Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Hebrews 11:8
By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
8. Abraham ] As was natural, the faith of “the father of the faithful was one of the commonest topics of discussion in the Jewish Schools. Wordsworth ( Eccles. Sonnets, xxvi.) speaks of
“ Faith, which to the Patriarchs did dispense
Sure guidance ere a ceremonial fence
Was needful to men thirsting to transgress.”
when he was called ] The Greek (if be the right reading) can only mean literally either “he who is called Abraham,” which would be somewhat meaningless; or “Abraham, who was called to go out.”
to go out ] from Ur of the Chaldees (Act 7:4).
a place which he should after receive ] Gen 12:7.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
By faith Abraham – There is no difficulty in determining that Abraham was influenced by faith in God. The case is even stronger than that of Noah, for it is expressly declared, Gen 15:6, And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness. Compare notes, Rom 4:1-5. In the illustrations of the power of faith in this chapter, the apostle appeals to two instances in which it was exhibited by Abraham, the father of the faithful. Each of these required confidence in God of extraordinary strength, and each of them demanded a special and honorable mention. The first was that when he left his own country to go to a distant land of strangers (Gen 15:8-10); the other when he showed his readiness to sacrifice his own son in obedience to the will of God, Heb 11:17-19.
When he was called – Gen 12:1, Now the Lord had said unto Abraham, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy fathers house, unto a land that I will show thee.
Into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed – To Palestine, or the land of Canaan, though that was not indicated at the time.
And he went out, not knowing whither he went – Gen 12:4. Abraham at that time took with him Sarai, and Lot the son of his brother, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran. Terah, the father of Abraham, started on the journey with them, but died in Haran; Gen 11:31-32. The original call was made to Abraham, Gen 12:1; Act 7:2-3, but he appears to have induced his father and his nephew to accompany him. At this time he had no children Gen 11:30, though it seems probable that Lot had; Gen 12:5. Some, however, understand the expression in Gen 12:5, and the souls they had gotten in Haran, as referring to the servants or domestics that they had in various ways procured, and to the fact that Abraham and Lot gradually drew around them a train of dependents and followers who were disposed to unite with them, and accompany them wherever they went. The Chaldee Paraphrast; understands it of the proselytes which Abraham had made there – All the souls which he had subdued unto the law. When it is said that Abraham went out, not knowing whither he went, it must be understood as meaning that he was ignorant to what country he would in fact be led. If it be supposed that he had some general intimation of the nature of that country, arid of the direction in which it was situated, yet it must be remembered that the knowledge of geography was then exceedingly imperfect; that this was a distant country; that it lay beyond a pathless desert, and that probably no traveler had ever come from that land to apprize him what it was. All this serves to show what was the strength of the faith of Abraham.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Heb 11:8-10
Abraham
The faith of Abraham
I.
THE FAITH EXHIBITED BY ABRAHAM IN HIS OBEDIENCE TO THE DIVINE CALL. It was neither poverty, nor restless discontent with the monotony of daily toil, that sent him out of Ur of the Chaldees. Nor does Scripture drop any hint of persecution. The simple urgent reason was a Divine command, Get thee out, &c. Mighty consequences hung upon his obedience. It was the first link in a long chain of acts of faith by which the knowledge of the true God was to be preserved in the earth, and the redemption of mankind accomplished. The greatest and happiest consequences have flowed from single acts of righteousness and faith. Men simply did their present duty; they took counsel with none but their own conscience; one step before them on lifes path stood clearly revealed, and they ventured, notwithstanding all being dark beyond. By faith they acted thus, believing that if a man can only see his way a yard before him in the path of duty, he may step it as boldly as though the whole road were clear right up to the gate of heaven. When Wicliff, the pioneer of the English mind in that unknown land of promise which lay hid in the Bible, first led the way by translating it into his mother-tongue, he went forth in faith, not knowing whither. When John Hampden resisted the unrighteous impost of ship-money, he-committed himself in faith to a struggle the issue of which no sagacity could predict. Little did he think that he was making himself a name as chief among the founders of his countrys liberties; it was the duty of the hour, and that was enough for him. When the crew of the Mayflower left our shores to seek a home in the New World, they went out not knowing whither; in their grandest dreams they could never have imagined what a stronghold of civil and religious liberty would arise out of the foundation they were laying in obedience to conscience and by their faith in God.
II. ABRAHAMS SOJOURN IN CANAAN, AS IN A LAND NOT HIS OWN, THOUGH IT WAS THE LAND OF PROMISE. Similar trials of faith have fallen to the lot of other men who, obeying God and conscience, have gone out not knowing whither, Not always have they found the promised land. Many have died without witnessing the accomplishment of their hopes, sometimes without catching a glimpse of the splendid results to which their faith and courage ultimately led. Exemption from such trials must not be expected. Brave lives are sacrificed in the forefront of battle that the soldiers in the rear may pass on to victory; so in every battle of principle the faith and courage of many a good soldier appear to be spent without result. Without result indeed they would be, if the conflict ended with their lives and their example perished. But since, in every contest for truth and right, the victory has first to be won inwardly, in the hearts of many earnest men, before it can be made palpable to eye and ear, so those who help the spiritual preparation contribute as much to the victory as they who actually accomplish it. (E. W. Shalders, B. A.)
The obedience of faith:
Obedience–what a blessing it would be if we were all trained to it by the Holy Spirit! How fully should we be restored if we were perfect in it! Oh, for obedience! It has been supposed by many ill-instructed people that the doctrine of justification by faith is opposed to the teaching of good works, or obedience. There is no truth in the supposition. We preach the obedience of faith. Faith is the fountain, the foundation, and the fosterer of obedience. Obedience, such as God can accept, never cometh out of a heart which thinks God a liar, but is wrought in us by the Spirit of the Lord, through our believing in the truth and love and grace of our God in Christ Jesus. There is a free-grace road to obedience, and that is receiving by faith the Lord Jesus, who is the gift of God, and is made of God unto us sanctification. We accept the Lord Jesus by faith, and He Leaches us obedience, and creates it in us. The more of faith in Him you have, the more of obedience to Him will you manifest.
I. THE KIND OF FAITH WHICH PRODUCES OBEDIENCE.
1. It is, manifestly, faith in God as having the right to command our obedience. He has a greater claim upon our ardent service than He has upon the services of angels; for while they were created as we have been, yet they have never been redeemed by precious blood.
2. Next, we must have faith in the rightness of all that God says or does. We hear people talk about minor points, and so on; but we must not consider any word of our God as a minor thing if by that expression is implied that it is of small importance. We must accept every single word of precept or prohibition or instruction as being what it ought to be, and neither to be diminished nor increased. We should not reason about the command of God as though it might be set aside or amended. He bids: we obey.
3. Furthermore, we must have faith in the Lords call upon us to obey. We, who are His chosen, redeemed from among men, called out from the rest of mankind, ought to feel that if no other ears hear the Divine call, our ears must hear it; and if no other heart obeys, our soul rejoices to do so.
4. Obedience arises out of a faith which is to us the paramount principle of action. The kind of faith which produces obedience is lord of the understanding, a royal faith. The true believer believes in God beyond all his belief in anything else and everything else.
II. THE KIND OF OBEDIENCE WHICH FAITH PRODUCES.
1. Genuine faith in God creates a prompt obedience. By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed. There was an immediate response to the command. Delayed obedience is disobedience.
2. Next, obedience should be exact. Abraham, when he was called to go out went out. That which the Lord commands we should do–just that, and not another thing of our own devising. Mind your jots and tittles with the Lords precepts. Attention to little things is a fine feature in obedience: it lies much more as to its essence in the little things than in the great ones.
3. And next, mark well that Abraham rendered practical obedience. The religion of mere brain and jaw does not amount to much. We want the religion of hands and feet. I remember a place in Yorkshire, years ago, where a good man said to me, We have a real good minister. I said, I am glad to hear it. Yes, he said; he is a fellow that preaches with his feet. Well, now, that is a capital thing if a preacher preaches with his feet by walking with God, and with his hands by working for God. He does well who glorifies God by where he goes and by what he does; he will excel fifty others who only preach religion with their tongues.
4. Next, faith produces a far-seeing obedience. Note this. Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance. How great a company would obey God if they were paid for it on the spot! Those who practise the obedience of faith look for the reward hereafter, and set the greatest store by it. To their faith alone the profit is exceeding great. To take up the cross will be to carry a burden, but it will also be to find rest.
5. Yet, remember that the obedience which comes of true faith is often bound to be altogether unreckoning and implicit; for it is written, He went out, not knowing whither he went. Even bad men will obey God when they think fit; but good men will obey when they know not what to think of it. It is not ours to judge the Lords command, but to follow it.
6. The obedience which faith produces must be continuous. Having commenced the separated life, Abraham continued to dwell in tents and sojourn in the land which was far from the place of his birth. His whole life may be thus summed up: By faith Abraham obeyed. He believed, and therefore walked before the Lord in a perfect way. Do not cultivate doubt, or you will soon cultivate disobedience. Set this up as your standard, and henceforth be this the epitome of your life–By faith he obeyed.
III. THE SORT OF LIFE WHICH WILL COME OF THIS FAITH AND OBEDIENCE.
1. It will be, in the first place, life without that great risk which else holds us in peril. A man runs a great risk when he steers himself. Rocks or no rocks, the peril lies in the helmsman. The believer is no longer the helmsman of his own vessel; he has taken a pilot on board. To believe in God, and to do His bidding, is a great escape from the hazards of personal weakness and folly. Providence is Gods business, obedience is ours. What harvest will come of our sowing we must leave with the Lord of the harvest; but we ourselves must look to the basket and the seed, and scatter our handfuls in the furrows without fail.
2. In the next place, we shall enjoy a life free from its heaviest cares. If we were in the midst of the wood, with Stanley, in the centre of Africa, our pressing care would be to find our way out; but when we have nothing to do but to obey, our road is mapped out for us. Jesus says, Follow Me; and this makes our way plain, and lifts from our shoulders a load of cares.
3. The way of obedience is a life of the highest honour. By faith we yield our intelligence to the highest intelligence: we are led, guided, directed; and we follow where our Lord has gone. Among His children, they are best who best know their Fathers mind, and yield to it the gladdest obedience. Should we have any other ambition, within the walls of our:Fathers house, than to be perfectly obedient children before Him and implicitly trustful towards Him?
4. But this is a kind of life which will bring communion with God. Obedient faith is the way to eternal life; nay, it is eternal life revealing itself.
5. The obedience of faith creates a form of life-which may be safely copied. As parents, we wish so to live that our children may copy us to their lasting profit. Children usually exaggerate their models; but there will be no fear of their going too far in faith or in obedience to the Lord.
6. Lastly, faith working obedience is a kind of life which needs great grace. Every careless professor will not live in this fashion. It will need watchfulness and prayer, and nearness to God, to maintain the faith which obeys in everything. He giveth more grace. The Lord will enable us to add to our faith all the virtues. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Abraham forsaking the world
I. THE RESULT OF ABRAHAMS FAITH, which we are now called upon to consider. There are three distinct points before us:
1. The first part of what is mentioned as the work of Abrahams faith, showing the Christian what he should give up.
2. What he should bear.
3. What he should live for. What had Abraham to give up? Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy fathers house. What a command! Consider what he had to forsake. And in the eyes of his family how absurd and fanciful must his scheme have been! But Abraham was supported by a certain hope. He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
Thus, then
1. Abraham gave up the world and endured hardships.
2. Lived on the hope of a future blessing, which he did receive.
3. And all this he did by faith.
II. AND NOW LET US APPLY ABRAHAMS CASE AND CONDUCT TO OUR OWN. First, then, what is the world you have to give up? It is the world, the objects to which we are drawn, the objects around us, which draw forth our sinful inclinations, which we are now to consider.
1. It depends upon different dispositions what becomes our world. To one man nature is his world: he has a mind to enjoy extremely the beauties and the works of nature. The feelings produced by a rich sunset or a beautiful view are his very religion; he gazes at the beauty of a flower till he thinks he worships the God who made it; he forgets the Creator in the creature, and mistakes the one for the other. Poetry is his religion, or sentiment, or some such natural feeling. Now suppose such a man called by duty, i.e. by God, to live in a place where he is cut off from all such objects of admiration, to live quietly and without excitement amid what are to him the dull realities of life, obliged to give up all his taste and refinement, and put up with quiet, dull, sober, everyday work–at least what is so to him naturally; and suppose this man refuses to do it, or lingers in doing it: he thinks if he gives up nature and his admiration that all his religion will go too. All his religion depended on a place, and nature is that mans world. It is what Abrahams family and home were to him, and if he refuse to desert it at the call of duty, he is not living above the world.
2. Again: in another man applause and praise is his world; he lives for this, and has lived for it all his life; every act of his life is governed by what men think of it. Now suppose such a man withdrawn from the sphere in which he had been admired, courted and flattered; suppose him called by duty to work in a sphere where his brightest acts would be unknown, and there would be none to admire even his most creditable denials; and suppose he hesitated to do this–then that mans world would be human applause.
3. Or again; to some men mere worldly success is their world, what they call getting on in life; they live for this; their whole views of right and wrong are almost bounded by their chance of success in their profession, their trade, their farm, their place.
4. But to some, like Abraham himself, their family is their world. If your family interfere with any single duty to God, that family is your world.
5. To others–in the common use of the word–pleasure is their world; society, whose only object it; is to gratify the sense or entertain the imagination. Good-natured society; dissipated society; intellectual society; idle society, whose object it is to pass away the dull hours of life by the empty reading of novels, or by lounging in listless carelessness through the precious fleeting hours of time. Ambitious society, whose great object it is to surpass each other in display of wealth.
6. To some, activity is a kind of world.
7. To some a particular set of circumstances connected with religion is their world, a particular minister, whom they almost worship, particular religious friends, whose word, with them, would almost surmount the authority of Scripture. This, then, is what he must do and give up for Christs sake and the gospels. The believer must show forth his faith, like Abraham, by forsaking and coming out from the world.
III. AND UNDER THIS WHAT IS THE CHRISTIANS HOPE?
IV. BUT ALL THIS IS THE RESULT OF FAITH. By faith Abraham gave up the world and rested on future promises. And by faith you must give up the world and rest on future promises. For example
1. If your world is the admiration of nature, of trees and hills, and the objects of the earth around you; then, if called by duty to cease to spend days in contemplating these, to work in a line which to you is dull and uninteresting, faith helps you by opening your eyes to see a world where are objects like those you yield, which you shall enjoy freely hereafter; where are hills without their toil, suns without their burning, trees without their dying, flowers without their fading, nature unstained by sin, unvisited by death, in the very presence of death for ever.
2. If your world is the praise of man, you are called to give it up; faith offers you the praise of God instead, the approval of your Saviour.
3. If your world is success m your earthly calling, and you are called by conscience to resign hopes of high success here, faith points through the veil of humiliation to the everlasting hills, where you shall reign as kings and priests for ever.
4. If your world is your family, whose affections God calls you willingly and cheerfully to resign, faith points to a re-union in heaven.
5. If your world is society, with its vain, empty, delusive, dissipating pleasure, faith points you to a society whose whole object is God, whose whole religion is praise, and whose whole will is obedience; a society of angels and saints, gathered from the earliest ages, and purified by the influence of the Spirit.
6. If your world is activity, and passive suffering to the call of God, faith offers a field of active service before God for ever.
7. If your world is a particular sphere of religious circumstances, faith points you to God, and bids you trust in Him, not in man. (E. Monro.)
Self-renunciation at the call of God
I. It becomes the infinite greatness, and all-satisfactory goodness of God, at the very first revelation of Himself unto any of His creatures, TO REQUIRE OF THEM RENUNCIATION OF ALL OTHER THINGS, AND OF THEIR INTEREST IN THEM, IN COMPLIANCE WITH HIS COMMANDS.
II. THE POWER OF SOVEREIGN GRACE, IN CALLING MEN TO GOD, AND THE MIGHTY EFFICACY OF FAITH COMPLYING THEREWITH.
III. IT IS THE CALL OF GOD ALONE THAT MAKES A DISTINCTION AMONGST MANKIND, AS UNTO FAITH AND OBEDIENCE, WITH ALL THE EFFECTS OF THEM. Abraham thus believed and obeyed God, because he was called. And he was called, not because he was better, or wiser than others, but because it pleased God to call him and not others (1Co 1:26-31).
IV. THE CHURCH OF BELIEVERS CONSISTS OF THOSE THAT ARE CALLED OUT OF THE WORLD. The call of Abraham is a pattern of the call of the Church Psa 45:10; 2Co 6:17-18).
V. SELF-DENIAL IN FACT OR RESOLUTION, IS THE FOUNDATION OF ALL SINCERE PROFESSION. Abraham began his profession in the practice of this, and proceeded unto the height of it in the greatest instances imaginable. And the instruction that our Saviour gives herein (Mat 10:37-38; Mat 16:24-25), amounts but unto this–If you intend to have the faith of Abraham, with the fruits and blessings attending it, you must lay the foundation of it in the relinquishment of all things, if called thereunto, as he did.
VI. THERE IS NO RIGHT, TITLE, OR POSSESSION, THAT CAN PRESCRIBE AGAINST THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD; IN THE DISPOSAL OF ALL INHERITANCES HERE BELOW AT HIS PLEASURE.
VII. GODS GRANT OF THINGS UNTO ANY, IS THE BEST OF TITLES, AND MOST SURE AGAINST ALL PRETENCES OR IMPEACHMENTS (Jdg 11:24).
VIII. POSSESSION BELONGS UNTO AN INHERITANCE ENJOYED. This God gave unto Abraham in his posterity, with a mighty hand, and stretched out arm; and He divided it unto them by lot.
IX. AN INHERITANCE MAY BE GIVEN ONLY FOR A LIMITED SEASON. The title unto it may be continued unto a prefixed period. So was it with this inheritance; for although it is called an everlasting inheritance, yet it was so only on two accounts.
1. That it was typical of that heavenly inheritance which is eternal.
2. Because, as unto right and title, it was to be continued unto the end of that limited perpetuity which God granted unto the church-state in that land; that is, unto the coming of the promised Seed, in whom all nations should be blessed; which the call and faith of Abraham did principally regard.
X. THAT IT IS FAITH ALONE THAT GIVES THE SOUL SATISFACTION IN FUTURE REWARDS, IN THE MIDST OF PRESENT DIFFICULTIES AND DISTRESSES. So it did to Abraham, who, in the whole course of his pilgrimage, attained nothing of this promised inheritance.
XI. THE ASSURANCE GIVEN US BY DIVINE PROMISES IS SUFFICIENT TO ENCOURAGE US TO ADVANCE IN THE MOST DIFFICULT COURSE OF OBEDIENCE. (John Owen, D. D.)
I. THE HARD TASK TO WHICH ABRAHAM WAS CALLED.
Faith the power for severing old ties
1. It involved painful separation from the past.
2. It involved the risk of being misunderstood in the present.
3. It involved great uncertainty for the future.
II. THE SIMPLE FAITH BY WHICH THIS HARD TASK WAS FULFILLED.
1. This faith was based on a Divine call.
2. Sustained by abundant promises.
3. Expressed by absolute surrender.
III. THE WONDERFUL BLESSING TO WHICH THIS SIMPLE FAITH LED. What came of this act of obedience? All the blessedness the world has ever had. (C. New.)
