The Spectacles of Faith Text: Hebrews 11:3
Introduction: The Starting Line
We live in an age that prides itself on its alleged commitment to raw, unadulterated facts. Our culture is besotted with the empirical, the observable, the measurable. The man in the lab coat is our high priest, and the scientific method is his liturgy. He tells us that to understand the world, we must begin with the world itself. We must begin with the things that are seen. But the writer of Hebrews, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us that this is precisely the wrong place to start. It is to begin the race at the halfway point, assuming you know the course. It is to open the book in the middle and wonder why the plot is so confusing.
The modern secularist believes he is standing on the firm ground of neutrality, looking at the world objectively. But there is no such thing as neutrality. You are either standing with God, looking at the world through the lens of His revelation, or you are standing in rebellion to God, attempting to make sense of the world while denying the very One who gives it sense. The latter approach is what our schools and universities are dedicated to. They are committed to explaining the painting while insisting there is no painter. They want to interpret the poem while denying the poet. The result is not intellectual freedom, but rather a descent into the howling madness of meaninglessness.
Hebrews 11 is the great hall of faith. It is a roll call of the saints who lived and died according to a different reality, a reality that could not be measured in a test tube. But before the author begins this great muster, he lays down the foundational principle of the whole enterprise. He tells us how we know what we know. He tells us that the Christian worldview is not a blind leap into the dark, but rather the only way to truly see in the light. This verse, Hebrews 11:3, is the Christian's epistemology in a nutshell. It is the fundamental axiom upon which all sane thought about the universe is built. Without it, you are left with absurdity.
The Text
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.
(Hebrews 11:3 LSB)
Faith: The Organ of Understanding
The verse begins by establishing the instrument of true knowledge:
"By faith we understand..." (Hebrews 11:3a)
Notice the verb: "understand." The world wants to pit faith against understanding. They imagine faith as a sentimental, pious fog that obscures the sharp edges of reality. Faith is for the weak, the uneducated, the emotional. Understanding, they say, is for the strong, the rational, the scientific. But the Bible will have none of this. The Bible presents faith not as the opposite of understanding, but as the necessary precondition for it. Faith is not a blind leap; faith is the gift of sight.
To put it another way, faith is the set of spectacles God gives us that brings the world into focus. Without faith, you are intellectually blind, stumbling around in the dark, bumping into furniture that you insist isn't there. You can feel the effects of God's creation, you can stub your toe on His moral law, you can breathe His air, but you cannot make ultimate sense of any of it. By faith, and only by faith, do we begin to "understand." This is not a rejection of reason, but the proper grounding of it. Reason is a magnificent tool, but it is a tool that must be used within the framework of a worldview. And your worldview is always, without exception, a matter of faith. The atheist has faith that there is no God. The materialist has faith that matter is all there is. The Christian has faith in the living God who has spoken. The question is not whether you have faith, but whether your faith corresponds to reality.
This faith is not a vague, internal feeling. It is trust in a specific revelation. It is believing what God has said, simply because God is the one who said it. This is the foundation of all that follows in this chapter. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, they all acted on the basis of what God had spoken to them, not on the basis of what their five senses were telling them. Their faith gave them a different set of facts, a higher reality.
The Spoken Universe
Next, the author tells us what it is that faith understands about the origin of all things.
"...that the worlds were prepared by the word of God..." (Hebrews 11:3b)
The "worlds" here refers to the entire created order, the cosmos in all its intricate glory. And how was it made? It was "prepared by the word of God." This takes us straight back to Genesis 1. "And God said..." This is the drumbeat of creation. God did not grunt and strain. He did not wrestle with some pre-existing, recalcitrant matter. He spoke. Fiat Lux. Let there be light. And there was light. God's Word is not descriptive; it is performative. It does not report on reality; it creates reality.
This is a profound statement about the nature of the universe we live in. Because the universe was spoken into existence by the divine Logos, the Word of God, it is therefore intelligible. It has grammar. It has structure. It makes sense. The whole enterprise of science is predicated on the assumption that the universe is orderly and that the human mind can comprehend that order. But the materialist has no basis for this assumption. If the universe is just the accidental byproduct of a cosmic burp, why should it be orderly? Why should our minds, themselves just a fizz of chemical reactions, be able to understand it? The Christian knows why. We can understand the world because it is a product of mind, the mind of God. We are made in His image, and He has made a world that is designed to be understood by us.
The "word of God" is not an impersonal force. John 1 tells us that the Word was with God and the Word was God, and all things were made through Him. When God the Father spoke creation into existence, He did so through His eternal Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the logic, the reason, the very grammar of the cosmos. To reject Him is to reject the principle of intelligibility itself.
Creation Out of Nothing
The final clause of the verse drives the point home, demolishing all pagan and materialistic alternatives.
"...so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible." (Hebrews 11:3c)
This is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. The visible, tangible, material world was not fashioned from some pre-existing, eternal stuff. Before God spoke, there was nothing but God. This establishes the most fundamental distinction in all of reality: the Creator/creature distinction. There is God, who is eternal, self-existent, and uncreated. And then there is everything else, which is contingent, dependent, and created. Everything that is not God owes its existence entirely to Him.
This is a direct assault on every form of idolatry. The pagan thinks the gods are part of the cosmos. The pantheist thinks the cosmos is God. The materialist thinks the cosmos is all there is. The Bible declares that the cosmos is a created artifact. It had a beginning. It was brought into being by a transcendent will. The implications of this are enormous. If God created everything from nothing, then He owns everything. He has absolute rights of authorship. He sets the rules. He defines the terms. We are not autonomous. We are creatures, living in His world, on His terms.
What is seen, the entire magnificent spectacle of the universe, points beyond itself. The visible world is a signpost to the invisible God. The materialist looks at the signpost and spends his life studying the quality of the paint and the grain of the wood, all the while refusing to read what it says or go where it points. By faith, we read the sign. We see the visible creation for what it is: a glorious, derivative, dependent reality that shouts the praises of its invisible Creator. "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Faith is simply taking God at His Word and seeing the world as He says it is. It is the only way to see it straight.