epistle, the obedience of Jesus
up to and in His death made His blood efficacious for pardon to the end of
time.
But Abraham's faith excelled. Abel was prompted to offer
sacrifice by natural religiousness and an awakened conscience; Abraham sternly
resolved to obey a command of God. He prepared to do that against which nature
revolted, yea that which conscience forbade. Had not the story of Abel's faith
itself loudly proclaimed the sacredness of human life? Would not Abraham, if he
offered up Isaac, become another Cain? Would not the dead child speak, and his blood cry from the ground to God for vengeance? It was the
case of a man to whom "God is greater than conscience." He resolved
to obey at all hazards. Hereby he assured his heart--that is, his
conscience--before God in that matter wherein his heart may have condemned him.[275] We, it is true, in the light of a better revelation
of God's character, should at once deny, without more ado, that such a command
had been given by God; and we need not fear thankfully and vehemently to
declare that our absolute trust in the rightness of our own moral instincts is
a higher faith than Abraham's. But he had no misgiving as to the reality of the
revelation or the authority of the command. Neither do
the sacred historian and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews question it.
We also need not doubt. God met His servant at that stage of spiritual
perception which he had already attained. His faith was strong in its
realisation of God's authority and faithfulness. But his moral nature was not
sufficiently educated to decide by the character of a command whether it was
worthy of God or not. He calmly left it to Him to vindicate His own
righteousness. Those who deny that God imposed such a hard task on Abraham must
be prepared to solve still greater difficulties. For do not
we also, in reference to some things, still require Abraham's faith that the
Judge of all the earth will do right? What shall we say of His
permitting the terrible and universal sufferings of all living things? What are
we to think of the still more awful mystery of moral evil? Shall we say He
could not have prevented it? Or shall we take refuge in the distinction between
permission and command? Of the two it were easier to understand His commanding
what He will not permit, as in the sacrifice of Isaac, than to explain His
permission of what He cannot and will not command, as in the undoubted
existence of sin.
But let us once more repeat that the greatest faith of all
is to believe, with Abel, that God is righteous, and yet to believe, with
Abraham, that God can justify His own seeming unrighteousness, and also to
believe, with the saints of Christianity, that the test which God imposed on
Abraham will nevermore be tried, because the enlightened conscience of humanity
forbids it and invites other and more subtle tests in its place.
We must not suppose that Abraham found the command an easy
one. From the narrative in the Book of Genesis we should infer that he expected
God to provide a substitute for Isaac: "And Abraham said, My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt
offering; so they went both of them together."[276] But the Apostle gives
us plainly to understand that Abraham offered his son because he accounted that
God was able to raise him from the dead. Both answers are true. They reveal to
us the anxious tossings of his spirit, seeking to account to itself for the
terrible command of Heaven. At one moment he thinks God will not carry matters
to the bitter end. His mind is pacified with the thought that a substitute for
Isaac will be provided. At another moment this appeared to detract from the
awful severity of the trial, and Abraham's faith waxed strong to obey, even
though no substitute would be found in the thicket. Another solution would then
offer itself. God would immediately bring Isaac back to life. For Isaac would not cease to be, nor cease to be Isaac, when the
sacrificial knife had descended. "God is not God of the dead, but
of the living, for all live unto Him."[277] Besides, the promise had not
been withdrawn, though it had not yet been confirmed by an oath; and the
promise involved that the seed would be called in Isaac, not in another son.
Both solutions were right. For a ram was caught in a thicket
by the horns, and Abraham did receive his son back from the dead, not literally
indeed, but in a parable.
Most expositors explain the words "in a parable"
as if they meant nothing more than "as it were," "so to
speak;" and some have actually supposed them to refer to the birth of
Isaac in his father's old age, when Abraham was "as good as dead."[278]
Both interpretations do violence to the Greek expression,[279]
which must mean "even in a parable." It is a brief and pregnant
allusion to the ultimate purpose of Abraham's trial. God intended more by it
than to test faith. The test was meant to prepare Abraham for receiving a
revelation. On Moriah, and ever after, Isaac was more than Isaac to Abraham. He
offered him to God as Isaac, the son of the promise. He received him back from
God's hand as a type of Him in Whom the promise would
be fulfilled. Abraham had gladly received the promise. He now saw the day of
Christ, and rejoiced.[280]
|