Abrahams prompt obedience to the call of God
I. WHAT WAS ABRAHAMS SPECIAL EXPERIENCE WHICH LED TO HIS BECOMING SO REMARKABLE A SAINT?
1. He had a call.
2. He obeyed it.
3. He obeyed it because he believed God.
II. WHAT WAS THERE PECULIAR IN ABRAHAMS CONDUCT?
1. That he was willing to be separated from his kindred.
2. That he was ready for all the losses and risks that might be involved in obedience to the call of God.
3. That he waived the present for the future.
4. That he committed himself to God by faith.
5. What he did was done at once.
III. THE RESULT OF ABRAHAMS ACTION. Did it pay? That is the inquiry of most people, and within proper bounds it is not a wrong question. Our reply is, it did so gloriously. True, it brought him into a world of trouble, and no wonder: such a noble course as his was not likely to be an easy one. What grand life ever was easy? Who wants to be a child and do easy things? Yet we read in Abrahams life, after a whole host of troubles, And Abraham was old and well stricken in years, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things. That is a splendid conclusion–God had blessed Abraham in all things. Whatever happened, he had always been under the Divine smile, and all things had worked for his good. He was parted from his friends, but then he had the sweet society of his God, and was treated as the friend of the Most High, and allowed to intercede for others, and clothed with power on their behalf. What honour, also, the patriarch had among his contemporaries; he was a great man, and held in high esteem. How splendidly he bore himself; no king ever behaved more royally. His image passes across the page of history rather like that of a spirit from the supernal realms than that of a mere mad; he is so thorough, so childlike, and therefore so heroic. He lived in God, and on God, and with God. Such a sublime life recompensed a thousandfold all the sacrifice he was led to make. Was not his life a happy one? One might wisely say, Let my life be like that of Abraham. As to temporal things the Lord enriched him, and in spirituals he was richer still. He was wealthier in heart than in substance, though great even in that respect. This very day, through his matchless seed, to whom be glory for ever and ever, even Jesus Christ of the seed of Abraham, all tribes of men are blessed. His life was, both for time and for eternity, a great success; both for temporals and for spirituals the path of faith was the best that he could have followed. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Adventuring for God:
We can hardly read those words without at once thinking how all this common life around us would be both simplified and made noble if men generally, in laying out their plans and carrying on their ordinary work, were moved and guided in the same Divine way!–i.e., if they inquired first, at every important decision, every new start and every new turn in the road, where their Lord called them to go; and then, leaving all other questions aside, were to go straight on, no matter what comfort, like the familiar country that the patriarch was leaving, they might be obliged to give up, and no matter how untried or bleak the regions before. I suppose one chief hindrance to its having this effect on most of us will be the difficulty of our realising that, with respect to each one of us, in our personal insignificance, God just as truly has a plan and a particular place, both of work and of communion, as He had for Abraham or Moses, for Enoch or Samuel, for St. John or St. Paul, for any hero or any saint. But He has. Ours may not be so high a place or so much honoured with usefulness as theirs. We have no concern with that; but the whole tenor of our Christian religion tells us our place is there; that when He created us God designed each one, in every station of society, of either sex, in all kinds of employment, for a particular service in His Church, in His family on earth, and in His heaven for ever. You may forfeit it by not believing in it, and by trying to live and die for yourself; God may hereafter fill up the vacancy and finish the full harmony of His heavenly multitude by the river of life without you. But in the millions of wayward lives entangled with each other He will never for one instant lose sight of the thread of yours. He formed you with a loving intention, and all His affection and mercy to the rest have not diminished a particle His affection and mercy for you. Next observe the large meaning of one small word–the word out. This faithful man was called to go out, and he went out. We are to draw from that a new inference, viz., that in his journeying one place did not look to him just like another, equally attractive and desirable. On the contrary, between the past and the future there was a contrast. What he must leave behind is familiar; what he must turn toward is strange. What he must leave behind is known, tried and safe and agreeable; what he must encounter is hazardous. Going out implies a giving up of something like a home, with the warm, bright, sheltering, endearing attributes always associated with that beloved name. Within are security and comfort; without are exposure, peril, sacrifice. Here, then, is a new rule for the Christian life. Where that life is regenerate, what a Christian life ought to be, fulfilling the gospel idea, it does not merely run on from one scene to another on the same level, nor does it consist in merely moving about through the routine of aa easy experience without progress, without trying new difficulties, gaining greater heights, or by fresh sacrifices coming into a closer and more spiritual sympathy with Christ. Every step needs faith in God, faith in the better country to come, faith in the end to be reached, or else he would look back and perhaps sink down in the road. Take in, then, with this another strong element in the doctrine of the text–the superiority, in this going forward of the disciple after his Lord, of faith over knowledge. We knew the low country we left by eyesight, by the senses, or the intellect; but what lay before was always unknown, invisible, a land of promise, only believed in. In all our approaches to God, in making up our minds to come out on Christs side in an open confession, in baptism in maturer years, in coming to be confirmed, in every victory over the evils of the world, we cannot depend merely on the understanding. He went out, not knowing whither he went. That was the crown and the glory of his obedience. He did know who tailed him, and in whom he believed, and that was enough. It might seem, at first sight, in reading this passage, as if the principal stress were laid on the obedience. And then some of you who are more advanced in the higher privileges of the gospel, and accustomed to> discriminate in spiritual matters, might say: No; obedience is a low and elementary stage; obedience is of the law; we are not under the law, but under grace; we are not Jews; Christ has come, and it is the faith and love which go out to Him for what He is in the beauty of His holiness, and what He has done for us in the atonement of the Cross, that constitute the special advantage of our position in the Christian Church. Nothing can be more true than this. The whole object of this chapter is to celebrate, not the bare keeping of commandments, but faith in the invisible, and the glory of acting freely with reference to the absolute God rather than present profits, or any outward reward. Hence it runs all through the passage that there are two kinds of obedience, not distinguished from each other by the outward appearance of the obedient action–for this may be precisely the same in the two cases–but by the motive which prompts the obedience, or the feeling that impels us to act as we do. Two different kinds of character are produced by these two sorts of obedience. One is the obedience of calculation; the other is the obedience of faith. (Bp. F. D. Huntington.)
Abrahams faith:
What did God mean to teach Abraham, by calling him out of his country, and telling him, I will make of thee a great nation? I think He meant to show him, for one thing, that that Babel plan of society was utterly absurd and accursed, certain to come to nought, and so to lead him on to hope for a city which had foundations, and to see that its builder and maker must be, not the selfishness or the ambition of men, but the will, and the wisdom, and providence of God. Let us see how God led Abraham on to understand this–to look for a city which had foundations; in short, to understand what a state and a nation means and ought to be. First, God taught him that he was not to cling, coward-like, to the place where he was born, but to go out boldly to colonise and subdue the earth, for the great God of heaven would protect and guide him. Again: God taught him what a nation was: I will make of thee a great nation. As much as to say, Never fancy, as those fools at Babel did, that a nation only means a great crowd of people–never fancy that men can make themselves into a nation just by feeding altogether, and breeding altogether, and fighting altogether, as the herds of wild cattle and sheep do, while there is no real union between them. For what brought those Bable men together? Just what keeps a herd of cattle together–selfishness and fear. Each man thought he would be safer forsooth in company. Each man thought that if he was in company he could use his neighbours wits as well as his own, and have the benefit of his neighbours strength as well as his own. And that is all true enough; but that does not make a nation. Selfishness can join nothing; it may join a set of men for a time, each for his own ends, just as a joint-stock company is made up; but it will soon split them up again. Each man, in a merely selfish community, will begin, after a time, to play on his own account, as well as work on his own account–to oppress and over-reach for his own ends, as well as to be honest and benevolent for his own ends, for he will find ill-doing far easier and more natural, in one senses and a plan that brings in quicker profits, than well-doing; and so this godless, loveless, every-man-for-himself nation, or sham nation, rather, this joint-stock company, in which fools expect that universal selfishness will do the work of universal benevolence, will quarrel and break up, crumble to dust again, as Babel did. But, says God to Abraham, I will make of thee a great nation. I make nations, and not they themselves. So it is: this is the lesson which God taught Abraham, the lesson which we English must learn nowadays over again, or smart for it bitterly–that God makes nations. The Psalms set forth the Son of God as the King of all nations. In Him all the nations of the earth are truly blessed. He the Saviour of a few individual souls only? God forbid! To Him all power is given in heaven and earth; by Him were all things created, whether in heaven or earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers; all national life, all forms of government, whether hero-despotisms, republics, or monarchies, aristocracies of birth, or of wealth, or of talent–all were created by Him, and for Him, and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist and hold together. Believe me, it takes long years, too, and much training from God and from Christ, the King of kings, to make a nation. Everything which is most precious great is also most slow in growing, and so is a nation. But again: God said to Abraham, when He had led him into this far country, Unto thy seed will I give this land. This was a great and a new lesson for Abraham, that the earth belonged to that same great invisible God who had promised to guide and protect him, and make him into a nation–that this same God gave the earth to whomsoever He would, and allotted to each people their proper portion of it. How this must have taught Abraham that the rights of property were sacred things–things appointed by God; that it was an awful and heinous sin to make wanton war on other people, to drive them out and take possession of their land; that it was not mere force or mere fancy which gave men a right to a country, but the providence of Almighty God! Now, Abraham needed this warning, for the men of Babel seem from the first to have gone on the plan of driving out and conquering the tribes around them. Now, in Gen 14:1-24. there is an account of Abrahams being called on to put in practice what he had learnt, and, by doing so, learning a fresh lesson. We read of four kings making war against five kings, against Chedorlaomer, king of Elam or Persia, who had been following the nays of Nimrod and the men of Babel, and conquering these foreign kings and making them serve him. We read of Chedorlaomer and four other kings coming down and wantonly destroying other countries, besides the five kings who had rebelled against them, and at last carrying off captive the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot, Abrahams nephew. We read then how Abraham armed his trained servants, both in his own house, three hundred and eighteen men, and pursued after these tyrants and plunderers, and with his small force completely overthrew that great army. Now, that was a sign and a lesson to Abraham, as much as to say, See the fruits of having the great God of heaven and earth for your protector and your guide; see the fruits of having men round you, not hirelings, keeping in your company just to see what they can get by it, but born in your own house, who love and trust you, whom you can love and trust; see how the favour of God, and reverence for those family ties and duties which He has appointed, make you and your little band of faithful men superior to those great mobs of selfish, godless, unjust robbers; see how hundreds of these slaves ran away before one man, who feels that he is a member of a family, and has a just cause for fighting, and that God and his brethren are with him. Now, as sure as God made Abraham a great nation, so if we English are a great nation, God has made us so; as sure as God gave Abraham the land of Canaan for his possession, so did He give us this land of England, when He brought our Saxon forefathers out of the wild barren north, and drove out before them nations greater and mightier than they, and gave them great and goodly cities which they builded not, and wells digged which they digged not, farms and gardens which they planted not, that we too might fear the Lord our God, and serve Him, and swear by His name; as sure as He commanded Abraham to respect the property of his neighbours, so has He commanded us; as sure as God taught Abraham that the nation which was to grow from him owed a duty to God, and could be only strong by faith in God, so it is with us: we English people owe a duty to God, and are to deal among ourselves, and with foreign countries, by faith in God, and in the fear of God, seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, sure that then all other things–victory, health, commerce, art, and science–will be added to us. (C. Kingsley, M. A.)
The spiritual production and practical development of true religion
I. THE SPIRITUAL PRODUCTION OF TRUE RELIGION.
1. Divine sovereignty.
2. Special revelation.
3. Earnest faith.
II. THE PRACTICAL DEVELOPMENT OF REAL RELIGION.
1. Renunciation of old mode of life.
2. Adoption of new.
(1) Implicit trust in God.
(2) Conscious strangeness on earth.
(3) Glorious prospect. (Homilist.)
Faith making light of present privations
I. GODS PEOPLE ARE OFTEN CALLED TO STRANGE PRIVATIONS.
1. One hard feature of these privations was that they had come in the way of obedience to God.
2. Moreover, they seemed to involve unfulfilled promise on Gods part.
II. THESE PRIVATIONS ARE, HOWEVER, ACCOMPANIED WITH BRIGHT PROSPECTS.
1. The present and visible does not limit our history.
2. The future will be as good as even God can make it.
3. In that future the delayed promises will be fulfilled, and the fruit of present obedience and discipline enjoyed.
III. FAITH DWELLING ON THIS PROSPECT CAN ENDURE THE PRIVATIONS.
1. Assuring us of this future, faith gives songs in present trouble. With the joy of hope we can sing as we suffer.
2. Lifting us unto this future, faith dwarfs present need. The sufferings of the present time are not worthy, &c.
3. Showing us the possibilities of this future; faith endures present discipline. Discipline is to make the future greater. These light afflictions work for us a far more, &c. While we look, &c. Conclusion: Feed and exercise this faith that it may grow. By it often climb the mount and see the land that is very far off. (C. New.)
Abrahams faith and pilgrimage
I. THE OBJECT OF ABRAHAMS DESIRE: A city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. This was the view under which the future state was presented to him; and it suggests
1. The immortality of its inhabitants. The city hath foundations, and shall evermore endure.
2. The changelessness of its enjoyments. This is also intimated by the term foundations. Its happiness is permanent.
3. The glory of the state. Whose Builder is God, that is, in a special sense. It displays, in a peculiar degree, His power, wisdom, and goodness.
4. Common participation. There is society. This multiplies happiness to angels and saints.
5. Perfect moral order. Whose Maker is God.
II. PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS WHICH THIS SINGULAR, BUT INSTRUCTIVE, CONDUCT OF ABRAHAM SUGGESTS. He chose the pilgrims life, and dwelt in tents rather than inhabit a city on earth.
1. We are taught by this conduct of Abraham the true ground of the eminent piety of Gods ancient saints.
2. We are taught to regulate our choice in life by our superior regard to the interests of the soul.
3. We are taught a noble indifference to the accommodation of our pilgrimage.
4. We are taught to be willing to make sacrifices for the religious good of others. (R. Watson.)
Abrahams faith
I. Where faith enables men to live unto God, as unto their eternal concerns, IT WILL ENABLE THEM TO TRUST UNTO HIM IN ALL THE DIFFICULTIES, dangers, and hazards of this life. To pretend a trust in God as unto our souls and invisible things, and not resign our temporal concerns with patience and quietness unto His disposal, is a vain pretence.
II. If we design to have an interest in the blessing of Abraham, WE MUST WALK IN THE STEPS OF THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM. Firm affiance in the promises for grace, mercy, and eternal salvation, trust in His providence for preservation and protection in this world, with a cheerful resignation of all our temporal and eternal concerns unto His disposal, according to the tenor of the covenant, are required hereunto.
III. WHERE FAITH IS ONCE DULY FIXED ON THE PROMISES, IT WILL WAIT PATIENTLY UNDER TRIALS, AFFLICTIONS, AND TEMPTATIONS, FOR THEIR FULL ACCOMPLISHMENT; as did that of Abraham, which is here celebrated.
IV. FAITH DISCERNING ARIGHT THE GLORY OF SPIRITUAL PROMISES, WILL MAKE THE SOUL OF A BELIEVER CONTENTED AND WELL SATISFIED WITH THE SMALLEST PORTION OF EARTHLY ENJOYMENTS, &C. (John Owen, D. D.)
On travelling
There is a time when a man may leave his own country and travel into strange countries, yet great circumspection is to be had in it.
1. A man must be called to it: we must do nothing without a calling. Not as if every one should expect such a calling as Abraham had by Gods immediate voice. We have our callings, but mediate. If a man be employed in an ambassadage to a foreign prince, he hath a calling to leave his country for a time. If a man cannot live in his own country, and can more conveniently maintain himself and his charge in another, he may go to it, so as he make not shipwreck of religion. If a man abound in wealth, and be desirous of tongues, arts, and sciences in another country, he hath a calling to it.
2. We must take heed that our families in the mean season be not neglected. He that careth not for them of his house is worse than an infidel. A man under pretext of travelling may not run away from his wife and children.
3. We must have no sinister respect in it. We must not make travelling a cloak to cover theft, murder, adultery, and other gross and notorious vices. God can find us out in all places; for whither shall we fly from His presence?
4. We must not imagine our travelling to be meritorious, as pilgrimages were in former times.
5. Let us take heed in travelling that we travel not away faith and good conscience; wheresoever we become, let us keep ourselves undefiled of the superstitions and corruptions that be in other countries. Let us keep our religion safe and sound, that the least crack be not found in it. Travelling is a dangerous thing. Let us not take it on us unless we be some way or other called to it, as Abraham was. (W. Jones, D. D.)
The illusiveness of life
I. GODS PROMISES NEVER ARE FULFILLED IN THE SENSE IN WHICH THEY SEEM TO HIVE BEEN GIVEN. Life is a deception; its anticipations, which are Gods promises to the imagination, are never realised; they who know life best, and have trusted God most to fill it with blessings, are ever the first to say that life is a series of disappointments. And in the spirit of this text we have to say that it is a wise and merciful arrangement which ordains it thus. Abraham had a few feet of earth, obtained by purchase–beyond that nothing; he died a stranger and a pilgrim in the land. Isaac had a little. So small was Jacobs hold upon his country that the last years of his life were spent in Egypt, and he died a foreigner in a strange land. His descendants came into the land of Canaan, expecting to find it a land flowing with milk and honey; they found hard work to do–war and unrest, instead of rest and peace. During one brief period in the history of Israel the promise may seem to have been fulfilled. It was during the later years of David and the earlier years of Solomon; but we have the warrant of Scripture itself for affirming that even then the promise was not fulfilled. In the Book of Psalms David speaks of a hope of entering into a future rest. They who believe that the Jews will be restored to their native land, expect it on the express ground that Canaan has never been actually and permanently theirs. A certain tract of country–three hundred miles in length, by two hundred in breadth–must be given, or else they think the promise has been broken. To quote the expression of one of the most eloquent of their writers, If there be nothing yet future for Israel, then the magnificence of the promise has been lost in the poverty of its accomplishment. I do not quote this to prove the correctness of the interpretation of the prophecy, but as an acknowledgment which may be taken so far as a proof, that the promise made to Abraham has never been accomplished. And such is lifes disappointment. Its promise is, you shall have a Canaan; it turns out to be a baseless, airy dream–toil and warfare–nothing that we can call our own; not the land of rest, by any means. But we will examine this in particulars.
1. Our senses deceive us; we begin life with delusion. Our senses deceive us with respect to distance, shape, and colour. That which afar off seems oval turns out to be circular, modified by the perspective of distance; that which appears a speck, upon nearer approach becomes a vast body. All experience is a correction of lifes delusions–a modification, a reversal of the judgment of the senses: and all life is a lesson on the falsehood of appearances.
2. Our natural anticipations deceive us–I say natural in contradistinction to extravagant expectations. Every human life is a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realised. There may be differences of character in these hopes; finer spirits may look on life as the arena of successful deeds, the more selfish as a place of personal enjoyment. With man the turning-point of life may be a profession–with woman, marriage; the one gilding the future with the triumphs of intellect, the other with the dreams of affection; but in every case life is not what any of them expects, but something else. It would almost seem a satire on existence to compare the youth in the outset of his career, flushed and sanguine, with the aspect of the same being when it is nearly done–worn, sobered, covered with the dust of life, and confessing that its days have been few and evil. Where is the land flowing with milk and honey? With our affections it is still worse, because they promise more. Mans affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan–the tents of a night; not permanent habitations even for this life. Where are the charms of character, the perfection, and the purity, and the truthfulness, which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of our own conceptions–our creative shaping intellect projected its own fantasies on him: and hence we outgrow our early friendships; outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in the land of promise. Life is an unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.
3. Our expectations, resting on revelation, deceive us. The worlds history has turned round two points of hope; one, the first, the other, the second coming of the Messiah. The magnificent imagery of Hebrew prophecy had described the advent of the Conqueror; He came–a root out of a dry ground, with no form or comeliness; and when they saw Him there was no beauty in Him that they should desire Him. The victory, predicted in such glowing terms, turned out to be the victory of submission–the law of our humanity, which wins by gentleness and love. The promise in the letter was unfulfilled. For ages the worlds hope has been the Second Advent. The early Church expected it in their own day. We, which are alive, and remain until the coming of our Lord. The Saviour Himself had said, This generation shall not pass till all things be fulfilled. Yet the Son of Man has never come; or rather, He has been ever coming. Unnumbered times the judgment eagles have gathered together over corruption ripe for condemnation. Times innumerable the separation has been made between good and bad. The promise has not been fulfilled, or it has been fulfilled, but in either case anticipation has been foiled and disappointed. There are two ways of considering this aspect of life. One is the way of sentiment; the other is the way of faith. The sentimental way is trite enough. Saint, sage, sophist, moralist, and preacher, have repeated in every possible image, till there is nothing new to say, that life is a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm. The other is the way of faith: the ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of its promises; they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralise on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so. They felt that all was right; they knew that the promise itself had a deeper meaning; they looked undauntedly for a city which hath foundations.
