Word of Encouragement (5/18/2020)
This morning, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite quotes on faith. It is by Geerhardus Vos from his sermon, “Heavenly-Mindedness” on Heb. 11:9-10. In the introductory section, he speaks of two different types of faith:
“In Romans and Galatians faith is in the main trust in the grace of God, the instrument of justification, the channel through which the vital influences flowing from Christ are received by the believer. Here in Hebrews the conception is wider; faith is ‘the proving of things not seen, the assurance of things hoped for’. It is the organ for apprehension of unseen and future realities, giving access to and contact with another world. It is the hand stretched out through the vast distances of space and time, whereby the Christian draws to himself the things far beyond, so that they become actual to him.”
The former is passive in its function: it receives Christ and His righteousness for the forgiveness of sin and imputation of His righteousness (that is, crediting His righteousness us us). The latter is more active than the other one: it “stretches out” its hand to “grab a hold of” ("apprehension of") the things far beyond and “draws” them to himself. I would say that this is the kind of faith we exercise in our prayer. And this is the kind of faith by which we are called to live each day. Vos further distinguishes the two in a christological way:
“[The difference between the two] can be best appreciated by observing that, while in the other writings [such as Romans and Galatians] Christ is the object of faith, the One towards whom the sinner’s trust is directed, here [in Hebrews 11] the Savior is described as himself exercising faith, in fact as the one perfect, ideal believer.”
Fascinating, isn’t it? In the former, Jesus is the One in whom we place our faith. In the latter, Jesus is the perfect example of it—the perfect, ideal Believer. How can that be? If Jesus is the omniscient God, how can He believe anything? Vos answers that question in this way:
“Faith in that other sense of specific trust, through which a guilty sinner becomes just in the sight of God, our Lord could not exercise, because he was sinless. But the faith that is an assurance of things hoped for and a proving of things not seen had a large place in his experience. By very reason of the contrast between the higher world to which he belonged and this dark lower world of suffering and death to which he had surrendered himself it could not be otherwise than that faith, as a projection of his soul into the unseen and future, should have been the fundamental habit of the earthly life of his human nature, and should have developed in him a degree of intensity no attained elsewhere.”
This faith, Christ could not exercise as an omniscient God. But this is the faith by which He lived in His human nature. We don’t know how His two natures interact with each other. But we do see that, at different times, one nature becomes prominent over the other. So, He grows weary though that is impossible for an omnipotent God. So, He says only the Father knows the time of His return though, as an omniscient God, He must know. So then, when He operated according to His human nature, He lived by faith and by His faith He grabbed a hold of “the higher world,” and “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2).
This might have been a bit challenging to understand but I hope you got the gist of what Vos is talking about. And I hope it will challenge all of us to be more proactive in exercising our faith to grab a hold of all the blessings we have in Christ, of the wonderful truth about who we are in Christ Jesus!