" FAITH IS TAKING THE INVISIBLE GOD FOR REAL."

20. Q. Are all men, then, saved by Christ just as they perished through Adam?
A. No. Only those are saved who by a true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all His benefits.[1]
[1] Matt. 7:14; John 1:12; 3:16, 18, 36; Rom. 11:16-21.

21. Q. What is true faith?
A. True faith is a sure knowledge whereby I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in His Word.[1] At the same time it is a firm confidence[2] that not only to others, but also to me,[3] God has granted forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness, and salvation,[4] out of mere grace, only for the sake of Christ's merits.[5] This faith the Holy Spirit works in my heart by the gospel.[6]
[1] John 17:3, 17; Heb. 11:1-3; James 2:19. [2] Rom. 4:18-21; 5:1; 10:10; Heb. 4:16. [3] Gal. 2:20. [4] Rom. 1:17; Heb. 10:10. [5] Rom. 3:20-26; Gal. 2:16; Eph. 2:8-10. [6] Acts 16:14; Rom. 1:16; 10:17; I Cor. 1:21.

22. Q. What, then, must a Christian believe?
A. All that is promised us in the gospel,[1] which the articles of our catholic and undoubted Christian faith teach us in a summary.
[1] Matt. 28:19; John 20:30, 31.

23. Q. What are these articles?
A. 1. I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.BR> 2. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord;
3. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary;
4. suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell;
5. On the third day He arose from the dead;
6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
7. from there He will come to judge the living and the dead.
8. I believe in the Holy Spirit;
9. I believe a holy catholic Christian church, the communion of saints;
10. the forgiveness of sins;
11. the resurrection of the body;
12. and the life everlasting.

Scripture Reading:
Hebrews 10:32-11:11
James 2:14-26

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 43:3
Psalm 62:1
Psalm 27:1,6
Psalm 84:4,5,6
Hymn 53:1,2

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

One of the more central words in Scripture and Christian thinking is the word ‘faith’. The term is central to our Lord’s Day also; indeed, we confess here that we need ‘faith’ to be saved. That puts us face-to-face with the big question: what is faith? More specifically: what does faith look like in real life? We need to be able to answer these questions because we need to answer whether we have faith.

What faith is? ‘Faith’, brothers and sisters, is not simply an optimism that things will turn out. Faith is also not simply knowing certain facts about God and Jesus Christ, about sin and salvation. Faith is taking God for real, in all His majesty, in all His promises, in all His works. That’s why faith can never be put on the shelf as something to admire or as something to help you in old age. Instead, that’s why faith colors every step of one’s daily life.

I summarize the sermon this afternoon with this theme:

The first topic that needs our attention this afternoon is why faith is necessary. I can possibly best draw this matter out by following the line of thought of the Catechism itself.

We confessed in Lord’s Day 3 that the Lord God had created the human race. With the whole human race the Lord also established His covenant of grace, so that in Paradise there was a bond of love between God and man. The human race, however, did not appreciate this bond of love, instead deserted God and joined Satan; that’s the fall. We confessed God’s response in Lord’s Day 4; He was and is terribly displeased with our original as well as actual sins, and will punish them by a just judgment both now and eternally. So we sought in Lord’s Day 5 for a way to escape this punishment, and learned that there was no way open to us; God wants payment, but we can’t pay. As we wait for God to pour out His wrath upon us, we can do nothing else than cry out for God to have mercy, have mercy upon us. And here, we heard last time with Lord’s Day 6, is the delightful marvel of the gospel; God does have mercy! For God from heaven on high was pleased to give His only Son to redeem an undeserving people for Himself. To God be all glory!

That brings us to the first question of Lord’s Day 7. God gave Christ to save sinners. OK: "are all men, then, saved by Christ just as they perished through Adam?" With Adam’s fall the whole human race deserted God and joined the devil; does the mirror opposite happen as a result of Christ’s work on the cross – all people taken from Satan’s side back to God’s side?

A couple of texts from Scripture will answer the question for us. I refer first to Gabriel’s words to the virgin Mary. Said he: "you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins" (Mt 1:21). Notice, brothers and sisters, that here the angel divides the human race into two groups. The one group he calls "His people" and the others, well, they’re passed by, they’re not mentioned as benefiting from Jesus’ saving work.

Consider also Jesus’ prayer before He went to the cross. He said in Jn 17: "I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours" (vs 9). That is: Jesus prays for some, and not for others. Shortly after He prayed this prayer Jesus was arrested, tried and crucified. What do you think: for whom did Jesus lay down His life? For those for whom He prayed? Or also for those for whom He refused to pray? We understand: Jesus divided the human population into two groups, prayed for the one and for these He laid down His life.