II. THE MEANING OF THIS DELUSIVENESS.
1. It serves to allure us on. Could a man see his route before him–a fiat, straight road, unbroken by bush, or tree, or eminence, with the suns heat burning down upon it, stretched out in dreary monotony–he could scarcely find energy to begin his task; but the uncertainty of what may be seen beyond the next turn keeps expectation alive. The view that may be seen from yonder summit–the glimpse that may be caught, perhaps, as the road winds round yonder knoll–hopes like these, not far distant, beguile the traveller on from mile to mile, and from league to league. In fact, life is an education. The object for which you educate your son is to give him strength of purpose, self-command, discipline of mental energies; but you do not reveal to your son this aim of his education; you tell him of his place in his class, of the prizes at the end of the year, of the honours to be given at college. These are not the true incentives to knowledge; such incentives are not the highest–they are even mean, and partially injurious; yet these mean incentives stimulate and lead on, from day to day and from year to year, by a process the principle of which the boy himself is not aware of. So does God lead on, through lifes unsatisfying and false reward, ever educating: Canaan first; then the hope of a Redeemer; then the millennial glory.
2. This non-fulfilment of promise fulfils it in a deeper way. The account we have given already, were it to end there, would be insufficient to excuse the failure of lifes promise; by saying that it allures us would be really to charge God with deception. Now, life is not deception, but illusion. We distinguish between illusion and delusion. We may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron, or marble; this is delusion: but you may paint a picture, in which rocks, trees, and sky are never mistaken for what they seem, yet produce all the emotion which real rocks, trees, and sky would produce. This is illusion, and this is the painters art: never for one moment to deceive by attempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which the feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves would create. Let us take an instance drawn from life. To a child a rainbow is a real thing–substantial and palpable; its limb rests on the side of yonder hill; he believes that he can appropriate it to himself; and when, instead of gems and gold hid in its radiant bow, he finds nothing but damp mist–cold, dreary drops of disappointment–that disappointment tells that his belief has been delusion. To the educated man that bow is a blessed illusion, yet it never once deceives; he does not take it for what it is not, he does not expect to make it his own; he feels its beauty as much as the child could feel it, nay, infinitely more–more even from the fact that he knows that it will be transient; but besides and beyond this, to him it presents a deeper loveliness; he knows the laws of light, and the laws of the human soul which gave it being. He has linked it with the laws of the universe, and with the invisible mind of God; and it brings to him a thrill of awe, and the sense of a mysterious, nameless beauty, of which the child did not conceive. It is illusion still; but it has fulfilled the promise. In the realm of spirit, in the temple of the soul, it is the same. All is illusion; but we look for a city which hath foundations; and in this the promise is fulfilled. And such was Canaan to the Israelites. To some doubtless it was delusion. They expected to find their reward in a land of milk and honey. They were bitterly disappointed, and expressed their disappointment loudly enough in their murmurs against Moses, and their rebellion against his successors. But to others, as to Abraham, Canaan was the bright illusion which never deceived, but for ever shone before as the type of something more real. And even taking the promise literally, though they built in tents, and could not call a foot of land their own, was not its beauty theirs? Were not its trellised vines, and glorious pastures, and rich olive-fields, ministers to the enjoyment of those who had all in God, though its milk, and oil, and honey, could not be enjoyed with exclusiveness of appropriation? Yet over and above and beyond this, there was a more blessed fulfilment of the promise; there was a city which had foundations–built and made by God–toward which the anticipation of this Canaan was leading them. The kingdom of God was forming in their souls, for ever disappointing them by the unreal, and teaching them that what is spiritual and belongs to mind and character alone can be eternal. (F. W. Robertson, M. A.)
Mysteriousness of life
It is not unusual for captains to receive their commands from their country to set sail, especially in times of war and danger, knowing not their destination. They cannot open their commission, perhaps, until they have reached a solitary, silent part of the great ocean. And we sail under sealed orders; we all go out not knowing whither we go. (E. P. Hood.)
Reason may hinder faith
I suppose you will all say that if a man were able to go a journey of two or three hundred miles a-foot, he were a very good footman; yet if you will tie him to carry a child of four or five years old with him, you will say it would be a great luggage to him; and the man would say, Pray, let this child be left alone; for though he may run along in my hand half a mile, or go a mile with me, yet notwithstanding I must carry him the rest of the way; and when I come at any great water, or have to go over any hill, I must take him upon my back, and that will be a great burden to me. Thus it is between faith and reason. Reason at the best is but a child to faith. Faith can foot it over mountains and difficulties, and wade through afflictions, though they be very wide; but when reason comes to any affliction, to wade through that and to go over some great difficulties, then it cries out, and says, Oh Faith, good Faith, go back again; good Faith, go back again. No, says Faith, but I will take thee upon my back, Reason. And so Faith is fain to do, indeed, to take Reason upon its back. But oh, what a luggage is Reason to Faith! Faith never works better than when it works most alone. The mere rational considering of the means, and the deadness thereof, is a great and special enemy to the work of believing. (William Bridge.)
Faith stimulating endeavour
See the spider casting out her film to the gale; she feels persuaded that somewhere or other it will adhere and form the commencement of her web. She commits the slender filament to the breeze, believing that there is a place provided for it to fix itself. In this fashion should we believingly cast forth our endeavours in this life, confident that God will find a place for us. He who bids us pray and work will aid our efforts and guide us in His providence in a right way. Sit not still in despair, O son of toil, but again cast out the floating thread of hopeful endeavour, and the wind of love will bear it to its resting-place.
The tent life:
The tent life will always be the natural one for those who feel that their mother country is beyond the stars. We should be like the wandering Swiss, who hear in a strange land the rude old melody that used to echo among the Alpine pastures. The sweet sad tones kindle home sickness that will not let them rest: no matter where they are, or what they are doing, no matter what honour they have carved out for themselves with their swords, they throw off the livery of the alien king which they have worn, and turning their backs upon pomp and courts, seek the free air of the mountains, and find home better than a place by a foreign throne. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
A city which hath foundations
The way to the city:
There are some men who are like the patriarch Abraham in this–they have no fixed dwelling-place in the earth. They go from one city to another at the different seasons of the year, arranging to come to each just at the season of its highest bloom. This is thought to be a pleasant, but it is a very poor way of spending life. Men who are always seeking pleasure are never happy. They soon wear all freshness out of their hearts. Better far be at the hardest work all the year round than be such a man. In the intervals of work, however, it is a good thing to see, as one can, the famous cities of the world. It is a relief to leave the well-known streets and the scenes of accustomed occupation for a time; and some expansion of the mind is attained amid the new and varied scenes which come into view. Now, suppose a man on pilgrimage going through a number of such cities, and coming at last of purpose to the best. May we not suppose such a man pausing and saying, Is this all? Have I seen the strongest that man can build, the fairest that he can paint? Is there no other city which I have not seen, no fairer lands than those which I have traversed? I have been refreshed, I am thankful; but alas for my immortality if this be all! Could you not suppose such a man, at such a time, rejoicing in the privilege of taking his place beside Abraham, and looking for a city which hath foundations?
I. THE CITY. How far we are to carry forward the ideas which we have about a city on earth, and fix them on that celestial place which God has prepared for the dwelling of His people through all eternity, it is difficult to say. It is with this as it is with the natural and spiritual body: there is a resemblance and yet a difference. To transfer our ideas just as they are, without purification or expansion, would be to vulgarise and degrade heaven. But to rise by their means to higher ideas like them, is just what the teaching of Scripture enables us to do. A city. Let us thank God for that word–or these: a country, a better country, that is, an heavenly. How do these familiar terms fill up for us the dim and vast obscure I They make a home for our wandering thoughts. They give an answer to our wondering inquiries.
1. This city is very ancient. Not the plan of it merely in Divine thought, nor parts of it merely in course of construction, but the whole city was built and finished, and Abraham journeyed to it through the quietness of the patriarchal days, just as a man now might journey to Paris or Rome.
2. This city is very strong and stable. It hath foundations. It is designedly put in contrast with those frail and movable structures in which Abraham dwelt during his pilgrimage. And what a contrast with the strongest cities and securest abodes of men! Nature and time wear down all mans works. As soon as a house is finished, it begins to vanish away. As soon as a tower is erected, it begins to decay. Man is still weaker than his house. His outward man is perishing far more rapidly than walls and towns, and rooms and pictures. It is to a being mortal in himself, and dwelling thus amid things, that this grand vision is revealed of a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
3. This city is all built by God. He is Architect and Artificer. He designs and builds. How grand is this conception of heaven as the masterpiece of Divine skill! a meet dwellingplace for those who have been cleansed and perfected by the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
II. THE WAY to the city. The way to the city is to look for it, to expect it. It is the way of faith. Without faith, showing itself by a life-long looking, we have no interest in the place. If we do not look, we reject the whole. This is the way in which heaven is lost to innumerable multitudes. The heart, the soul is in the look, and where a man looks his soul will go. A whole city for a look! Only it must be the look of the whole soul, continued through the whole life, until the city appears. There are those who would be willing enough to think themselves into a celestial city, to speculate concerning a future life, its probable scenes and characteristics, and then to have it as their fancy had feigned. That is not the way to the city. There are those who would be very willing to buy themselves into it. They would give a great many religious services, much money, and some suffering to get there. Neither is that the way to the city. It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. They cannot discern it by knowledge. They may measure and weigh the heavenly bodies with the lines and balances of their thought; they may analyse those beams of light which are shot down on us, and describe the chemistry of the stars; but after they have said all, and told all they know, there is still no sign of the city. They cannot win it by strength. Men do not ascend the snowy summits of the mountains, and then go up to a nobler world. Alas! they all go downwards–down, down to the grave. They cannot win it by merit. Do men so live in this world that they would be justified in saying, We do not need to look beyond this life. There must be another world prepared for us, and we can well afford to wait for the day of entrance? Benjamin Franklin said, As this world was all prepared for me before I came here, so the world to which I am going will be ready when I go there. But there is a fallacy in this reasoning; it is to place a man who has lived responsibly, who has, of his own will, chosen good or evil for threescore years, in the same category as an infant who has never lived at all. God has said that this is the way to the city, the way of the faith-look; and if we are to be wise, we must walk in this way, on and on, until the city comes in sight. This looking is the whole soul acting in faith, rising in desire, answering to the word and assurance of God in reference to the life to come. No test of a mans state could be deeper or truer than this, and therefore it is good and worthy Of God to make faith the condition of salvation, and to give a city of eternal glory for a life-long look. (A. Raleigh, D. D.)
The hope of Abraham:
It is an interesting fact, that though Abraham was selected by Providence to be the head of a great nation, and though he had in those days of his much cattle and a great company of dependents, yet he had no special or particular home in the land he traversed. His habitation was a tent, like that of the traveller of the desert; and this he pitched in the land of promise, as a pilgrim in a strange country. The reason given by the apostle for this conduct is expressed in the words, He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. Here we have the object of the patriarchs faith; and in considering it briefly, let us notice a few of its peculiar features, as well as the nature of his faith itself.
I. OBSERVE IT IS A CITY OF DIVINE ORIGIN.
1. Abraham may not have had any mysterious vision of this city as St. John had of the heavenly Jerusalem, described in the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation. But it is possible that he might have thought of that which is distinguished by the peculiar advantages of a city; such as a central spot of splendour, of security, of unity, in which the tribes of earth could meet together in social harmony and friendship; and, lastly, as the seat of government. It is not impossible but what one of the most beautiful cities of the Canaanites might have suggested the idea to his mind. But be that as it may, he readily drew a distinction between an earthly and a heavenly city. The earthly he well knew would perish. But the heavenly city, having God for its Builder and Creator, its foundations and its glory would be eternal. Thus it would stem that Abraham had a belief in the souls immortality, by his having an expectation of permanent rest and happiness after death. Hence Christians of the present age are linked to Abraham through centuries long past by this simple faith and hope in the glorious future.
2. As the city is Divine in its origin, so we may rightly conclude that its inhabitants would correspond in character with its Supreme Founder. Abraham no doubt included this view of the city in his expectations. He must have well known that if the character of the heavenly citizens did not differ from that of the earthly ones, he could neither expect within its walls rest, nor security, nor permanency. Consequently, while expecting it he must have disciplined himself in all goodness, and in all obedience to the commands of God, as a qualification for entering it and for associating with its inhabitants.
II. THINK UPON THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM.
1. It induced a purpose worthy of a life like that of Abraham. This purpose was to realise the glory and greatness of the object which faith acknowledged. Can we imagine a purpose of life more inspiriting, more fraught with greatness, and more suited to give an elevation to thought and feeling? The purposes generally for which men live here, when properly considered, are beneath the capacity, the calling, and the destiny of man.
They are very limited as to their duration, and very uncertain as to their possession. But the purposes of a Christian life are eternal; and the very certainty of the promise on which they rest leaves no regret or disappointment in the hour of death. What brighter vision can pass before the spirit, when leaving its earthly tabernacle, than the home-city of the faithful, whose Maker and Builder is God?
2. The faith of Abraham, furthermore, induced his co-operation with the Divine purposes and power. No doubt many of his neigh-hours derided him for what they might have thought an act of folly; and it is more than probable that in travelling over wide and lonely deserts he felt the difficulty of his undertaking. But Abraham did not turn back, neither did his faith fairer, nor did the peril of the day or of the night change his purpose. Thus we are taught a lesson of co-operation, by giving a ready obedience to the Divine will in the use of means adapted to meet the ends of Christian faith and worship. We are called upon to come out from the world, from its spirit, and to separate ourselves from its hurtful maxims, and from its dangerous companionship.
3. The faith of Abraham was childlike and humble. A faith which led him in its moral influence to tread only in one path, and that path was Christ. It is not a broad way, giving a wide scope to earthly passions, and favouring the selfish ease which knows not the force of the struggle between the downward tendency of the flesh and the upward strivings of the renewed spirit, but it is a narrow way. Yet withal, though the way is in some places steep and rugged, it is safe, and its end is peace and rest for evermore. (W.
D. Heywood.)
The believers earnest desire for heaven
I. WHY HEAVEN IS LIKENED TO A CITY. The description implies
1. Safety. Its walls are too high to be sealed by the wily foe, too firmly built to be beaten down; its gates are too strong to be forced, and He who possesses the keys too wise not to discover a friend from a foe, under whatever disguise, when seeking admittance. He that laid the foundations of the holy city is Himself its Guardian.
2. Society. It is a delightful thing to think of meeting with our Christian friends who have long since gone to their rest, to see the prophets who foretold the day of Christ..
3. The permanence of its enjoyments. Heaven is a city that stands; the stream of time, the ocean of eternity, as it washes its base, shall in vain attempt to undermine it, for it has foundations that cannot be moved.
II. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN THE EXPRESSION THAT ABRAHAM LOOKED FOR THE CITY.
1. A belief in its existence.
2. A desire to have a place in it.
3. An actual preparation for it.
III. THE EFFECTS RESULTING FROM THE CONTEMPLATION OF THE HEAVENLY STATE.
1. It should moderate our attachment to worldly objects.
2. It should endue us with patience under all the afflictions and trials which it may be ours to suffer.
3. It should make us anxious to lead others to seek it. (James Clason.)
The heavenly city:
I. A CERTAIN EXPECTATION OF THE HEAVENLY REWARD, GROUNDED ON THE PROMISES AND COVENANT OF GOD, IS SUFFICIENT TO SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGE THE SOULS OF BELIEVERS UNDER ALL THEIR TRIALS IN THE WHOLE COURSE OF THEIR OBEDIENCE.
II. HEAVEN IS A SETTLED QUIET HABITATION. A suitable dwelling for them that have had a life of trouble in this world.
III. ALL STABILITY, ALL PERPETUITY IN EVERY STATE HERE AND HEREAFTER, ARISETH FROM THE PURPOSE OF GOD, AND IS RESOLVED THEREINTO.
IV. This is that which recommends to us the city of God, the heavenly state, THAT IT IS, AS THE WORK OF GOD ALONE, SO THE PRINCIPAL EFFECT OF HIS WISDOM AND POWER. (John Owen, D. D.)
The expected city
I. THE CITY IS DESCRIBED FROM THE STABILITY AND THE BUILDER THEREOF. A city is sometimes taken for a multitude and vicinity of buildings: sometimes it is taken for a political community; sometimes it is taken for the condition and estate of these societies. In this place the word city must be taken spiritually, for such a kind of habitation, society, and estate as is not found in this world.
1. It hath foundations; for nothing can be firm which is not firmly fixed upon an immovable ground. This cloth difference it from tabernacles and tents, and also from all other buildings, habitations, societies, states, kingdoms, and their prosperity; for they are obnoxious to change, decay, and ruin. Experience doth sufficiently prove this by the ruin of so many castles, palaces, cities, societies, states, and kingdoms, which have flourished in great splendour, power, and strength, yet now lie in the dust and do not appear. This city is no such thing; but the place of abode, the persons, and their felicity, endure for ever.
2. The Builder and Maker is God. All other cities, societies, and their condition is from men; but in this man hath no hand at all; for God made it according to the model contrived by Himself. These words are added to inform us
(1) That it was so far above the art and power of man, that only God could make it. He was not only the Principal, but the sole Efficient of it.
(2) That it was most excellent, and far above all other cities of the world for firmness, duration, beauty, and felicity; for the peace, pleasures, and felicity of it are full and everlasting.
II. ABRAHAMS EXPECTATION OF THIS CITY BY FAITH. This looking for, or expectation, includes many things; as
1. He had a title to it by virtue of Gods promise and his qualification; and this was not a mere title, but something more; for there was a time limited in the grant of the full enjoyment, and he had received the first fruits of glory.
2. He desired and lounged after the enjoyment of this city far more than for anything in this world.
3. These desires were very effectual and working upon his soul, and stirred him to seek this city, and constantly to use all means appointed by God for to attain it; and the whole course of his life was a continued approach towards this eternal rest and glorious estate.
4. The actual possession of this blessed estate was deferred; yet he with patience did wait for it, and made no doubt but to attain that which he so much desired. And here it is to be observed
(1) That no man can be a right sojourner on earth who doth not look for a city eternally stable in heaven; for that which most effectually draws the heart of man off from this world is the expectation of a far better estate in the world to come.
(2) That believers and expectants of heaven, who are candidates of eternity, are of a most noble and Divine spirit. Amongst men of this world, the ambitious, who aspire to crowns and kingdoms, and aim at perpetual fame by their heroic virtues and rare exploits, are judged persons of far greater gallantry than covetous muck-worms or brutish epicures; yet in their thoughts and highest designs they are very base in comparison of these pilgrims, in whose breast the sparks of heavenly fire do ever burn and move, and carry them upward, far above the world.
(3) That neither Abraham, nor any other, without faith could look for this glorious city; for by it they did not only understand how glorious it was, but also were verily persuaded of Gods promise and fidelity; and without this faith they could not possibly hope or look for it. And as by faith they did sojourn, so by the same faith they did look for this city. (G. Lawson.)
The hope of Abraham:
Abraham, the friend of God and the father of the faithful, was homeless man in a strange country, dwelling in tents like an Arab or a Tartar. This fact, though not inexplicable, is so far singular as to deserve our particular attention.
1. Why, then, was Abraham a wanderer, a homeless man, a sojourner in the land of promise? I remark that it was not on account of poverty. Abraham was rich, by inheritance, by acquisition–rich by the blessing of God on the increase of his possessions, and rich through the favour of the kings and chiefs whose friendship he enjoyed.
2. Was it, then, because he had no real estate, no landed property, to which he could lay claim and on which he might reside? The whole land of
Canaan was in one sense his own. It was his by express grant from Jehovah–made sure to him and to his heirs for ever.
3. We read that when Abraham first crossed the Jordan from the East, the Canaanite was in the land. The Hivite, the Hittite, the Jebusite, the Amorite, and other sons of Canaan, had possession of the country. And so thickly were they settled, in the central part at least, that there was not room for Abraham and Lot to live together. May it not be, therefore, that these actual possessors of the country would not suffer him to dwell among them? Had they known his pretensions, or, to speak more properly, his rights, they might have hated him and driven him away. But as he made no efforts to enforce those rights, and as he came among them from the East with flocks and herds, and as an independent chieftain, they received him with respect, and this respect increased. It was not, therefore, on account of any enmity between him and the Canaanites that, instead of founding a great city, he preferred to live a wandering life. There must be other reasons for his course.
4. It may be suggested that his perseverance in a wandering course shows him to have been a mere barbarian, one who was unable to appreciate the comforts of a settled life, or rather, who had never had experience of them. Thus we find that in Arabia there are tribes of Bedouins who regard their wandering life as the most honourable possible, and laugh to scorn those pleasures and advantages of civilised society about which they know nothing by experience. But let it be observed that these tribes inhabit the Arabian desert, where cultivation exists only in detached spots, and where the herdsman is obliged to change his pasture-ground and home continually. Abraham, on the other hand, was in a fertile, cultivated, thickly settled country full of proud cities, walled towns of inferior size, and villages innumerable. It was not because he knew no better that he obese to dwell in tents instead of houses, and to govern an encampment, not a city or a kingdom.
5. Was it, then, because he thought it wrong to lead a settled life in towns and cities, that he dwelt in tents? There is no trace of such a doctrine in the Word of God, and Abraham was too well grounded in the Divine will to hold it as a superstition. He was no ascetic.
6. To some the thought may here occur that we are searching for the explanation of a fact which needs none. Why should Abrahams wandering be considered stranger than the wandering of any other Eastern chief? And as those of the: highest rank lead such a life to this day, it need not be regarded as below the dignity even of the Father of the Faithful and the Friend of God. He came inter the country with his flocks and herds; and as the land was densely peopled, he was under the necessity of frequently changing his encampment and his pasture. This would be wholly satisfactory but for the apostles mention of the patriarchs unsettled life as a remarkable evidence of faith.
7. Having thus determined negatively that it was neither poverty nor want of title to the land, nor opposition on the part of the inhabitants, nor ignorance, nor mere ascetic self-denial, nor a regard to temporal convenience that induced him to reside in tents rather than in a palace and a city worthy of so great a prince, we are ready to receive the explanation of the text, which is this: he looked, or was looking, for a city. The sense is not that Abraham was wandering in search of a city upon earth, but that, he lived in quiet expectation of a city. If we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. It was this patience of hope that rendered Abraham indifferent to the walled cities of the Canaanites around him whose antiquity was of ancient days, and whose defence was the munition of rocks. Nothing so effectually breeds indifference to present objects as the hope of better things to come. The traveller pressing homewards after a long absence can pass, with a contemptuous smile or absolute unconsciousness, those very objects which the homeless traveller dwells upon with rapture.
8. And what sort of s city did he look for, in contempt of those around him? How did the city of his expectations differ from the cities of the Canaanites and the Philistines, from old Damascus, and from Ur of the Chaldees? It had foundations. And had not they foundations? In one sense they had none. They were liable to change. In the same sense, Abrahams city, which he looked for, had foundations–has them now; for observe the present form of the expression. It was a city, therefore, not of this world; for in this world there are no foundations time-proof. And whence had the city of his hopes these firm foundations? From the Architect.
9. Whose Builder and Maker is God. God does not build like man. The foundations of His structures are laid deep in His decrees, and the cement has been growing hard from all eternity. His power over the materials He uses is not merely the disposing power of a builder, but the absolute power of a maker. What He builds He creates. The city of which He is the Maker and Builder is eternal; it has foundations which decay can never weaken, and which laugh at the violence of storm and earthquake. And who are its inhabitants? (Rev 21:24-26). And are none to be excluded? Ah, Rev 21:27). This is the grand distinction of the city for which Abraham looked. It is a city free from sin. In this it differs from all earthly cities, And why is it called a city? Because with a city we associate ideas of substantial strength, immense wealth, regular government, social intercourse, refinement of manners, and external splendour. But what are all these, in the cities of the earth, to the surpassing glories of that city for which Abraham looked, and where the saints shall be enthroned as kings and priests unto God?
10. Here, then, we begin to see a marked resemblance between his case and our own. However remote from our experience what has hitherto been said of his condition, at last we are alike, we are all sojourners and strangers upon earth, we seek the same city as the patriarch. However well we may be pleased with it, however fully satisfied with what it can afford, we know that our abode in it is only for a time; it is not the place of our rest. And of this we are receiving constant admonitions.
11. Now this feeling of uneasiness, this sense of homelessness, is, as you well know, incompatible with happiness. In order to be happy you must have a home, either present or in prospect. Have you such a home? Remember that earthly homes, in reference to eternity, are nothing worth. Look at the households breaking up around you, and say whether these can be your solace and your stay for ever. What will you do then? Will you waste yourselves in misanthropic discontent! No! do as Abraham did: look forward to the city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. The more unsatisfactory you find this world, look the more eagerly and steadfastly on that which is to come.
12. But here let us guard against a fatal error–the error of imagining that mere expectation is alone required. Believe me, multitudes have looked for that city who have never reached it. There is but one path to it through the wilderness of life, and that path is a narrow one. It was by that path that the Father of the Faithful gained the object of his faith and hope. If you would gain it likewise, you must walk in the footsteps of the Friend of God. Do you ask what path he travelled? I reply, the:path of humble, childlike faith.
13. And now let me turn to you who have your faces turned to Zion, and are already looking for that city to which Abraham aspired, and where he reigns in glory. It is said that when the caravan of pilgrims to the sepulchre of Christ cross the mountains of Judaea, worn with hunger and fatigue, they are sometimes ready to relax their efforts, and despair of safe arrival. They may even repent of their own folly in attempting so adventurous a journey, and wish themselves in safety at their own distant firesides. But these thoughts all vanish when the summit is attained, and from the mountains brow they catch a glimpse of Olivet and Zion, and the forsaken city seated in her widows weeds upon her throne of hills. That sight reanimates their courage and renews their strength. With simultaneous energy they rise and hasten onward, and the roughness of the journey is forgotten in the presence of Jerusalem. Oh! we are also strangers and pilgrims, and our way through the world may be precipitous and rugged, and so long as we look only at the things around us, our hearts may well grow faint and our knees feeble. But amidst these discouragements, look upward to the heavenly hills, and, through the dust and smoke of this worlds troubles, keep the eternal city steadfastly in view. That sight will make your hearts beat with new vigour. It will nerve your arm for battle and your bosom for resistance. It will enable you to look down with contempt upon the pleasures and temptations of the world; it will preserve you from illusions, painful even to the Christian, and, ah! how often fatal to the unbeliever. (J. A. Alexander, D. D.)
The city Abraham looked for:
Here he had a tent, but there he looked for a city; , for that city which alone deserves the name of a city. It excels all earthly cities. Aholiab and Bezaleel made the tabernacle, Hiram the temple; carpenters and masons set up these cities; but God Himself is the Maker and Builder of this city. These cities may be overthrown by waters; the sea may come in tumbling and sweep them away; these towns and cities may be consumed with fire, there be burnings almost every day; these may be sacked with the enemy, and made even with the ground, as Jerusalem and the temple are, which were the wonder of the world; we may be driven by famine and pestilence out of those towns and cities. Howsoever they stand awhile, and we in them; the time shall come when the earth, with all the goodly buildings that be on it, shall be burned with fire. Therefore let us use these cities as we used them not. Let our hearts and affections be in this city, whose Maker and Builder is God. We have not here an abiding city. London is no abiding city; York, Norwich, no town is an abiding town. Death will give us a remove out of all towns. But in this city we shall abide for ever, and reign with Christ for evermore; therefore let us all long for it. He cloth not say that he believed there was such a city; but he looked for it (Jdg 5:28). We look out of our windows on sights in the streets, gardens, orchards, etc., but not out of the windows of our hearts for this city. He that looks shortly for a new ,coat, will not be much in love with his old; for a fair house, will not care for a cottage. We look after our wool and cloth, houses, and lands, &c. Let us look daily for Christs coming; that will put us in possession of this city. (W. Jones, D. D.)
A hold upon eternity:
As in some sea-weed, far out in the depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billows goes down, and down, and down, by filaments that knit it to the basal rock; so the most insignificant act of our fleeting days has a hold upon eternity, and life in all its moments may be knit to the permanent. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 8. Abraham, when he was called] See on Ge 12:1-4.
Not knowing whither he went.] Therefore his obedience was the fullest proof of his faith in God, and his faith was an implicit faith; he obeyed, and went out from his own country, having no prospect of any good or success but what his implicit faith led him to expect from God, as the rewarder of them that diligently seek him. In all the preceding cases, and in all that follow, the apostle keeps this maxim fully in view.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Here begin instances of this Divine faith after the flood from Abraham to Mosess time, Heb 11:8-22. The first is the father of believers, so entitled by God, eminent in the exercise of this grace, of whose ancestry, and their descent from him, these Hebrews did greatly glory. He had an express discovery of the will of God unto him, that he should leave the idolatrous place where he lived, Gen 11:31; 12:1-3; compare Jos 24:2; Act 7:2,3; and with his family should travel to a land which God would show him, and which he would give him as an inheritance for him and his, which was the land of Canaan, as described, Gen 13:14-17; 25:18,19,21. This command of God, strengthened by a promise, he obeyed, Gen 12:4; Act 7:4; through faith, really, freely, and fully resigning up himself and his to Gods disposal.
And he went out not knowing whither he went; he went forth with his father Terah from his country, kindred, and friends, in Ur of the Chaldees, to Charran, and there they dwelt till Terah died, Gen 11:31; Act 7:4. After which, he pursued Gods orders in his motion from place to place, though he knew neither the way, nor the place in which and whither he was to move, resting himself on Gods word and guidance, and relying wholly on his provision for him, and protection of him in all his ways.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
8. From the antediluvian saintshe passes to the patriarchs of Israel, to whom “the promises”belonged.
calledby God (Ge12:1). The oldest manuscripts and Vulgate read, “Hethat was called Abraham,” his name being changed from Abram toAbraham, on the occasion of God’s making with him and his seed acovenant sealed by circumcision, many years after his call out of Ur.”By faith, he who was (afterwards) called Abraham (father ofnations, Ge 17:5, in orderto become which was the design of God’s bringing him out of Ur)obeyed (the command of God: to be understood in this reading), soas to go out,” c.
which he should afterreceiveHe had not fully received even this promise when hewent out, for it was not explicitly given him till he hadreached Canaan (Gen 12:1 Gen 12:6;Gen 12:7). When the promise of theland was given him the Canaanite was still in the land, and himself astranger; it is in the new heaven and new earth that he shall receivehis personal inheritance promised him; so believers sojourn on earthas strangers, while the ungodly and Satan lord it over the earth; butat Christ’s coming that same earth which was the scene of thebeliever’s conflict shall be the inheritance of Christ and Hissaints.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
By faith, Abraham, when he was called,…. The Alexandrian copy and the Vulgate Latin version read, “by faith he who was called Abraham”; but this call is not to be understood of his name; for though his first name Abram might be given him, in the faith of his being a great man, and his second name Abraham, when he himself was a believer; yet this change was made some years after the call referred to; which is that in Ge 12:1 when he was called out of his own country, kindred, and father’s house; which was an emblem of the call of God’s people out from among the men of the world, and from their friends, relations, and acquaintance, and even out of themselves; and as Abraham was called from “Ur” of the Chaldees, so they from darkness, bondage, idolatry, and communion with wicked men; that, as he, they might not perish with idolaters, being chosen vessels, and for whom God has peculiar blessings in store: and so the grace of God is seen in calling them, without any respect to their deserts, as in calling Abraham: and the care and goodness of God may be observed, in raising up fit instruments to propagate his cause and interest. Now Abraham, being called
to go out into a place; from Ur of the Chaldees, to the land of Canna;
which he should afterwards receive for an inheritance; not in his own person, but in his seed and posterity, unless after the resurrection, in the New Jerusalem church state, and which inheritance was typical of heaven;
obeyed the divine call; and which was a fruit and evidence of his faith, and may he called the obedience of faith:
and he went out, not knowing whither he went: for though he went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan he came, Ge 12:5, yet, when God called him to go forth, and he prepared to obey his call, he knew not what land he was to go into; for it is only said, Ge 12:1,
unto a land that I will show thee: upon which words a Jewish commentator r has this note;
“he (God) did not immediately make known the land unto him, that so it might be lovely in his eyes;”
and it is, elsewhere, said by the Jews s, that Abraham
“came from Aspamia (i.e. Mesopotamia), and its companions,
, “and he knew not where” he was, as a man that is in the dark;”
all which agrees with our apostle: and, from hence, it may be observed, that God sometimes leads his people in ways they have not known, though they are known to him, and are always right; and that it is the property of faith to follow God, when it cannot see its way; and a great mercy it is to have God for a guide. This also shows, that Abraham’s faith agrees with the apostle’s definition of it, Heb 11:1.
r Jarchi in Gen. xii. 1. s Bereshit Rabba, sect. 60. fol. 52. 3.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
Not knowing whither he went ( ). Usual negative with a participle (present middle from , old and common verb to put the mind on). Present middle indicative () preserved in the indirect question after the secondary tense (went out) from which gets its time. Abraham is a sublime and graphic example of faith. He did not even know where the land was that he was going to receive “as an inheritance” ( ).
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
Paul exhibits faith as the element of personal righteousness in Abraham. In these verses (8 – 22) faith, according to the opening definition in this chapter, is that assurance and conviction of unseen things which caused Abraham and the patriarchs to rely confidently upon the future fulfillment of the divine promises.
When he was called to go out – obeyed [ ] . A. V. is wrong. jExelqein to go out should be construed with uJphkousen obeyed, and kaloumenov being called is to be taken absolutely. Kaloumenov, the present participle, indicates Abraham ‘s immediate obedience to the call : while he was yet being called. Rend. “when he was called obeyed to go out.” The infinitive explains the more general obeyed, by specifying that in which his obedience was shown. For the construction, see Act 14:10; 1Th 1:9; Heb 5:5. For the narrative, see Gen 12:1 – 6, and comp. Act 7:2 – 5.
Whither he went [ ] . Note the picturesque continued present tense, “whither he is going,” as of Abraham on his journey.
Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament
The Patriarchs of Faith (v. 8-23)
1) “By faith Abraham, when he was called,” (pistei kaloumenos abraam) “By faith Abraham being a called one; Immediately he believed God, was saved, and his faith was accounted, or imputed to him for righteousness, Rom 4:3; Rom 4:5; Rom 4:16; Gen 12:1; Gen 12:4; Gen 15:6; Gal 3:6-9.
2) “To go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance,” (ekselthein eis topon homn emellen lambanein eis kleronomian) “To go forth (from Ur of Chaldee) into a place, (Canaan), which he was about to receive for an inheritance;” Tho he received it not personally, it was pledged as a receipt to his Seed after him, while he yet had no seed, no heir of his own, Gen 15:7; Gen 17:8; Gen 18:10; Act 7:2-5.
3) “Obeyed; and he went forth,” (kai ekselthen) “Obeyed and went forth,” of his own volition, will or accord. The idea of “obey” is that immediately upon being called, he believed the gospel, was saved, and began to express his faith by departing his homeland, (chaldee). Gen 15:9; Gal 3:8; Rom 4:3; Rom 1:16.
4) “Not knowing whither he went,” (me epistameneos pou erchetai) “Not understanding where he goes out,” where he went, (into Canaan), wandering from place to place, yet he obeyed. His act of going out immediately was evidence or fruit of his faith he had placed in God for his salvation and daily care; Mat 7:13-17; Men still know not what tomorrow holds, but when called to a vocation, avocation, or field of religious service, they are still wise when they go out to their daily calling and labors by faith in, and obedience to, God’s daily call, Jas 4:14-15; Eph 5:15-18; Luk 9:23; Heb 13:5.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
8. By faith Abraham, etc. He comes now to Abraham, who is the chief father of God’s church on earth, and in whose name the Jews gloried, as though by the distinction of being the holy race of Abraham alone, they were removed from the common order of men. But he now reminds them of what they ought to possess as the main thing, that they might be counted among his children. He therefore calls their attention to faith, for Abraham himself had no excellency which did not proceed from faith.
He first teaches us that faith was the cause why he immediately obeyed God when he was commanded to remove from his own country; and then that through the same faith it was that he went on without wavering, according to what he was called to do even to the end. By these two things, — his promptness in obeying, and his perseverance, was Abraham’s faith most clearly proved.
When he was called, etc. The old Latin translator and Erasmus apply this to his name, which is extremely tame and frigid. On the contrary, I refer it to the oracle by which he was called from his own country. He indeed did in this way undergo a voluntary exile, while yet he did nothing but by God’s command; and no doubt it is one of the chief things which belong to faith, not to move a step except God’s word shows us the way, and as a lantern gives us light, according to what David says. (Psa 119:105.) Let us then learn that it is a thing to be observed through life, that we are to undertake nothing to which God does not call us.
To go out into a place, (216) etc. To the command was added a promise, that God would give him a land for an inheritance. This promise he immediately embraced, and hastened as though he was sent to take possession of this land. It is a no ordinary trial of faith to give up what we have in hand, in order to seek what is afar off, and unknown to us. For when God commanded him to leave his own country, he did not point out the place where he intended him to live, but left him in suspense and perplexity of mind: “go”, he said, “into the place that I will show thee.” (Gen 12:1.) Why did he defer to point out the place, except that his faith might be more and more exercised? Besides, the love of his native land might not only have retarded the alacrity of Abraham, but also held him so bound to it, so as not to quit his home. His faith then was not of an ordinary kind, which thus broke through all hindrances and carried him where the Lord called him to go.
(216) This is differently connected by Calvin, his version is “by faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed, so that he went forth,” etc. Bloomfield by supposing ωστε understood before ἐξελθεῖν, seems to be of the same opinion. Beza renders the verb by a gerund, “abiendo,” by departing. This construction is more agreeable to the location of the words; the other introduces an unnatural transposition. Besides, the idea is somewhat different. There are thus two things in the verse stated more directly, as evidences and proofs of faith, — his departure from his own country, and his ignorance as to the country where he was going. His faith was such that he obeyed, so as to leave his own country, and also to go to a country, of which he knew nothing. — Ed
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
B.
The patriarchal: faith in God plus faith in His promises. Heb. 11:8-27.
Text
Heb. 11:8-27
Heb. 11:8 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. Heb. 11:9 By faith he became a sojourner in the land of promise, and in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: Heb. 11:10 for he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. Heb. 11:11 By faith even Sarah herself received power to conceive seed when she was past age, since she counted Him faithful Who had promised; Heb. 11:12 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.
Heb. 11:13 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, Heb. 11:14 For they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own, Heb. 11:15 And if indeed they had been mindful of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. Heb. 11:16 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.
Heb. 11:17 By faith Abraham, being tried, offered up Isaac: yea, he that had gladly received the promises was offering up his only begotten son; Heb. 11:18 even he to whom it was said, In Isaac shall thy seed be called: Heb. 11:19 accounting that God is able to raise up, even from the dead; from whence he did also in a figure receive him back. Heb. 11:20 By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau, even concerning things to come. Heb. 11:21 By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph; and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff, Heb. 11:22 By faith Joseph, when his end was nigh, made mention of the departure of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones. Heb. 11:23 By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months by his parents, because they saw he was a goodly child; and they were not afraid of the kings commandment. Heb. 11:24 By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaohs daughter; Heb. 11:25 choosing rather to share ill treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; Heb. 11:26 accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt: for he looked unto the recompense of reward. Heb. 11:27 By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing Him Who is invisible.
Paraphrase
Heb. 11:8 By faith in the divine promises Abraham, when called to go out from his kindred and country, namely, Ur of the Chaldees, into a land which he should afterwards receive as an inheritance, obeyed, and relying on the power and veracity of God, went out, although he did not know the country to which he was going; nor whether it was a good or bad country.
Heb. 11:9 By believing that Canaan was promised to him and to his seed only as the type of a better country, he acquired no possessions in Canaan except a burying-place, and built no houses there, but sojourned in the land which was promised to him as in a country belonging to others, dwelling in moveable tents with Isaac and Jacob, the joint heirs of the same promise:
Heb. 11:10 For he expected the city having firm foundations, of which city the Builder and Lawgiver is God; consequently a city more magnificent and happy than any city on earth.
Heb. 11:11 By faith in Gods promise, even Sarah herself, though at first she thought the matter impossible, received strength for the conception of seed, and brought forth a son when past the age of child-bearing; because she at length attained the strongest persuasion of the faithfulness and power of Him who had promised her a son.
Heb. 11:12 And therefore, by her, there sprang from one, namely Abraham, who on account of his great age was absolutely unfit for procreating children, a race as the stars of heaven in multitude, and as the sand upon the sea-shore, which is innumerable, agreeably to Gods promises to him, recorded Gen. 15:5; Gen. 22:17.