I refer finally to Jesus’ words in Mt 25. "When the Son of Man comes in His glory…," Jesus says of His return on the last day, "all the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world….’ [And] He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels…" (Mt 25:31ff). It can’t be clearer: the Lord divides the human race into two groups, of which one is reconciled to God and inherits eternal life, while the other remains under the curse of God’s eternal wrath against sin.

The fact that God has divided the human race into two groups, and sent His Son to redeem the one group and not the other, raises for each person the pressing question: which group am I in? Directly linked to that question is another: has God set a criteria I must satisfy so that I may belong to the one group and not the other? On that question of criteria, congregation, God’s answer is clear: yes, there is a criteria each person needs to satisfy. The Holy Spirit says in Jn 3: "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life" (vs 16). God’s gift to salvation was most generous –His only Son- but only those who believe in Him will benefit from His saving work. That is the criteria one needs to satisfy to be numbered with the sheep on the right instead of with the goats on the left – one must believe, have faith. That in turn is why the Bible insists: "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31). And: "he who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned" (Mk 16:16). To believe, to have faith: God holds men responsible to do that, and we are in one of those two groups depending on whether we submit to this command of God or not.

Let the point be clear, beloved. The criteria God uses to judge whether we go to the right amongst the sheep instead of to the left amongst the goats is not: did you go to church? The criteria is not either: were you a covenant child? Nor is it: did you learn your Catechism, or did you stay away from the night-clubs, or did you give liberally for worthy causes in God’s kingdom? The criteria is faith, and faith alone. That’s why it’s imperative that each of us grapples with that critical question: do I have faith?

That brings us to our second point:

If you must have faith to be saved, what is faith? The question presses upon us, and, truth be told, we find it hard to put into words. So I draw your attention to the portion of Scripture we read from the letter to the Hebrews.

The section we read from Heb 10 makes clear that the Christians addressed in this letter were in trouble. They had years ago come to faith (vs 32), and initially had endured the resulting persecution with good courage. But of late they were dropping their bundle, says vs 36; the trials that characterize the Christian life were just getting too much…. So the apostle seeks to encourage. How? By reminding the Hebrews that Jesus Christ is soon coming again. That’s the punch of his quote in vs 37: "yet a little while, And He who is coming will come and will not tarry." His coming will bring relief from the trials of this life, indeed. But the Bible is also clear that His coming will not benefit all men; His coming means judgment and hell for some. Who will survive His coming? Vs 38: "the just shall live by faith." That is: faith is essential for salvation. In that context, where the Hebrew Christians were in danger of drawing back from the faith, of giving it up, the Holy Spirit moves the apostle to explain to these embattled Christians what faith really is.

What it is? The apostle describes faith in chap 11:1: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It needs to be fixed in our minds first, brothers and sisters, that the apostle is here not supplying the Hebrews with a dictionary definition of faith. Rather, the apostle is outlining the function of faith. He gives color to this function of faith by the various examples of faith he gives in the course of chap 11 – to which we’ll turn shortly. First, though, I need to say something more about vs 1 itself. The word ‘substance’ actually translates a word that means ‘foundation’, ‘basis’, ‘that upon which one stands.’ The psalmist complains that he "sinks in deep mire, where there is no standing" (Ps 69:2), and that’s the same word; there’s no bottom in the mire, no foundation. The Christian, now, looks into the future, into the day to day struggles against attacks from the devil, the world, and one’s own flesh. What hope does he have of surviving? What’s the foundation, the basis for his hopes for the future? That, says the apostle, is faith; "faith is the substance, the basis, the foundation of things the believer hopes for."

The second part of the sentence says a similar thing; "faith is … the evidence of things not seen." The footnote in our translation says that the word ‘evidence’ could also be translated as ‘confidence’. That’s a better translation; faith supplies the confidence that God’s promises –though still unseen because they’re still future- will certainly come about.

If faith, then, supplies the foundation upon which your hopes for the future is based, what is the content of this faith? Is it enough to believe that it will rain this month? Or that alignment of the stars will benefit your life? No, brothers and sisters, that’s not the content of the faith the apostle speaks of. In the earlier chapters of his letter he drew out how God in heaven is busy reconciling a world to Himself through Jesus Christ; that’s the content of faith. And at the heart of that content is first of all this that God exists; after all, Jesus’ work of reconciling sinners to God makes no sense if God does not exist in the first place. That’s vs 6: "he who comes to God must believe that He is." To put it in plain language: the essence of faith is that one takes God seriously.