Heb. 11:13 All these died in faith, though they did not receive the blessings promised: For, descrying them afar off, and being persuaded of their certainty, and embracing them with ardent desire, they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims in the land of Canaan, and on the earth itself. (See Gen. 23:4; Gen. 47:9.)
Heb. 11:14 Now persons who spake in this manner plainly declared, that they did not consider Canaan as the country principally meant in Gods promise, but that they earnestly sought to go to their fathers country; the country which God promised to their fathers.
Heb. 11:15 And they by no means wished to go back to Chaldea: For truly if they had longed after that country from which they came out, they might have had an opportunity to have returned to it.
Heb. 11:16 But indeed they longed after a better country than Chaldea, even an heavenly country, which God had promised to them: Therefore God was not ashamed of them (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) to be called their God, long after they were dead, notwithstanding He gave them no possession in Canaan, because He hath prepared for them a city, even the new Jerusalem.
Heb. 11:17 By a great exercise of faith, Abraham, when tried, offered up Isaac; laid him on the altar to sacrifice him: He who had received the promises, that his seed should be as the sand on the sea-shore innumerable, and should inherit Canaan, and that the nations should be blessed in his seed, offered up even his only begotten.
Heb. 11:18 Concerning whom it was expressly said, Surely by Isaac a seed shall be to thee, in whom all the promises which I have made to thy seed shall be fulfilled.
Heb. 11:19 Yet, notwithstanding the apparent contradiction in the divine revelations, Abraham laid Isaac on the altar, reasoning that, although he were burnt to ashes, God was able to raise him, and would raise him even from the dead: from whence on this occasion he received him, by being hindered from slaying him, even in order to his being a type of Christ.
Heb. 11:20 By faith in the divine revelation, Isaac foretold to Jacob and Esau the blessings which were to be bestowed on them and their posterity.
Heb. 11:21 By the like faith, Jacob, when near his death, Gen. 47:20 blessed each of the sons of Joseph; and, in token of his faith in the promises concerning their possessing Canaan, worshipped God leaning on the top of his staff.
Heb. 11:22 By faith in Gods promise of giving Canaan to Abraham and to his seed, Joseph, when ending his life, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel out of Egypt, as a thing certain; and to preserve the knowledge and expectation thereof among the Israelites, he commanded them to carry his bones with them into Canaan.
Heb. 11:23 By faith in the promises of God, Moses, when born, being circumcised, was hid three months by his parents till he was recovered, because they saw the child beautiful, and presaged he might be the person appointed to deliver them; and were not afraid of the kings commandment to give up their children to be killed. Exo. 1:22.
Heb. 11:24 By faith in the promises of God, made known to him by his brethren, Moses, when he was grown up, resolving to join himself to his people, refused to be called any longer the son of Pharaohs daughter;
Heb. 11:25 Choosing rather to suffer persecution with the people of God, than, as the son of Pharaohs daughter, to have the temporary fruition of the pleasures of sin in the court of Egypt;
Heb. 11:26 Esteeming the scoffs cast on the Israelites for expecting the Christ to arise among them, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed, greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he looked off from them to the reward which he expected in the life to come.
Heb. 11:27 By believing that God would deliver His people, notwithstanding the number and power of their oppressors, Moses left Egypt with the Israelites, not being afraid of the wrath of Pharaoh, who he knew would pursue them: For he courageously persevered in his purpose, as expecting aid from the invisible God.
Comment
By faith Abraham when he was called
This man is so great as to be recognized by the three theistic religions in the world.
a.
His grave at Hebron is the common shrine for Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
b.
His name occurs more than three hundred times in twenty-seven books of the Bible.
He was called of God in the midst of idolatry, for Ur was the center of moon worship.
a.
Abraham worshipped God, for otherwise he would not have obeyed God.
b.
The faithful receive the call of God, for they hear His voice.
obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive as an inheritance and he went out, not knowing whither he went
Gen. 12:1-3 gives us his call in substance. This land to be given to his posterity was unknown to him at the time. To leave home and loved ones shows a strong faith. He went out to Haran where he remained five years. Where his father died, and then he went on to Canaan at the age of seventy-five. (Gen. 12:4). Compare Gal. 3:17; Exo. 12:40-41. He died at age one hundred seventy-five. See Gen. 25:7.
by faith he became a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not his own
Milligan makes much of the word sojourner, saying that he never really possessed the land.
Round about were the walled cities, over which he was not King, but he made an impression. The Hittites said, Thou art a prince. See Gen. 23:6.
dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob
They lived in fragile homes, moving here and there, From the birth of Isaac to the Exodus was four hundred years. Gen. 15:13, There were walled cities, property everywhere, but still Abraham had to purchase a burying place, Gen. 23:3-20.
the heirs with him of the same promise
The promise of Abraham was theirs likewise, They sojourned in the same promise by faith as did Abraham.
for he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God
This accounts for their stedfastness.
a.
They did not worry about living in tents when cities abounded, for their eyes penetrated heaven.
b.
Foundations suggests perpetuity rather than something transitory and fading.
Milligan thinks that they had revelations which have never been transmitted to us.
a.
He feels this city is the heavenly Jerusalem, Gal. 4:26; Heb. 12:22; Heb. 13:14, which is for the present located in heaven.
b.
He says, It will descend to the earth after it shall be renovated by fire. Revelation 21.
c.
Then will be fulfilled in its proper and full sense that Abraham and his seed be the heirs of the world. Romans 4.
Regardless of the location, God is the Architect and Builder.
a.
He will locate it where it ought to be.
b.
It will be a permanent place for the people of God.
by faith even Sarah herself received power to conceive seed when she was past age
The introduction of Sarah shows that this truth belongs to women also.
a.
She is mentioned since she is the mother of the faithful.
b.
She was openly charged with unbelief, so it may seem strange for her to be included. Gen. 18:12-13.
c.
Remember Abraham also laughed at first. Gen. 17:17.
since she counted Him faithful who had promised
God promised: that made the difference.
a.
Rom. 10:17 : Faith comes by hearing.
b.
True faith then is that which hears God speaking and rests on His promise.
She was about ninety years of age, Gen. 17:17, past the natural period of child-bearing, but faith brought to her power to do it.
wherefore also there sprang of one, and him as good as dead
This refers to dead Abrahamdead as to the power of begetting children. This accounts for his attitude in Gen. 17:17, where he named his age and laughed.
so many as the stars of heaven in multitude and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable
Whatever pride the Jews may have, everything must be ascribed to the faith of Abraham and Isaac. This reference to the faith of this great man ought to serve to encourage the hearts of the despondent.
these all died in faith, not having received the promises
What promises are meant?
a.
He never saw his posterity in such numbers.
b.
He never saw his seed receive an everlasting inheritance. Gen. 12:7; Gen. 13:15; Gen. 15:18-21; Gen. 17:8.
c.
He never saw the earth blessed through his seed. Gen. 12:3; Gen. 22:18.
but having seen them and greeted them from afar
Jesus may throw light on this expression.
Joh. 8:56 : Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.
Them must refer to promises and not to people. A distant view was had, but that was all.
having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth
Abraham could say, I see a new city, but I am a stranger here.
This confession Jacob made to Pharaoh. Gen. 47:9.
for they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own
The confession made in Heb. 11:13 is referred to.
a.
This shows that they had faith in a better country.
b.
If they in spirit, amid dark clouds, took a flight into the celestial country, how much more ought we, as Christ beckons. Where I am, there you may be also.
The promise of Christ should be more real to us than the promise to them.
if indeed they have been mindful of that country from which they went out
These could have returned to their native land if they had desired to do so.
a.
Abraham could have returned to Ur of the Chaldees, for he was not banished.
b.
Eliezer, Abrahams steward, was sworn to never carry Isaac into Chaldea, Gen. 24:5-8.
They would have had opportunity suggests that nothing stood in their way.
but now they desire a better country, that is a heavenly
The fact that Abraham didnt return to Chaldea showed his disinterest in earthly land. He looked for a country better than Canaan or Chaldea.
wherefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God
God showed this in Exo. 3:6 when God said He was God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
a.
It is a singular honor for God to attach His name to men.
b.
When they renounced the world, considered themselves pilgrims, then God claimed them.
We must do the same if God would claim us.
a.
Gal. 3:26 indicates that we are sons of God through faith.
b.
Gen. 17:7 shows that God promised this relationship to Abrahams seed.
for He hath prepared for them a city
God is able to give life to their bodies and to make it possible for them to live in their city. Why would God allow man to be outlived by trees, turtles, and elephants, if it were not for the fact that man will live again?
Abraham, being tried, offered up Isaac
This was a proving of Abraham.
a.
Archeologists show that child sacrifices were common among the people of that day.
b.
The heathens loved their gods enough to sacrifice a child. Here was a greater God asking Abraham to do it.
c.
Would Abraham do it? He would by faith.
His resolution to obey was then the same as though he had actually sacrificed his son.
offering up his only begotten son
This shows how severe the trial was.
a.
Abraham had gladly received promises, and Isaac was the only hope of their being fulfilled. See Gen. 17:2; Gen. 21:12.
b.
Now in taking away Isaac, it was the same as taking away the promises.
Isaac is called the only begotten, for Ishmael had been driven from the family and was not considered a part of the promise.
accounting that God is able to raise up, even from the dead
According to this verse, Abraham surely concluded that God would restore Isaac to life. This was further strengthened by Abrahams words to his servants, We will worship.
a.
Come again. Gen. 22:5.
b.
In the Hebrew it is in the plural, We will return.
from whence he did also in a figure receive him back
Some think this refers to Isaacs supernatural birth, but this is poor exegesis. Abraham received him back from the altar as one raised from the dead.
a.
Abrahams obedience until God stayed his hand caused Isaac to be the same as dead.
b.
He was figuratively raised from the dead.
God said Isaac had not been withheld, so he was sacrificed as far as God was concerned. Gen. 22:12-18.
by faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau, even concerning things to come
The ability to bless was, in a sense, a prophecy.
a.
Isaac had nothing in the land, except the right of burial, yet he could say, Let peoples serve thee and nations bow down to thee. Gen. 27:29.
b.
Isaac had nothing to bestow but the Word of God.
The unusual thing about this blessing is that he distinguished between the twins.
a.
He gave first place to the younger, which meant taking away the rights of the firstborn.
b.
Isaac by faith spoke the thing that God desired.
c.
Isaac refused to change the blessing, saying, Gen. 27:33; I have blessed him, yea, and he shall be blessed.
A comparison of the history of Esaus people, the Edomites, with the blessing of Isaac shows that Isaac made a prophetic outline of the fortunes of the two races.
a.
Edom was quite a nation before Israel had kings, Gen. 36:31.
b.
Edom was independent while Israel was in bondage in Egypt.
c.
Saul and David finally conquered the Edomites. Compare 1Sa. 14:47; 2Sa. 8:14.
by faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph
Josephs sons were Ephraim and Manasseh, and were blessed by their grandfather. Gen. 48:1-22.
a.
This occurred when Joseph took the sons to see their sick grandfather.
b.
They were adopted as sons and made the honored heads of separate and distinct tribes.
c.
He put his right hand on Ephraim and his left hand on Manasseh as he made the blessing.
Ephraim became so superior as a tribe that often the ten tribes were included under his name, so that in a manner they did lie down under its shade.
a.
Ephraim was the younger, yet Jacob in his dimness of eyes crossed his hands so that Ephraim received the greater blessing.
b.
Jacob sounded as though he were lord of the land from which he was driven by famine.
Faith is the only explanation for such a prophecy.
and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff
Here is a dramatic picture, an old man dying, blessing, worshipping, leaning. The act of worshipping that we know from Genesis occurred prior to this blessing when Joseph promised not to bury his father in Egypt. Gen. 47:31.
Some make a great deal out of the fact that in some versions it reads, Israel bowed himself upon the beds head.
a.
Several suggestions are made to clarify the issue, one of which suggests the Hebrew word may mean either a bed or a staff, depending upon the vowel pointing in the Hebrew language.
b.
Some suggest Paul quoted from an incorrect text, but this view destroys inspiration. An inspired writer would select an inspired text, or would know the truth.
Both can be right in my judgment. Here is an old man dying, and he would need support, and so his staff and bed were both used.
Joseph, when his end was nigh, made mention of the departure of Israel and gave command concerning his bones
Here is one of the finest characters in the Old Testament.
a.
His conception of sin stands out. How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? Gen. 39:9.
b.
He is one of the few of which no evil is recorded of him. His prophecy is found in Gen. 50:24.
a.
His faith is seen in that he requested that they carry his bones in a box with them into the promised land. Gen. 50:25.
b.
Genesis ends with him in a coffin in Egypt, but his bones were carried into the promised land, for Moses remembered. Exo. 13:19.
By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months
Pharaoh commanded every son to be cast into the river. Exo. 1:22.
a.
Moses was cast into the river, but an ark was under him. Exo. 2:3.
b.
Amram and Jochebed had faith, and it was wonderfully rewarded by Pharaohs daughters care and devotion.
The description a goodly child is no doubt the same as Act. 7:20 : Fair unto God. (alternate reading).
a.
The parents were not just charmed by his beauty, but saw in him a person destined to serve God.
b.
Putting him in the river was not a wavering of their faith as some suggest, but another attempt to preserve him.
by faith, Moses, when he was grown up refused to be called the son of Pharaohs daughter
How did he go about it formally?
a.
Very likely he just showed a preference for his own people, Exo. 2:11-12; Act. 7:24.
b.
His mother no doubt had taught him very early about his true identity.
Being about forty years old, Act. 7:24 shows that this was not a hasty, headstrong decision of a youth.
choosing rather to share ill treatment with the people of God
The Egyptians were learned, powerful, and influential in the world; the Hebrews were oppressed and degraded.
a.
The world would say, What a poor choice!
b.
It was a choice between temporary vanity and eternal glory, and Moses chose rightly.
Man begins to live when he connects his life with a great cause, and Moses became the great lawgiver of Israel.
than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season
Faith in God causes one to see the folly, pleasures of sin, and glitter of wickedness that soon fades. A season or an eternity must be our choice, and faith makes the difference.
a.
It was not pleasures in Canaan, for ill treatment would be too much of a price for earthly pleasures in that land.
b.
It was the joys of a heavenly Canaan which Moses could see by the eyes of faith.
accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt
Did Moses know that he was to suffer the reproach of Christ? Did he know Christ?
a.
Some answer, It was such reproach as Christ Himself endured.
b.
Some say, Reproach suffered on account of Christ.
c.
Others, It was reproach on Moses as a type of Christ.
d.
It is the reproach which Christ had to bear and also the reproach that all true believers have to bear.
e.
It is the reproach of Christs people.
I believe that it is a reproach like Christs. As He, though rich, became poor to redeem mankind, so Moses despised the treasurers of Egypt to deliver Israel.
for he looked unto the recompense of reward
a.
Calvin says, It corresponds to what he did; his retribution was his success.
b.
Milligan says the great and final recompense.
c.
McKnight says it was nothing earthly, for he could have had more and in greater perfection by staying in the palace.
A man like Moses doesnt have to hear specific offers of remuneration before he works for God. To please God would be enough.
by faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible
This does not refer to his departure into Midian, for he left them in great fear. Exo. 2:14-15.
When did he forsake Egypt?
a.
Perhaps when he made his choice to be among the Israelites.
b.
Many suggest when he led Israel out.
c.
Milligan holds to the flight to Midian.
1.
Because it fits the chronology, the Passover was instituted after his return from Midian but not after the Exodus.
2.
The departure was in opposition to the will of Pharaoh.
3.
If the Exodus were meant, all Israel would have been named. There are some glaring weaknesses to Milligans view:
a.
The author is not interested in chronology in this chapter, for the men are named out of order.
b.
He doesnt necessarily say, instituted the Passover although the Greek allows it and the context suggests it.
c.
He is not talking about Israel, but Moses.
d.
Leaving Pharaoh, quitting, would no doubt provoke wrath. Him who is invisible suggests the true God.
a.
Perhaps Christ could be included, for Christ was on the journey. 1Co. 10:4.
b.
The main point to gain is his faith in One unseen that made him endure.
Study Questions
2172.
Abraham is the chief character for discussion. What three religions honor him?
2173.
Does his name appear frequently in the scriptures?
2174.
Name the New Testament books that refer to him.
2175.
How did God call him in Ur?
2176.
What did the call include?
2177.
Where was he living? What do we know about the place?
2178.
Show how faith and obedience are connected in his life.
2179.
Do you think his call was challenging to faith?
2180.
Does the word inheritance mean that he was to own a great land?
2181.
Did he ever seem to possess it?
2182.
What is meant, he became a sojourner? Heb. 11:9.
2183.
Did he ever make much of an impact on their civilization?
2184.
In his battle with the kings, what may we judge about him?
2185.
How did the Hittites feel about him?
2186.
What kind of home did he live in?
2187.
Does this show that he had a permanent home?
2188.
Does the size of the herds indicate that, in a sense, he owned a great amount of land?
2189.
How do Isaac and Jacob figure in the promise?
2190.
Was Abraham hoping for one of the cities which he saw?
2191.
What is the significance of the word foundations? Heb. 11:10.
2192.
Who would make this city?
2193.
Is it possible that we do not have recorded the complete revelation to Abraham?
2194.
Will it be a city limited to the descendants of Abraham?
2195.
Could it be the same city referred to in Revelation?
2196.
Is the heavenly Jerusalem to be moved?
2197.
Who is the first woman of faith mentioned in the text?
2198.
How could she be considered of faith when she laughed at the promise of God?
2199.
Did Abraham laugh as she did? Cf. Gen. 17:17.
2200.
What attribute of God did Sarah rest upon?
2201.
Who is referred to in Heb. 11:12?
2202.
What is meant by, as good as dead?
2203.
How many sprang from Abraham?
2204.
Are the Jews a numerous people today?
2205.
Who is referred to by the expression, These all died? Heb. 11:13.
2206.
What promises are meant?
2207.
What all did Abraham fail to see?
2208.
Did he ever see his descendants possessing the earth?
2209.
Did he ever see his seed blessing the earth?
2210.
What is referred to by the expression, having seen them?
2211.
Does it refer to people, or days, or promises? Cf. Joh. 8:56.
2212.
When was a confession made that the Hebrews were strangers and pilgrims? Cf. Gen. 47:9.
2213.
What are the such things of Heb. 11:14?
2214.
Are we looking for a country?
2215.
Should our promise be more real to us?
2216.
What did Jesus say about our abiding place?
2217.
Did they concern themselves over the land they had left?
2218.
Could Abraham have returned to Chaldea? Cf. Gen. 24:5-8.
2219.
Was Abrahams desire for an earthly home?
2220.
What was the better country? Heb. 11:16.
2221.
Did God ever exhibit pride in these patriarchs?
2222.
When did He confess their name? Cf. Exo. 3:6.
2223.
What was required of them in order to be claimed by God?
2224.
Compare Gal. 3:26 and Gen. 17:7 to see if this can be our experience.
2225.
If they did not inherit the promise, when will they receive it?
2226.
Why does he speak of it as a city sometimes, and a country in other places?
2227.
What was Abrahams greatest trial?
2228.
Was the offering of a son a common thing?
2229.
Was the resolution to sacrifice Isaac the same as obedience?
2230.
How could Isaac be considered only begotten?
2231.
Where else does this phrase appear?
2232.
If Isaac had been taken, what else would have been taken away?
2233.
What may we judge that Abraham believed God would do if he killed Isaac?
2234.
Compare the statement in Gen. 22:5.
2235.
What is the figure described here?
2236.
Was it a figurative resurrection?
2237.
Was it a figurative sacrifice?
2238.
What was the nature of a blessing in the Old Testament?
2239.
Were these Old Testament characters so influential with God that they could promise, and God had to fulfill?
2240.
What was the blessing in Gen. 27:29?
2241.
Was this unusual?
2242.
Can we say that Isaac by faith spoke what God desired?
2243.
Who were Esaus descendants?
2244.
How great were the Edomites?
2245.
Who finally conquered them? Cf. 1Sa. 14:47; 2Sa. 8:14.
2246.
Tell of the blessing of Jacob on his death bed. Cf. Gen. 48:1-22.
2247.
Upon whom was it pronounced?
2248.
What did he pronounce?
2249.
What did he do when he pronounced the blessing?
2250.
Was this blessing unusual?
2251.
Did the younger or the elder receive the greater blessing?
2252.
Did Ephraim become great?
2253.
How may we explain that Jacob seemed to be lord of a land from which he had been driven by famine?
2254.
What four words describe Jacob in this experience?
2255.
How did Joseph reveal his faith in the fact of a new country being promised? Cf. Gen. 50:24-25.
2256.
Did Moses obey this request which Joseph made? Cf. Exo. 13:19.
2257.
How does Genesis end? Is the coffin mentioned at the end?
2258.
How did faith involve Moses early in his life?
2259.
Was he cast into the river as Pharaoh commanded?
2260.
What was under him?
2261.
How was his parents faith rewarded?
2262.
What is meant, a goodly child?
2263.
Compare Act. 7:20 for a description of him.
2264.
Was it good appearance that saved him?
2265.
If not, what does the description, a goodly child mean?
2266.
How did Moses refuse to be called the son of Pharaohs daughter? Compare Exo. 2:11-12 and Act. 7:24.
2267.
How old was he when he took his stand?
2268.
How did he learn of his true identity?
2269.
What was the object of his faith that would cause him to reject Pharaohs house?
2270.
Show the contrast of what he rejected and what he accepted as a Jew.
2271.
Did he make a wise choice in the eyes of the world?
2272.
Does the world choose temporary vanity in place of eternal glory?
2273.
Would he have been an historical character if he had stayed with the Egyptians?
2274.
Is it a great cause that makes the man, or the man who makes a cause great?
2275.
Does faith still cause men to see the folly of sin?
2276.
What is meant by the word season? Heb. 11:25.
2277.
Is a seasons pleasure worth the loss of eternity with God?
2278.
Did Moses know Christ?
2279.
Was it a reproach like Christs?
2280.
Could Moses be considered a type of Christ in suffering?
2281.
Did Jesus empty Himself of treasure to be poor? Cf. Php. 2:5-11.
2282.
What was Moses expected rewardearthly or heavenly?
2283.
Could pleasing God be enough to challenge a man like Moses?
2284.
What is meant by, he forsook Egypt?
2285.
Could it be referring to the time he left for Midian? Why not?
2286.
Does Exo. 2:14-15 answer the above question?
2287.
When did he forsake Egypt? Is it the same time as referred to in Heb. 11:25?
2288.
Why does Milligan feel that the flight to Midian is meant?
2289.
Is the chronology a good reason for believing it?
2290.
If the Exodus is meant, would he have necessarily have included all Israel?
2291.
Would leaving Pharaoh make Pharaoh wrathful?
2292.
Do people become angry when you refuse their so-called social graces?
2293.
Are people offended when you refuse to drink with them?
2294.
What is meant by, Him Who is invisible?
2295.
Could Moses have seen Christ?
2296.
Compare 1Co. 10:4.
2297.
Is spiritual sight more foresighted than that of the physical eye?
Fuente: College Press Bible Study Textbook Series
(8) When he was called to go out.Our older versions are here better than the Authorised, bringing in the word obeyed after calledobeyed to go out into, &c.
Which he should after receive.The English rendering may seem to imply that when called Abraham received the promise that the land to which he would be directed should in the future be his inheritance. It is not so (Act. 7:5); for this promise is not found in Gen. 12:1-3, but was bestowed when he had obeyed (Gen. 12:7). The meaning here is, unto a place which he was to receive.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
8. Example of Abraham. As the great typical example of faith, both with Jewish writers (note on Gal 3:6) and St. Paul, Abraham with Sarah fills a long paragraph, 8-20. And the similarity of the treatment here is good proof that Paul’s idea of faith is still the same, and this epistle by his hand.
Called A well supported reading in the Greek would read Abraham the called. And that reading would mean, according to Delitzsch, Abraham the well known, or historically illustrious as the called a very suitable and significant meaning. But Alford, in accordance with the old Greek commentators, interprets it the man who previously was called Abram, and was subsequently named Abraham. The reading, however, without the article, is, probably, the true one, and the reference is to “the call of Abraham.”
Go out into a place Modern research suggests the probability that Abraham’s going out was part of a great western movement of the Asiatic peoples. But Abraham’s great peculiarity was, that he went under divine guidance, about to plant a special race in a special spot for a future divine history. By his faithfulness he became the founder of that race whose history stands alone in the history of the world.
Went out As Noah launched forth upon the unknown waters, so Abraham started forth into unknown lands. So the man of faith looks onward and upward to an unknown but blessed home.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance, and he went out, not knowing where he went.’
Noah’s faith pointed to judgment on the world, and preserved alive a remnant to go into the future. But now arose one who would offer hope to the whole world (Gen 12:3). Abraham also believed God, and believed that He would reward his faith. And his faith was counted for righteousness (Gen 15:6). For when he was called by God to go to a strange and unknown country, simply on the basis that he was promised that he would receive it as an inheritance, he went, not knowing where he was going. Because he believed God, he trusted Him implicitly and was fully obedient. He too was a man of faith in God.
It is quite probable that his faith had been built up by studying the tablets which were in his father’s house, which contained information about his family’s past, much as we find them today in the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis. For someone kept them faithfully in order that they might be used by Moses in his great work at the birth of the nation of Israel. But it also resulted from his direct encounters with God, some of which are described for us in Genesis.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
The Testimony of Abraham and Sarah in the Genealogy of Terah/Abraham ( Gen 11:27 to Gen 25:11 ) – In Heb 11:8-19 we are given the lengthiest account of a testimony of faith and perseverance in this doctrinal discourse (Heb 11:1-40), as seen in the life of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham’s expressions of his faith in God are demonstrated when he left Ur and obeyed God’s call (Heb 11:8); he sojourned in Canaan (Heb 11:9); he looked for an eternal city (Heb 11:10); and he offered up Isaac (Heb 11:17). This passage of Scripture begins with Abraham’s divine commission and it ends with the perfection of his faith in God. Thus, the lives of Abraham and Sarah testify to the fulfillment of their divine commissions as seen in Gen 11:27 to Gen 25:11. Heb 11:8-19 reflects the theme of Heb 10:19 to Heb 11:40, which is perseverance in our divine service.
The Difference Between a Man and a Woman in Divine Commissions – It is interesting to note that God generally calls men to go out by faith without a full understanding of where they are going or what they will do or say. God called Abraham to go to the land of Canaan, then told him to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar. God also tested Job. This is because God created man differently than a woman. A woman is generally more emotionally based and her mind is concerned about the details of her life and family, while a man is generally more logical and does not need to know details. In other words, it is generally more important for a woman to understand how things are going to work out than for a man. It would be easier for a woman to become stressed in such a call, while the man generally has the ability to focus on the call and remain calm. This has been my experience as a married man having been called to the mission field for many years. I have seen the challenges of a husband taking care of his wife while taking steps of faith similar to those of Abraham. However, it is important to note that God has used women to accomplish great feats of faith.
Heb 11:8 By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
Heb 11:9 Heb 11:9
Gen 17:8, “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.”
Exo 6:4, “And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers.”
Heb 11:10 For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
Heb 11:10
Eph 2:20-22, “And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”
Rev 21:14, “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.”
Rev 21:19-20, “And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst.”
Heb 11:10 “whose builder and maker is God” Word Study on “builder” The Greek word “builder” ( ) means, “architect” (Adam Clarke, [247] BDAG).
[247] Adam Clarke, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, in Adam Clarke’s Commentary, Electronic Database (Seattle, WA: Hendrickson Publishers Inc., 1996), in P.C. Study Bible, v. 3.1 [CD-ROM] (Seattle, WA: Biblesoft Inc., 1993-2000), notes on Hebrews 11:10.
Word Study on “maker” The Greek word “maker” ( ) means, “the governor of a people” (Adam Clarke), [248] or “craftsman, maker, creator” ( BDAG).
[248] Adam Clarke, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, in Adam Clarke’s Commentary, Electronic Database (Seattle, WA: Hendrickson Publishers Inc., 1996), in P.C. Study Bible, v. 3.1 [CD-ROM] (Seattle, WA: Biblesoft Inc., 1993-2000), notes on Hebrews 11:10.
Heb 11:10 Comments – Abraham’s suffering involved living in a tent all of his life. Therefore, he looked for a heavenly city as a better place to live. It was a custom in ancient times for a patriarch to found a city and name it after himself as a memorial or after some characteristic feature or event. In contrast, Abraham looked for a city founded and built by God. Cain was the first man to build a city, and he named it after his son Enoch (Gen 4:17). Nimrod (Gen 10:8-10) built four cities in an attempt to establish a kingdom on earth for himself (Gen 10:8-10), in contradiction to God’s original commission to mankind. Terah, the father of Abraham, left Ur of the Chaldees, founded a city and named it after his son Haran (Gen 11:27; Gen 11:31; Gen 29:4). Joab threatened to name a city after himself if David did not come and take it (2 Sam 27-28). While men were trying to establish their memorials upon earth, Abraham was seeking an eternal place called Heaven, while abandoning efforts to establish himself upon this earth. As a result, God gave to Abraham and his descendents the entire Promised Land as his reward for being faithful and obedient.
Heb 11:11 Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.
Heb 11:11
Heb 11:11 Comments Assonance is a rhetorical device that uses the repetition of similar sounds. The author of Hebrews uses assonance when describing Sarah as barren with the Greek phrase (Sarra steira). We find a similar example of assonance in the phrase “sterile Cheryl.” [249]
[249] David L. Allen, “Class Lecture,” Doctor of Ministry Seminar, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 25 July to 5 August 2011.
Heb 11:12 Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.
Heb 11:13 Heb 11:13
Heb 11:13 “but having seen them afar off” – Comments – Note Heb 11:1, “of things not seen.”
Heb 11:13 Comments – Heb 11:13 reveals how God’s children were saved in the Old Testament. We know that in this dispensation, a person is saved by looking back at the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the Cross. In the Old Testament a person was saved by looking forward to the redemption of the Messiah. Although they did not understand as much as we do now, they did place their hope and faith in God’s promises of redemption. Heb 11:13 tells us that God’s children in the Old Testament times embraced these promises as they were persuaded of them. They died in hope of seeing them fulfilled in the future. This qualified them for salvation.
Note that we have been blessed to see these things (Mat 13:16-17).
Mat 13:16-17, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.”
Heb 11:14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.
Heb 11:15 Heb 11:15
Heb 11:16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.
Heb 11:17 Heb 11:17
Jas 2:21, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?”
Heb 11:18 Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called:
Heb 11:19 Heb 11:19
Heb 11:19 “he received him in a figure” Comments – That is, Abraham received his son back ( ) (G2865) as a type or symbol ( ) of the violent death and of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Heb 11:19 Comments – Abraham believed that if he offered up his only son, through whom the promise was made, God would have to resurrect Isaac from the dead in order to fulfill His promise to Abraham. Abraham considered that God could raise Isaac from the dead.
Paraphrasing Heb 11:19 says, “For this reason Abraham figuratively received Isaac back as resurrected from the dead. This happened figuratively, not literally, by faith.”
Fuente: Everett’s Study Notes on the Holy Scriptures
The example of Abraham and Sarah:
v. 8. By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
v. 9. By faith he sojourned in the Land of Promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise;
v. 10. for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
v. 11. Through faith also Sarah herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.
v. 12. Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable. Since he was the father of the Old Testament believers, the example of Abraham is treated at length, no fewer than five points in which his faith stood out prominently being given in this chapter: By faith Abraham, being called to go forth to a place which he was destined to receive as an inheritance, obeyed, and he went out, not knowing where he was going. Gen 12:1-4. When the Lord issued His special call to Abraham, the latter was living with his father Terah at Haran. The call of God influenced his heart and mind to such an extent that he was no longer identified in any manner with the idolatry practiced in his father’s house, and that his faith wrought in him a strong obedience to the call of the Lord. It may not have been an easy matter for Abraham, who at that time was already seventy-five years old and possessed great wealth, to leave the home of his father for an unknown country, where, moreover, idolatry was practiced just as badly as in Mesopotamia. But his faith in the promise of the Messiah gave him power to believe also the promise concerning the land of his inheritance on earth.
Abraham’s faith was put to a severe test at this time: By faith he sojourned in the Land of Promise as in a foreign country, living in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he was waiting for the city having foundations, whose architect and builder is God. All these facts are recorded in the Book of Genesis. Having come into the Land of Promise, the land of Canaan, Abraham, instead of being given the country for his possession as he might have expected from the words of the Lord, did not get so much as a foot of land to call his own, being even obliged, at the death of Sarah, to buy a place of burial for her from the children of Heth. He lived the life of a nomad, dwelling in tents, and moving from one place to another as occasion offered. This was the lot also of his son Isaac and of his grandson Jacob. They lived in the land which God had promised to them as their inheritance, and yet it was a strange land to them, a country in which they were merely suffered as sojourners. This surely was a strong test for the faith of the patriarchs. But Abraham was equal to the test. Although possessing not a foot of soil in Canaan for more than fifty years and then only a small cave with the adjoining land, he looked upon this country as his possession and would not permit Eliezer to suggest taking Isaac back to Mesopotamia. In this faith Abraham was sustained by his firm hope of the future glory, which he knew to be his by virtue of the Messiah’s merits. He might be obliged, as long as he lived here on earth, to live the life of a nomad, but this did not shake his firm hope of entering the heavenly Jerusalem, the city which was designed and built by God for those that love Him. That is the hope of the believers of all times; for they have here no continuing city, but they seek the one to come.
The faith of Abraham was shared also by his wife Sarah, though not in the same measure: By faith also Sarah received strength to conceive and was delivered of a son though past the usual age, since she counted Him faithful that had promised. Gen 18:12-15. When Abraham came to Canaan, Sarah was about sixty-five years old and had not only been barren, but was now past the age when she might expect to bear a child in agreement with the course of nature, Gen 18:11. For twenty-four years she waited for the promise of God to be fulfilled, and her faith was sometimes not equal to the strain, as when she gave Abraham her maid Hagar as a second wife, and when she laughed at the final definite announcement of the Lord, Gen 18:12-13. But the Lord’s gentle rebuke upon this last occasion seems to have had the beneficial effect of banishing all doubts from her heart, simply because she relied upon God’s promise. It was this faith, growing, as it did, out of the true faith in the promised Messiah, which was ever connected with God’s announcement to Abraham, that gave her strength to become a mother at the age of eighty-nine, against the course of nature.
The result of this unwavering reliance upon God’s word and promise was truly remarkable: Wherefore also there were begotten of one, and of one as good as dead, these (descendants) as the stars of the heaven for multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable. In such a miraculous manner there was founded through Sarah, herself by nature doubly incapable for that purpose, a family. And another strange point is this, that Abraham at that time also was beyond the age when a man is ordinarily able to beget children; his generative power, according to the usual course of nature, had waned. Because God’s promise, however, was so certain, the result was that the descendants of Abraham, through Isaac, the children of Israel, finally were like the stars of the sky or the sand at the seashore for multitude. Gen 21:2; Gen 22:17; Gen 32:12. Thus was the faith of both Abraham and Sarah vindicated most wonderfully.
Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann
Heb 11:8. By faith Abraham, &c. Abraham was called to go into a land which God promised to shew him. What land that was, did not appear till after he had travelled to Canaan; when God assured him that that was the land which he designed to give him; so that he went out from his father’s house, purely upon the principle of faith in God, not knowing whither he went.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Heb 11:8 . A proof of believing confidence in God it was that Abraham at God’s command wandered forth without knowing whither. Comp. Gen 12:1 ; Gen 12:4 ; also Act 7:2-3 .
] is not: “ he who is called Abraham , whereas, namely, he formerly bore the name of Abram” (Theodoret, Clarius, Zeger, Bisping, Ewald, al .), which would be a very tame addition. It signifies: “Abraham, who was thereto ( sc . to the ) called or summoned by God.” That this sense could have been expressed only by without the article (Bleek, Delitzsch, Reiche, Comm. Crit . p. 108; Maier, Moll, Kurtz), can hardly be maintained. The only difference between the two modes of expression is, that with the article the is merely stated as an historic fact; without the article, on the other hand, is at the same time represented as a cause of the . The participle present , moreover (not ), is chosen in order to accentuate the immediate sequence of the and the .
. . .] namely, to Canaan.
] inexactly used, instead of . Comp. Winer, Gramm. , 7 Aufl. p. 439.
On the indicative , see Winer, Gramm. , 7 Aufl. p. 279 f.; Buttmann, Gramm. des neutest. Sprachgebr . p. 218.
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
Heb 11:8-10 . The example of Abraham .
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
II
The example of Abraham and Sarah
Heb 11:8-12
8By faith Abraham, when7 he was called to go out into a place which he should after [was destined to] receive for an inheritance, obeyed [hearkened, ]; and he went out, not knowing whither he went [cometh]. 9By faith he sojourned in the [a]8 land of promise, as in a strange [alien, ] country, dwelling in tabernacles 10[tents] with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a [was looking for the] city which hath foundations, whose builder [architect, designer, ] and maker [framer, fabricator, ] is God. 11Through faith also Sarah herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child [om. was delivered, etc.] when she was past age [contrary to her time of life],9 because she judged him faithful who had promised. 12Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead [and that too, having become deadened], so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand10 which is by the sea shore, [the] innumerable.
[Heb 11:8., being called, summoned; with Art. , as read by many, he that is called Abraham; but much less well. , hearkened, or obeyed, to go out, i.e., so as to go out. ., was about, was destined to receive; E. V., should after receive. , where, he cometh, , pregnant=whither (), he is coming, and where he is going to remain.
Heb 11:9. , sojourned, dwelt as a stranger (lit., dwelt along side of) in the land; , again pregnant, went into the land in order to sojourn in it. So Mat 2:23, , dwelt into, i.e., came into and dwelt in., as alien, as belonging to others, though he had himself been promised the future possession of it.
Heb 11:10., he was awaiting, looking for, Imperf. , the city, not, a city. , artisan, architect; , framer, builder, i.e., of the heavenly Jerusalem, Heb 12:22.
Heb 11:11. , for the depositing of seed (Alf.); for the founding of a seed, an offspring (Moll); Del., fr befruchtenden Samen; Stier, einen Samen zu grnden; De Wette, zur Grndung des Geschlechts. , even contrary to the period of her age or time of life (, aside from, in inconsistency with).
Heb 11:12. , and that too having become dead., according as, equality of measure, not merely , as, of likeness., the=which is innumerable, agreeing with , not, as would seem in E. V., referring to the progeny.K.].
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
Heb 11:8. When he was called.The lect. rec. without the article is preferable in respect to sense, since can hardly mean Abraham who was called or summoned, namely, to come forth (Ln.); but, in accordance with usage, could mean only the so-called Abraham, or, he who was called Abraham. But a reference to the change of name would here have nor elevancy, since this change took place not until twenty-five years after Abrams departure from Haran, the event which is here spoken of.
Heb 11:9. Sojourned in the classics is used only of dwelling in the neighborhood, but in Hellenistic use, of sojourning as a foreigner; in connection with it includes also the idea of coming to sojourn.
Heb 11:10. The city that hath foundations.This is not the earthly Jerusalem (Grot., etc.), but the heavenly (Gal 4:28), which (Heb 12:22) is called the city of the living God, and (Heb 13:14) the city that is to be, whose foundations also are mentioned (Rev 21:14). In so far as God projected the plan of this city, He is called its , and as the one who executes this plan, its . This latter word elsewhere only at 2Ma 4:1. [It figures largely in the Gnostic vocabulary, but in a very different sense].
Heb 11:11. Also Sarah herself.The emphatic is referred by Chrys., Beng., etc., to the fact that Sarah was a mere woman; by Schlicht., Schultz, etc., to the fact that she was barren; but by the majority correctly to that of her having been at the outset unbelieving, Rom 4:19.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. Faith gives to obedience, which is its characteristic mark, also power; for it surrenders man entirely into the hands of God, while he sacrifices his individual will with his natural propensities and dearest inclinations, and merges his heart entirely in the pleasure and will of God. The Divine command determines his calling, and in the obedience of faith he goes willingly whither God calls him; in the confidence of faith he leaves it entirely to the Divine disposal to determine time, place, object, and limit of his sojourning and his wandering; and in the hope of faith he confidently waits in his pilgrimage for the final fulfilment of the Divine promise, and anticipates his entrance into the eternal mansions.