The point is critical, brothers and sisters. We walk the road of life day by day, be it as mothers in our homes, as children at school, as fathers in the workforce, etc. As we go about our daily activities we meet so many people who do not take God seriously. The vast majority of Australians don’t take Him into account because either they deny that He exists or they see Him as that old man in the sky who can’t do much about the evils happening on earth – in other words, He’s small, pathetic. Especially the notion that there is no God has a cold and compelling logic to it. That logic is this: no one has ever seen God. Ask your mates at work, talk to the scientists at uni: no one in Perth has ever seen God, no one has ever touched Him. And there’s no experiment available either that will prove that He exists. In such a context the pressure is certainly on to cave in to society’s ridicule of those who believe that God exists. For: what grounds have you to insist that God is real? And therefore: what grounds have you to believe that God will care for you tonight and tomorrow and Tuesday?

Here, congregation, is the function of faith. We acknowledge that no one has seen God - we haven’t either- and yet we maintain that God is real; more, we take Him seriously in all His actions and His words. That is faith. It’s the conviction that things not seen are true nevertheless. In the words of vs 3: we weren’t there when God created the world in the beginning, and we’ve never seen the non-existent suddenly come into being at a word of command either. But never mind what we haven’t seen; there’s more to reality than meets the eye. God Almighty is real, and so we accept as fact "that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible." Similarly, we acknowledge that the man who was crucified on Calvary so long ago was sentenced as a criminal, and criminals are not obvious saviors. But we’re convinced nevertheless that Christ has obtained the redemption we long for and reconciled us to God. We’ve never yet seen a person rise from the dead, but that doesn’t stop us from insisting that Jesus Christ did arise on the third day. We’ve never yet seen a man ascend from off our planet and travel through space into heaven, but we accept as true that Jesus Christ did so. That is faith. It’s the conviction that things not seen are true nevertheless, true because God is real and He does actions that are out of the ordinary range of daily experiences.

The apostle draws this material out through various examples in the remainder of chap 11. "By faith," he writes in vs 4, "Able offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain." We can picture it: two men in a field, neither of whom had seen God, let alone the anger of God on their sins. Both offered a sacrifice, each for reasons of his own. The one took God for real, and so knew that something had to be done to pay for sin and avert His punishment on sin; that’s why Abel came humbly to God with the firstborn of his flock. His brother did not take God for real, did not accept as true that he would perish under the burden of God’s wrath against sin unless atonement was made; that’s why Cain did the done thing without humility and sincerity. That Abel took God seriously, though he’d never seen God, is faith-at-work; "by faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice" – and so expressed the ground for his conviction that his tomorrows would be well supplied.

The apostle mentions Noah. According to Genesis 6 God came to him one day with His promise to destroy all men from the earth with a flood, and that’s why Noah should build an ark so long and so high and so wide. What Noah did? He’d never seen a flood big enough to destroy all flesh. He’d never seen a boat big enough to house two of every species of animal, let alone the food required to feed them. His culture didn’t have chainsaws, let alone lumber mills. But Noah dropped his daily work, went bush with an axe over his shoulder, and began to chop down trees…, and with his axe he made planks from the logs…, and over the space of a hundred years he assembled his trees into an ark. What do you think: did his community applaud Noah for his labors? When he explained to them what he was doing –building this huge boat because God is going to send a flood to drown all creatures- when he explained to them what he was doing, how would they have responded? We need no imagination, beloved, to understand that Noah will have been laughed out of town. Fancy spending a hundred years on a boat because you think a flood is going to happen – when no one has ever seen such a flood before, indeed, no one has ever yet seen the God who promised such a flood! ‘Noah, you’ve lost your marbles; wake up to reality, get your feet on the ground!’

But this, now, beloved, is faith: Noah took God seriously. True, he’d never seen God, and he’d never seen a flood like the one coming up, but he knew that God was there, that God was mighty, that God was faithful, that God would and could do what He’d said He’d do. So Noah hammered on, never mind the ridicule of his community. So by his faith he saved his household. Do you get a taste here, beloved, of how faith colors one’s actions??

Consider also Abraham. 75 years old he was when God told him to leave Ur of the Chaldeans to go …, never mind where, just go…. In fact, in that new land God would make Abraham a blessing to the nations…. How? God doesn’t say straightaway…; Abram just has to go. Abram’s response? He put up a For Sale sign, gathered his wife and his servants, and set off to go – who knows…. Make sense? Make no mistake, beloved: the devil, the world, and his own flesh will have told Abram that migrating to a new land at age 75 was ridiculous; he ought instead to be booking a room in an old-age home…. But Abram took God for real, and so he quietly obeyed this God, convinced that the future this God had talked about would come to pass. That is faith: doing the will of God though the naked eye sees no value and no sense in doing it…. That is faith: building your hopes and dreams for the future on the promises of God alone, though the promises made no sense to the human mind.