2. Faith renders us not merely strong in the conflict with the trials of our earthly pilgrimage, and not merely willing to surrender our temporal possessions for eternal good; it conquers also unbelief and doubt in the bosom of man, and qualifies him to be an instrument of Gods omnipotence and compassion, to which later generations are pointed for their edification and their admonition (Isa 51:1 ff.; Mal 2:15; Eze 33:24).
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
The pilgrimage of Abraham a figure of the character of our earthly life.To the believer the word of God is sufficient: 1, as a command to set out; 2, as a directory of the way; 3, as nourishment on the journey.The leadings of God are often dark, and it is not unfrequently difficult for men to follow them; but faith which clings to Gods word and faithfulness, receives light for the one, and power for the other.Faith triumphs over outward affliction and over inward assaults.It is not enough to have received a call from God: we must steadfastly abide in this clear to the end.The first steps are frequently the hardest; but they are the decisive ones.What we find in God repays abundantly what we sacrifice in our vocation.As we have to give heed to the word of God, so we have to trust in the power of God.
Starke:The believer follows, if God calls him from one place to another, although he sees no temporal advantage, Act 20:22-23.Believers acknowledge that they are here strangers and pilgrims, and are seeking a genuine habitation.The impotence of nature yields to the power of faith.God fulfils abundantly His promises; blessed are all they who put their trust in Him!Abundance of population is a Divine blessing, and produces no scarcity in the land; the fault of this lies in the sins of men (Lev 26:9; Lev 26:26).
Rieger:The will of God is as an infinitely wide space which has indeed a narrow entrance; but whoever has once forced his way through the entrance, and has entirely offered up his will to God, he henceforth has abundant space in the will of God to move in accordance with His choice.Waiting expresses exceedingly well the nature and power of faith. For in waiting, certainty of conviction springing from the promise, a loving longing and desire for the promised good, and patience in hope, flow together beautifully into one.The word of promise is, to be sure, the only seed for faith; but to prepare the heart properly to preserve this seed often requires many other labors.
Heubner:Faith produces perseverance under heavy trials.Faith must, with the believer, decide in regard to the choice of his residence.God gives to the dead new life.God is the guardian of holy wedlock.
Footnotes:
[8]Heb 11:9.The art. before is, according to Sin. A. D**. K. L. and many minusc., to be stricken out.
[9]Heb 11:11. of the Rec., after , is, according to A. D*., 17, to be expunged. In Sin. it is from the hand of the corrector.
[10]Heb 11:12.Instead of , we are to read after Sin. A. D. E. K. L., 23, 37, 46, 47, , and we retain the words , which are wanting in D*. E.Instead of , write with A. E*. K., 109, 219*., .
Fuente: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical by Lange
DISCOURSE: 2322
ABRAHAMS LIFE A PATTERN FOR OURS
Heb 11:8-10. By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
THERE can scarcely be proposed to our consideration any subject more important than the practical efficacy of faith. It is the one subject which pervades this whole chapter: and it is set before us in the most advantageous way that can be imagined, being exhibited in living examples, in whom it was so embodied as to be visible, as it were, before our eyes. Had the Apostle launched forth into a general description of it, we might possibly be thought to lay an undue stress on any expressions which he has used: but, when he merely refers us to historic fact as illustrative of the point, we feel, that there is no room for misapprehension on the part of any candid inquirer.
The Apostle has already adduced instances which occurred before the flood: and now he comes to specify others which took place at different and distant periods, almost to the apostolic age. At the head of these is the case of Abraham, who, both in this chapter, and in other parts of Scripture, is more celebrated for his faith than any other of the children of men. We propose to consider,
I.
His conduct under the influence of faith
It is but a partial view that we shall be led to take at present of Abrahams faith, because other, and yet more remarkable, circumstances will come under our consideration at a future time. We now notice only two things:
1.
His departure from his own country
[Whilst Abraham was in Ur of the Chaldees, God appeared to him, and said, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy fathers house, unto a land which I will shew thee [Note: Gen 12:1 and Act 7:3.]. Whether this was done in a vision, or by a voice, we are not informed: but it is clear that it was done in such a way as not to leave the smallest doubt upon Abrahams mind, that the command proceeded from Jehovah, the only true and living God. It was a command which required much self-denial: for every man naturally feels attached to his country, and his kindred, and his possessions; and, unless induced by the prospect of some great advantages, is averse to leave them. But the self-denial was the greater, because he was not informed whither he was to go: it was to a land which should afterwards be shewn him. What would all his friends and relatives think of him, when he told them that he was about to forsake them all, and did not so much as know whither he was going? Would they not account him mad? Yet did he obey, without hesitation, and without a murmur. God, at the same time that he issued this command, had engaged to make of him a great nation, and to raise up from his loins the promised Seed, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed [Note: Gen 12:2-3.]: and of Gods power or fidelity he had no doubt [Note: Rom 4:18-21.]: he therefore went forth, willingly renouncing all present comforts in obedience to his God, assured that, however despised or ridiculed his conduct might be, it would prove in the issue to be the path of happiness and wisdom.]
2.
His sojourning in the land of promise as in a strange country
[When he went forth from his own country, he took with him Sarah his wife, and Terah his father, and his nephew Lot. But though he went towards Canaan, he stopped short of it in Haran; and there abode five years, till his fathers death: when he proceeded to Canaan [Note: Act 7:4.], where, except when driven from it by a famine, he abode during the remainder of his days. But did he then merely change one inheritance for another? No; he had not there the smallest inheritance, no, not so much as to set his foot on. He had not even a stationary abode; but dwelt in tents, which were moved from one place to another, as occasion required: thus avowing himself to be a mere pilgrim and sojourner there, and to be looking for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. The city which he had left in his native land, and those which were in the land of promise, had their foundation in the dust, to which they would all in time be reduced t but the heavenly city, which God had formed for his own habitation and the eternal residence of his saints, would continue for ever: and to that he looked as his home; content to have no abiding place here, if only he might attain to that as his eternal rest [Note: Heb 13:14.]. Nor was it for himself only that he chose this unsettled mode of life, but for his children also, even for Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise: for what he desired for himself, he desired for them also, the enjoyment of the Divine favour, and the possession of an unseen, but everlasting inheritance.]
But whilst we contemplate his conduct in these respects, it will be proper to shew,
II.
How far his example is a pattern for us
It is evident that the whole catalogue of saints here enumerated is intended to illustrate the nature and efficacy of faith. Yet in considering the conduct of the individuals, we must make due allowance for the difference of circumstances, and rather mark the principle by which they were actuated, than the particular acts in which it was displayed. If, for instance, we should imagine that we were called to forsake our country and kindred in the way that Abraham did, we should greatly err. But I conceive, that, in the two following respects, all will confess we are bound to follow him:
1.
The authority of God should in our minds be paramount to every other authority
[As he consulted not with flesh and blood, when once the Divine will was intimated to him, so neither should we: it should be sufficient for us that God hath commanded any thing: there should then be no inquiry whether the command be easy or not; nor should there be any regard to consequences in obeying it: there should be in us a fixed determination of heart to fulfil his will at all events. If, for instance, the Lord Jesus Christ say to us, If any man will be my disciple, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me; we must not stand to inquire into the extent of the self-denial that may be requisite, or the weight of the cross which we may have to bear, but leave that to his wise and gracious disposal, being intent on nothing but the performance of our duty to him. If he add, that we must forsake all, and follow him, not only not loving, but actually hating, in comparison of him, our own nearest and most honoured relatives, yea, and our own lives also, we must not reply, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? but must set ourselves instantly to fulfil in all its extent whatever he has required of us. If men, who know not God, despise, and revile, and persecute us, we must be ready to welcome it all for his sake; and to reply to the menaces of the most ferocious adversaries, Whether it be right to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. In a word, we must spare no pains to ascertain the mind of God; and, that once learned, neither men nor devils should deter us from labouring to fulfil it.]
2.
The interests of the eternal world should be paramount to every other interest
[Abraham had never seen the heavenly city; but, in the hope of reaching it, he counted all earthly possessions, interests, or pleasures, as unworthy of notice. We too are ignorant of what awaits us in the eternal world: we have no conception of the glory that shall be revealed to us at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. But by faith we may even now get such views of it, that all earthly glory shall vanish before it, as the stars before the meridian sun. How empty did all the glory of Egypt appear to Moses, when he had respect unto the recompence of reward which awaited him in a better world [Note: ver. 26.]! And to St. Paul all his accumulated afflictions appeared lightness itself, whilst he looked, not at the things which are visible and temporal, but at those which are invisible and eternal [Note: 2Co 4:17-18.]. And thus it will be with us: it will be a small thing to us that we have no inheritance here, or even that we are called to give up an inheritance we already possess. We shall even take joyfully the spoiling of our goods, knowing that we have in heaven a better, and an enduring, substance [Note: Heb 10:34.]. We shall contentedly live as pilgrims and sojourners here, and seek our rest only in the world above.]
Let us then take occasion from this subject to inquire,
1.
Whether we be children of Abraham
[Our blessed Lord has told us, that, if we be Abrahams children, we shall do the works of Abraham [Note: Joh 8:39.]. Do we then these works? Do we in these respects walk in the steps of Abraham [Note: Rom 4:12.]? Inquire what authority has Gods word with you? Do you set yourselves to obey every command of his as soon as you know it? and are you anxious to know his will in order that you may obey it? Inquire also, what influence the world has over you? If you belong to Christ, though you are in the world, you are not of it: you are not of the world, even as Christ was not of the world [Note: Joh 17:14-16.]: you love it not, nor any thing that is in it: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, are shunned by you as ensnaring, and despised by you as unsatisfying [Note: 1Jn 2:15-16.]. The very friendship of it you avoid, as enmity with God [Note: Jam 4:4.]: you come out from it [Note: 2Co 4:17.]; and will not be conformed to it [Note: Rom 12:2.]: you are even crucified unto it, and esteem it as a crucified object in your eyes [Note: Gal 6:14.]. Say, is it thus with you? and do you regard it thus in reference to your children, as well as unto yourself; contented that your children after you should live in tents, if only they may attain an everlasting inheritance? The description of all true Christians is, They walk by faith, and not by sight [Note: 2Co 5:7.]. And surely it is no difficult thing to ascertain what your habits are in this respect. Oh! remember, that if you are not Abrahams sons, you have another father, even the devil. This may sound harsh; but it is the declaration of Him who spake as never man spake [Note: Joh 8:38-44.]. I pray you, leave not such an interesting subject any longer in suspense: nor rest till you have given evidence that you are Abrahams seed, by walking as Abraham walked, and as Christ himself also walked [Note: 1Jn 2:6.].]
2.
How you may become so
[It was by faith that Abraham was brought into a justified state: and by faith are we also to be made partakers of that happiness. By our works we must prove our relation to him; but by faith only can we obtain an admission into his family. We must believe in the promised Seed, as he did; and then shall we be Christs, as he was: And, if we be Christs, then are we Abrahams seed, and heirs according to the promise [Note: Gal 3:6-7; Gal 3:29.]. Now it is of the utmost importance that we understand this matter well. For there are many who imagine, that to sequester themselves from the world is meritorious, and to live as monks or hermits is to secure the favour of their God. But this is a fatal error. There is no acceptance with God but by Jesus Christ, even by faith in his atoning blood. The Apostle especially guards us on this head. Abraham was circumcised: yet his righteousness came not by circumcision, but by the faith which he had whilst he was yet uncircumcised [Note: Rom 4:9-11.]. So it is not by any obedience of ours that we are to purchase an inheritance in heaven; we must receive it as the free gift of God through Christ Jesus; and then press forward towards it in the way of his commandments. Let us walk with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this world, and then we shall sit down with them for ever in the kingdom of our God.]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
(8) By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. (9) By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: (10) For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. (11) Through faith also Sarah herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised. (12) Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.
How equally plain and blessed is the same doctrine concerning the sovereignty of grace, in the instance of the great father of the faithful, Abraham? For what was Abraham, when the Lord first called him? Surely, an idolater. And what prompted the Lord to call Abraham, but his own free, sovereign, and unmerited grace. Is not everything the Lord said to this man to the same amount as to Noah? He found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Fear not, Abraham; I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward, Gen 15:1 . So everlastingly true is that blessed scripture by John. If we hope, it is because he first loved us, 1Jn 4:19 . And all the blessed consequences resulting, in the lives and conduct of Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob, were the fruits and effects; and not in the smallest degree causes, or ministering to the first great and only disposing cause, God’s purpose, grace, and favor, leading on to the accomplishment of the end intended. Reader! it is blessed to behold the lives of the faithful, bearing testimony to God’s covenant truth and faithfulness. But it is doubly blessed, to keep always in view the Lord disposing all. While the eye of the Prophet was fixed in contemplation at beholding the whirlwind from the north, and the complicated machine, wheel within wheel, moving on in endless revolvings; the whole was too deep, and too much encompassed in perplexity for his mind to understand. But, when the Lord opened to his astonished view, One, like the Son of Man above, guiding all, the Lord’s glory became manifested, Eze 1:4-26 .
It is blessed, yea, very blessed, to behold the children of God, in every age of the Church, all marked with one and the same family feature. They may be said, all of them, to sojourn by faith in the land of promise; for all the promises are theirs in Christ, by right of inheritance, 2Co 1:20 , and yet, every country here below is to them a strange country, Mic 2:10 . They dwell in the midst of many people, as a dew from the Lord, Mic 5:7 , and yet they dwell alone, and are not reckoned among the nations, Num 23:9 . They sojourn in tabernacles which are moveable, liable, and expecting every moment to be taken down, Heb 13:14 , and yet the eternal God is their refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms, Deu 33:27 .
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
8 By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
Ver. 8. When he was called ] A man may follow God dryshod through the Red Sea. He is to be obeyed without sciscitation, with a blind obedience. Abraham winked, as it were, and put his hand into God’s to be led whithersoever he pleased. Magnus est animus, qui se Dee tradidit; pusillus et degener qui obluctatur. (Seneca.) That is a brave man indeed that can wholly resign himself up to God- Quo fata trahunt, retrahuntque, sequamur. (Virgil.)
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
8 22 .] Thus far the examples have been taken from the antediluvian world. Next, he takes them from the patriarchs of Israel; with whom the promise was ever the object of faith: a land , in which they were strangers: a son, who was not yet born: a people, who were yet to be.
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
8 .] ABRAHAM’S example . By faith Abraham, being called (viz. by God, Gen 12:1 ff. With the art. (see var. read.), can hardly mean any thing but ‘he that was called, named, Abraham.’ And the sense thus would be very good, whatever Bleek and Delitzsch have said against it, when we take into account the meaning of the name Abraham, the father of nations. That this change of name did not take place till 25 years after his removal from Haran, is no objection, but is just what would be the point raised: ‘By faith, he who was (afterwards) called Abraham, father of nations’ &c. Lnemann’s rendering of , “he that was called by God,” hardly requires refutation. But on the whole, I adhere to the rec. text. The manuscript evidence is strong for the other, but not overwhelming; and the comparison of with gives great support to the rec. In fairness it should be said, as Del. points out, that ( ) , appended to names, is exceedingly common with St. Luke (Luk 1:36 ; Luk 6:15 ; Luk 7:11 ; Luk 8:2 ; Luk 10:39 , &c.), and, as he also remarks, it may appear that Clem.-rom. read and understood this “he that was called Abraham,” for he says, . Of the Greek Commentators, Thdrt. says, , : c., , : Thl., , ) obeyed to go out (the infin. is epexegetic, explaining wherein he obeyed. Cf. Rev 16:9 ; Col 1:22 , &c. Winer, 44. 1) to a (or, ‘the,’ even without , after a preposition) place which he was hereafter to receive for an inheritance (not that he was conscious even of this promise when he went out, for it was made to him afterwards in Canaan, see Gen 12:7 ), and went out, not knowing where (whither) he was (is) going (coming. The indic. is perfectly normal, a matter of fact, not one of possibility only, being in question. Cf. , ref. John: , Act 20:18 . But , Mat 8:20 , when the matter is one of mere possibility. See Winer, 41. 4).
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
Heb 11:8 . . “By faith Abraham on being called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance, obeyed and went out not knowing whither he was going.” , as in Mar 1:20 and Isa 51:2 , , . The present, not , expresses the idea that no sooner was the call given than it was obeyed [“dass er, so wie der Ruf an ihn ging, gehorsamte” (Bleek)]. The same idea is expressed by the immediate introduction of , which more naturally would come at the end of the clause, and thus allow ( cf. Gen 12:1 ; Act 7:2 ) to follow . The faith of Abraham appeared in his promptly abandoning his own country on God’s promise of another, and the strength of this faith was illustrated by the circumstance that he had no knowledge where or what that country was. He went out . The terms of the call (Gen 12:1 ) were , . It was, therefore, no attractive account of Canaan which induced him to forsake Mesopotamia, no ordinary emigrant’s motive which moved him, but mere faith in God’s promise. “Even still the life of faith must be entered on in ignorance of the way to the inheritance, or even what the inheritance and rest in each one’s particular case will be, and of the experiences that the way will bring. This is true even of ordinary life” (Davidson). This did not exhaust the faith of Abraham. Further . “By faith he became a sojourner in a land [his] by the promise as if it belonged to another, dwelling in tents, along with Isaac and Jacob, co-heirs with him of the same promise.” , as in Act 7:6 , , dwelt alongside of the proper inhabitants. Cf. Gen 17:8 and passim . in its common pregnant sense, Joh 21:4 ; Act 8:40 ; Pet. Heb 5:12 and especially Act 7:4 . He lived in the promised land, , as if it belonged to some other person; neither did he make a permanent settlement in it but dwelt in tents, shifting from place to place, the symbol of what is temporary, see Isa 38:12 ; 2Co 5:4 . The presence of his son and grandson must continually have prompted him to settle. They were included in the promise, but they too were compelled to move with him from place to place. But how did this evince faith? It did so by showing that he had given a wider scope and a deeper significance to God’s words. He was content to dwell in tents, because he looked for “the city which has the foundations”. . “For he expectantly waited for thecity.” (Jas 5:7 , ., Act 17:16 ; 1Co 11:33 ) occurs in Soph. Phil. , 123, where Jebb says: “The idea of the compound is ‘be ready for him,’ prepared to deal with him the moment he appears”. The city is described as one “that has the foundations” which the tents lacked, and which according to Heb 13:14 is by implication not only but . In Heb 12:22 it is called “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,” and in Gal 4:26 . A city was the symbol of a settled condition, as in Psa 107:7 , . Cf. the interesting parallel in Philo. Leg. Alleg. , iii. xxvi., p. 103, , . It is further described as , “whose constructer and maker is God”. is used of the silversmiths in Act 19:24 , of God as Maker of the world in Wis 13:1 ; Wis 14:2 , . Perhaps “artificer” comes nearest to the meaning. , originally one who works for the people, but applied by Plato ( Rep. , p. 530) to God; and so, very often in Josephus and Philo (see Krebs. in loc .). For the use of the title among the Gnostics, see Mansel, Gnostic Heresies , p. 19. In Clement, Ep. , 20, we have . In Mal 4:1Mal 4:1 , . “Maker” most adequately translates the word. Wetstein shows that was not an uncommon combination and aptly compares Cicero ( De Nat. D. , i. 8) “Opificem aedificatorem mundi”. The statement of this verse shows that Abraham and other enlightened O.T. saints ( cf. chap. 4) understood that their connection with God, the Eternal One, was their great possession, of which earthly gifts and blessings were but present manifestations.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Heb 11:8-12
8By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise; 10for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11By faith even Sarah herself received ability to conceive, even beyond the proper time of life, since she considered Him faithful who had promised. 12Therefore there was born even of one man, and him as good as dead at that, as many descendants as the stars of heaven in number, and innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
Heb 11:8 “Abraham. . .obeyed” In some ways these cameos are idealized representations of these men’s lives. The OT is unique in ancient literature in that it records both the positive and negative about its characters. Abraham was a strange mixture of fear and faith
1. Fear
a. God said leave your family; he took his father and Lot
b. God promised a child; he tried to produce a child through Sarah’s servant and later tried to give Sarah away to both an Egyptian and a Philistine king in order to save his own life
2. Faith
a. He did leave Ur
b. He did believe God would give him descendants
c. He was willing to offer Isaac (cf. Genesis 22)
God is not looking for “super-saints,” but for flawed humans who will respond to Him in repentance and faith and live for Him regardless of the circumstances.