The Hebrews were in danger of giving up their Christianity, collapsing under the pressure of tribulation. The apostle encourages them –how?- by telling them of the need for faith, telling them what faith is. They’re told that faith is taking God for real, more real than the ridicule of those around you. They’re told that faith is taking God seriously, more seriously than the questions our sinful minds throw up in the face of God’s commands. It’s true for the Hebrews in their circumstance and it’s true for us in ours: by faith we accept that God is real and all His promises are sure, and on that basis we’re sure that the forgiveness of sins we do not see is ours nevertheless, and the reconciliation with God we do not see is ours nevertheless, and the care we need this evening and tomorrow and Tuesday –though we don’t see it in the fog of our troubles- will be there nevertheless. This faith gives encouragement to go on, on, on, never mind the anguish of the moment. Faith: I’m sure that God is there, that God gave His Son for me, that God is my Father, and He has my future securely in His almighty hands.

So we find ourselves in our last point:

What I’ve just said gives us some indication of the look of faith in real life. James insists that you can’t separate faith from works; "faith by itself," he says, "if it does not have works, is dead" (2:17). Given what we’ve learned from Hebrews 11 that’s perfectly clear. At the heart of faith, we learned, is that one takes God seriously. And taking God seriously obviously mean that one obeys God. That’s clear: Noah would not be taking God seriously if Noah had ignored God’s command to build that ark. Instead, taking God seriously meant that each morning anew Noah had to resist the urge to agree with the folk of town, meant that each morning anew he had to be prepared to act contrary to what all his human senses told him was logical. Taking God seriously determined Noah’s conduct every day, and that’s equally true for Abram, and that’s equally true for us. That’s what faith concretely looks like. Faith is something different than obedience, but you can’t separate faith from obedience. Faith is something different than good works, but you can’t separate faith from good works. That’s why it will never, ever do to say that what’s important is what’s in the heart – as if the outside is less than important. To contrast the outside from the inside, to contrast what you do with what lives in your heart is a false dilemma, for the one is directly linked to the other. The faith in your heart shows itself by the things you do; Noah showed that he took God seriously by going back to his boat-building every morning anew for a hundred long years.

Not all men are saved by Christ as they perished in Adam, but only those are saved who by faith are grafted into Jesus Christ. We want to be among those saved, among the sheep at the Judge’s right hand and not among the goats at His left. So we need to believe, and that’s to say that we accept God for real, and therefore also accept every word of His for real. That includes what He says about the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and includes also what He says about stealing. It includes what He says about the providence of God and also what He says about committing adultery. It includes what He says about the church gathering work of the ascended Christ and also what He says about loving your neighbor. By faith we take God seriously every moment of the day, take seriously every word He ever spoke – even though we’ve never seen God, and His commands may seem right down ridiculous in our specific circumstances. But by this faith we obey whatever He says, and that is why the believer has a different lifestyle than the unbeliever. Faith without works-of-obedience is dead, because the person who doesn’t obey God doesn’t take God for real – and therefore he demonstrates that he doesn’t believe after all.

Please don’t misunderstand. I do not say that the person who falls into sin does not believe. The Holy Spirit has not perfected us yet, and so we shall all stumble in many ways (cf James 3:2). I speak rather of the person who is characterized by not taking God seriously in the nuts and bolts of daily life. Such a one does not believe. Such a one has decided to succumb to the pressure of the devil, the world, and his own flesh, has decided to take what the eye sees more seriously than what the eye does not see. Such a one does not ask each step of the day: Lord, what do you want me to do? – and then expect that his sense of happiness in the next hour lays in obeying the commands of his Father in Jesus Christ.

Who shall be saved? Indeed, he who believes. And we understand it now: faith is not something you put on a shelf to admire, and say: see, I have faith, it’s over there. Rather, faith is action, faith is taking God seriously in everything He says, in every step of every day.

This faith takes seriously what God revealed about Christ dying for sin of Calvary’s cross. This faith also takes seriously what God says about the ridicule of the world upon the believers, and so isn’t surprised at scorn. And this faith takes seriously that the Christ who ascended will come again as He went. We’ve never seen God, have never seen Christ appear on the clouds of heaven. But we take Him for real nevertheless, and live that way, because we’re sure: "Yet a little while, and He who is coming will come and will not tarry." Then we’ll see Him face to face, and our faith in Him vindicated. And those who scorned the godly will see that the believers were right all along….  Amen.