Heb 11:9 “he lived as an alien in the land of promise” This is the term “sojourned,” which means he did not have rights as a citizen (cf. Heb 11:13).
Heb 11:10 “he was looking” This is an imperfect middle (deponent) indicative. He kept looking!
“the city” This is a common biblical metaphor (cf. Heb 11:16; Heb 12:22; Heb 13:14; Joh 14:2; Gal 4:26; Rev 3:12; Rev 21:2), which refers to the place of God’s dwelling with humans again, as in Eden.
Abraham lived his life by faith looking not at current reality, but promised reality. Faith says “this world is not my home”; faith says “God’s promises are sure”; faith says “reality is not what I see, but what God says”!
SPECIAL TOPIC: THE TWO CITIES
Heb 11:11 “Sarah” Some ancient Greek manuscripts (P46, D) add “barren.” It is significant that none of the patriarch’s wives (except Leah) could conceive without the help of God. Also, none of the first born children were the heirs of promise. God acted to show that He was in charge!
Sarah, like Abraham, was a mixture of fear and faith. She gave Abraham her servant; she also laughed at God’s promise (cf. Gen 18:12).
Heb 11:12 “as the stars of heaven in number and innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore” This was part of God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (cf. Gen 15:5; Gen 22:17; Gen 32:12). Remember all of their wives (except Leah) were barren.
“she considered Him faithful who had promised” She acted based on God’s promise, not current reality. This phrase is similar to Heb 10:23 (cf. Heb 6:17-18). The readers are also to act in this way.
Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley
Abraham. In Abraham we see the obedience of faith (compare Rom 4:3-22), and in Sarah faith’s reckoning, or judging.
should after = was about to.
knowing. Greek. epistamai. App-132. See App-50. Part I.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
8-22.] Thus far the examples have been taken from the antediluvian world. Next, he takes them from the patriarchs of Israel; with whom the promise was ever the object of faith: a land, in which they were strangers: a son, who was not yet born: a people, who were yet to be.
Fuente: The Greek Testament
Heb 11:8. , Abraham) Rom 4:1; Rom 4:16, etc.- , , obeyed so as that he should go out, and went out) A gradation [but Engl. Vers. joins with ]; comp. 2 Corinthians 8 Heb 11:10, at the end, and Heb 11:11.-) A word adapted to future events. So Heb 11:20; with which comp. Heb 11:1.- , not knowing) Comp. Act 7:3, at the end.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
The apostle hath now passed over the first period of Scripture records, namely, from the beginning of the world unto the flood; and therein he hath considered the examples of all concerning whom it is testified in particular that they pleased God, and were accepted with him in their obedience. And two things he proves from them with respect unto his present purpose:
1. That they all pleased God and were righteous by faith.
2. That their faith was effectual to secure them in that state of divine favor, by enabling them unto all duties of obedience, notwithstanding the difficulties and oppositions which they met withal.
Hereby he makes good his design with respect unto these Hebrews, namely, to convince them that if they did not persevere in their profession, it was because of their unbelief, for that true faith would certainly carry them through with constancy and perseverance, whatever difficulties they should meet withal, giving them encouragement from what it wrought in others from the beginning.
Hence he proceeds unto the next period of time, from the flood, and the renovation of the world in the family of Noah, unto the giving of the law; so to manifest that in every state of the church the way of pleasing God was one and the same; as also, that faith still retained its efficacy under all alterations.
He who, in this period of time, is first testified unto in the Scripture, is he whose example on all accounts was most forcible with these Hebrews, which he had before at large proposed unto them and insisted on, Heb 6:11-15; the exposition of which place may be consulted, to give light to this context. This is Abraham; whose example, by reason of the eminency of his person, the relation of the Hebrews unto him, from whom they derived all their privileges temporal and spiritual, the efficacy of his faith, with the various successful exercises of it, he declares and urgeth at large from hence unto the end of the 19th verse.
Heb 11:8. , .
. Vulg. Lat., qui vocatur Abraham; Rhem., he who is called Abraham: which can no way be reconciled unto the text. Those who will adhere unto that translation do suppose that the change of his name is here intimated, when from Abram he was called Abraham: but that is not vocatus, but cognominatus; not , but . And if were ever used in such a sense, as it is not, it should have been , and not , without any article. Besides, as the apostle had no reason to speak of Abraham in that manner, he who is called Abraham, as if he were a person but little known to them, so this interpretation takes away the whole foundation of the faith of Abraham, and of all the effects of it, and so of the whole argument of the apostle, which was his divine call, which he refers unto. Wherefore all other translations avoid this mistake. Syr., , when he was called. Evocatus, called forth. , obedivit exire, obeyed to go forth. Syr., dicto audiens fuit, auscultavit ut exiret, ut abiret, ut emigraret; hearkened, obeyed to go forth, to wander away. Some supply Deo to auscultavit; which may be better supplied to called, called of God. Our English translation makes a transposition of the words: instead of, he obeyed to go forth unto the place, it refers , to go forth, unto , being called to go out unto a place; and so refers obeyed afterwards not only to the call of Abraham, but also unto what he did in compliance therewithall.
v, auscultavit, ditto audivit; a word proper to answer : being called, he so heard as to yield obedience. So to hearken or hear is frequently used in the Scripture.
Heb 11:8. By faith Abraham, being called [of God], obeyed to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
In Abraham there was a foundation laid of a new state of the church after the flood, more excellent than that which preceded. He was the first also after the flood unto whom testimony was given in particular that he pleased God. He was the progenitor of the Hebrews, from whom they derived all their privileges, in whose person they were initiated into the covenant, with a right unto the promises. He was also by promise the father of all that believe. And therefore it was the great concernment of those Hebrews then, and is so now of us, to consider aright the example of his faith and obedience.
Designing to give many illustrious instances of the power and efficacy of the faith of Abraham, the apostle begins with that which was the beginning and foundation of them all, namely, the call of God, and his compliance therewithal
And the nature, life, and power of faith, are represented in three words in this instance: , , . It respects the call of God, which it rests upon, and which it is resolved into; and it acts itself in obedience to all the commands of God. This alone is that faith which the apostle celebrates, and whereunto he ascribes the great effect of our pleasing God.
In the words of the verse there is proposed unto us,
1. The foundation of the faith and obedience of Abraham, which was his call of God.
2. What he was called unto, which was a journey or pilgrimage; described,
(1.) By the term from whence he went, go out; and,
(2.) From the term whither he went, unto a place, etc.
3. The exercise of his faith, and the effects of it, he obeyed.
4. The commendation of his faith, from the difficulty wherewith his obedience was accompanied, with respect unto what he was called unto, not knowing, etc.
First, He was called; that is, of God, by an immediate word of command from him.
1. He did it not without a command, He did not leave all his present satisfactions, he did not put himself on innumerable hazards for the future, merely of his own accord. Had he not had a divine call, there had been no work for faith. Where there is no call from God, there can be no faith or trust in God. Where the call is general, as in our ordinary occasions, so is our faith in God, resigning all circumstances unto his disposal; but this especial call of Abraham required a special faith.
2. Concerning this call of Abraham, there are many difficulties arising from the record of it, Gen 12:1-3, with its repetition by Stephen, Act 7:2-4. For Genesis 12, it is reported as made after the death of Terah, his father, in Haran, Gen 11:31-32; by Stephen it is assigned unto his being in Mesopotamia, before he left the land of the Chaldees. Besides, Haran, or Charran, was in Mesopotamia; where, in the relation of Stephen, he is said to dwell after he left Mesopotamia. Wherefore some say he was twice called, once in the land of the Chaldees, and again in Haran. Others say his call was but one; but then some say it was at Ur of the Chaldees, before he first went thence with his father; others, at Haran, after his fathers death.
It will not consist with my design, nor the nature of an exposition, to insist at large on these things. Some few observations will clear the whole difficulty, so far as is necessary unto our purpose; as,
(1.) Mesopotamia is in good authors sometimes taken largely for all that part of Asia which is separated from Syria by the river Euphrates, comprehending both Assyria and Chaldea; and sometimes strictly and properly for the country between the two rivers of Euphrates and Tigris, whence it hath its denomination. Hence, when Stephen affirms that the God of glory appeared unto Abraham in Mesopotamia, he takes it in the largest sense, comprehending Chaldea, wherein Ur was, as is plain, verses 2, 4. And Abraham coming thence unto Haran, came into a city of Mesopotamia properly so called, and that near to Euphrates, which he was to pass over into Syria.
(2.) By assigning the appearance of God unto Abraham before he left the land of the Chaldees, Stephen directly affirms his call to have been whilst he was there, before he departed with his father and came to Haran. And this is evident from the story in Moses, when it is said that he and his father went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan, Gen 11:31; for they could have no design to leave their native country, with all their possessions and relations, to go into so remote and unknown a country, without some especial call and direction from God.
(3.) Wherefore those words of Moses, , Gen 12:1, are well rendered by our translators, Now the LORD had said unto Abram; that is, he had so whilst he was in Ur of the Chaldees, before he and his father departed thence to go into the land of Canaan, Gen 11:31. And because this call had no respect unto Terah, but unto Abraham only, Moses first records his journey with his father toward Canaan, and then, on the death of his father, takes up again and particularly expresseth his call, Gen 12:1. The pursuit whereof from thence he distinctly declares.
(4.) And this is evident from the call itself, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy fathers house, Gen 12:1. For Abraham had all these in Ur of the Chaldees, and not in Haran.
Wherefore this call of Abraham was but one, and given at once; namely, whilst he was in Ur of the Chaldees, before his going out from thence with his father, and the death of his father thereon; which place Stephen reckons to Mesopotamia in the large notation of it. And this one call is particularly recorded, Gen 12:1-3, after the death of Terah, when he only remained who was alone concerned therein. But the reader may see these things fully discoursed, with a just reconciliation of Moses with Stephen, in our Exercitations on the first volume of the Exposition, Exercitation 19.
Of this call of Abraham there were two parts:
(1.) A command, Gen 12:1, Get thee out of thy country, etc.
(2.) A promise, Gen 12:2-3, And I will make of thee, etc. Of this promise there were two parts:
[1.] A temporal blessing, in the multiplication of his seed, Gen 12:2.
[2.] A spiritual blessing, in confining the promised blessing Seed unto him and his family, in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed, verse 3. And it is a thing most absurd, and contrary to the whole design of the Scripture and the dispensation of the covenant, to confine the faith of Abraham unto the land of Canaan, and the glory of his posterity therein. For the life of the promise made unto him on his call, whereby his faith was animated, was in the blessing of all the families of the earth in him; which was in Christ alone, the promised seed, as all but infidels must confess.
Secondly, The apostle takes notice only of the first part of the call, namely, the command. And therein two things are considerable:
1. From what he was to go and depart.
2. What he was to go unto. He was to go out: . He was called to go out; so our translation disposeth the words: or, being called, , he obeyed to go out, or in going out, as they lie in the original. They are both to the same purpose.
In the latter way, obeyed is immediately referred to faith; in the former, going out is so; his faith wrought by obedience in his going out.
1. It is said he was called to go out. From whence and from what, we are referred unto the story: Gen 12:1, Get thee (, vade tibi) out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy fathers house; that is, leave and forsake all things that are pleasant, useful, desirable unto thee;for these three things, country, kindred, and fathers house, comprise them all. And they fall under two considerations:
(1.) As man is naturally inclined to the love of them, to adhere unto them, to value them and delight in them. These are the things which, by all sorts of circumstances, do from their nativity insinuate themselves into the minds and affections of men, so as that they cannot be separated from them without the greatest convulsions of nature. And we have the testimony of mankind hereunto, with sundry instances of such as have preferred these things before their own lives.
(2.) They may be considered as useful and beneficial unto life and the comforts of it. Whatever is so, is contained in these things. Whereas, therefore, natural affection and sense of usefulness unto all the advantages and comforts of life, are the two cords that bind us unto any thing whatever, the forsaking of all things that fall under both of them, must needs proceed from some great cause and efficacious impulse.
This, therefore, commends the faith of Abraham in the first place, and evinceth the powerful efficacy of faith in general, that under its conduct, in obedience unto the call of God, he could and did relinquish all these things, cast out their insinuations into his affections, and break the cords of delight and interest which they cast upon him. And we may see herein that,
Obs. 1. It becomes the infinite greatness and all-satisfactory goodness of God, at the very first revelation of himself unto any of his creatures, to require of them a renunciation of all other things, and their interest in them, in compliance with his commands. Get thee away from country, friends, relations, and enjoyments,is a command becoming the greatness of God. I am the LORD thy God, is his first word unto us. And the next is, Thou shalt have no other gods but me, with me, before me, besides me, nothing to be in my place, in comparison of me, in competition with me; forsake all, and be mine only.Unless we have a sense of that greatness of God which makes such commands alone to become him, we yield no obedience unto him in a due manner.
Obs. 2. The power of sovereign grace in calling men to God, and the mighty efficacy of faith complying therewithal. Whilst Abraham lived with his father on the other side of the river, they served other gods, Jos 24:2, or were engaged in the superstition and idolatry then prevalent in the world. And the minds of men being once thoroughly infected with them, as having received them by tradition from their fathers, are very hardly recovered from their snares. In this state he had all worldly accommodations that his own country, kindred, and inheritance, could afford him; yet such was the powerful efficacy of sovereign grace in his call by God, that it enabled him by faith to relinquish and renounce them all, and to betake himself at once unto a new state and condition, both as unto things temporal and eternal. It is well if all of us who make profession of the same faith, have an experience of the same grace.
Obs. 3. It is the call of God alone that makes a distinction amongst mankind, as unto faith and obedience, with all the effects of them. Abraham thus believed and obeyed God, because he was called; and he was called, not because he was better or wiser than others, but because it pleased God to call him and not others, 1Co 1:26-31.
Obs. 4. The church of believers consists of those that are called out of the world. The call of Abraham is a pattern of the call of the church, Psa 45:10; 2Co 6:17-18.
Obs. 5. Self-denial, in fact or resolution, is the foundation of all sincere profession. This Abraham began his profession in the practice of, and proceeded unto the height in the greatest instances imaginable. And the instruction that our Savior gives herein, Mat 10:37-38; Mat 16:24-25, amounts but unto this, If you intend to have the faith of Abraham, with the fruits and blessings attending it, you must lay the foundation of it in self-denial, and the relinquishment of all things, if called thereunto, as he did. Wherefore, the faith of Abraham being everywhere in the Scripture set up as the measure and standard of the faith of believers in all ages, and the apostle in this place giving us an account of the beginning and progress of it for our example, there is nothing that belongs more directly unto the exposition of the place than a due observation of its nature, actings, and effects, for our instruction, without which the mind of the Holy Ghost in the context is not understood; though expositors take very little notice of these things. Now, the foundation of the whole is laid herein, that the first act of saving faith consists in the discovery and sight of the infinite greatness goodness, and other excellencies of the divine nature, so as to judge it our duty, upon his call, his command and promise, to deny ourselves, to relinquish all things, and to do so accordingly.
2. We have seen what Abraham was called from: the next thing in the words is, what he was called unto; namely, a place which he should after receive for an inheritance.
He was not called merely to forsake the place where he was, and then left to rove and wander up and down uncertainly; but he was called unto a certain place. For it so falls out many times, that men, wearied by one means or another, (as convictions or afflictions,) of their present spiritual state and condition, so as to have a mind to relinquish it, yet having no discovery of another, of a better state, with rest in Christ by the gospel, they rove up and down in their minds and affections for a season, and then return to the state or place from which they came out, (which the patriarchs refused to do, verse 15,) or else perish in their wanderings.
This place whereunto he went is described by his future relation unto it and interest in it; he was afterwards to receive it for an inheritance. At present he received it not, but only in right and title; nor during his life. He, nor his posterity for some generations, had no inheritance in it; only he bought a burying-place in it of the children of Heth, whereby he took seizin of the whole. But he received it afterwards in his posterity, as is known.
And he is said to receive it. It was given unto him, bestowed on him by way of a free gift, or donation.: He did only receive it. And so it is with respect unto all good things betwixt God and us; he is the free donor of them, we are but passive recipients.
And he received this country for an inheritance. And unto an inheritance there is required right and title unto it, that a man may be a lawful possessor of it. Now, this country was before possessed by others, who enjoyed it by a prescription from its first plantation. But God, as the great possessor of heaven and earth, as the sovereign Lord of all things, transferred their right and title unto that land, and invested it in Abraham. So it is frequently repeated, that God gave them this or that land.
Obs. 6. There is no right, title, or possession, that can prescribe against the righteousness of God in the disposal of all inheritances here below at his pleasure. Whatever single persons, whatever whole nations, may think or boast of their title and right, as unto God, they are all but tenants at will and pleasure. He can disinherit and disseize them of all as he sees good; and when he will do so, (as he gives instances of his so doing in all ages,) no plea will be admitted against his right, and the exercise of it. So do kings hold their crowns, nations their soil, and private men their possessions.
Obs. 7. Gods grant of things unto any is the best of titles, and most sure against all pretences or impeachments. Jdg 11:24,
We will possess what the LORD our God gives us to possess.
Obs. 8. Possession belongs unto an inheritance enjoyed. This God gave unto Abraham in his posterity, with a mighty hand and stretched-out arm; and he divided it unto them by lot.
Obs. 9. An inheritance is capable of a limited season. The title unto it may be continued unto a prefixed period. So was it with this inheritance; for although it is called an everlasting inheritance, yet it was so only on two accounts:
(1.) That it was typical of that heavenly inheritance which is eternal. (2.) Because, as unto right and title, it was to be continued unto the end of that limited perpetuity which God granted unto the church-state in that land; that is, unto the coming of the promised Seed, in whom all nations should be blessed, which the call and faith of Abraham did principally regard. Until that time was expired, although many incursions were made into and upon this inheritance of Abraham, yet were all that made them oppressors; and they were punished for their usurpation. But when the grant of it to them expired, and those wicked tenants of Gods vineyard forfeited their right unto it by their unbelief, and murdering of the true Heir, God disinherited them, dispossessed them, and left them neither right nor title to, nor any interest in this inheritance; as it is at this day. It is no more the inheritance of Abraham; but in Christ he is become heir of the world, and his spiritual posterity enjoy all the privileges of it.
Wherefore the grant of this land, for an inheritance unto Abraham in his posterity, had a season limited unto it. Upon the expiration of that term, their right and title unto it were cancelled and disannulled. And thereon God in his providence sent the armies of the Romans to dispossess them; which they did accordingly, unto this day. Nor have the present Jews any more or better title unto the land of Canaan than unto any other country in the world. Nor shall their title be renewed thereunto upon their conversion unto God. For the limitation of their right was unto that time wherein it was typical of the heavenly inheritance: that now ceasing for ever, there can be no especial title unto it revived. And we see herein,
Obs. 10. That it is faith alone that gives the soul satisfaction in future rewards in the midst of present difficulties and distresses. So it did to Abraham, who, in the whole course of his pilgrimage, attained nothing of this promised inheritance. And,
Obs. 11. The assurance given us by divine promises is sufficient to encourage us unto the most difficult course of obedience.
Thirdly, The last thing in the words is, the commendation of the faith of Abraham, from his ignorance of the place whither he was to go upon the call of God. He had only said unto him that he should go into a land that he would show him, Gen 12:1.
1. But of what nature the land was, how or by whom inhabited, or what way he was to go into it, he told him not. It should seem, indeed, that God had told him from the beginning that it was the land of Canaan which he designed; for when he first left Ur of the Chaldees, he steered his course towards Canaan, Gen 11:31 : but it it is yet said that he knew it not. He did not understand any thing of the circumstances of it, nor what in that land he was called unto, nor where it was; so that it may be well said that he went whither he knew not. The sum is, that he wholly committed himself unto the power, faithfulness, goodness, and conduct of God, without the least encouragement from a prospect of the place whither he was going.
2. All these things being put together, namely, what he was called from; what he was called unto; his readiness in obedience; the ground of his whole undertaking, namely, the call of God, which he received, and obeyed by faith: here is not only an eminent instance of his faith recorded, but an invincible encouragement given unto those Hebrews unto whom the apostle wrote, and unto us with them, that faith is able to carry us through all the difficulties of our profession, unto the full enjoyment of the promise. This I look upon as a second instance of the faith of Abraham, wherein it was signally exemplary. He did not only on the first call of God, through a view of his greatness and sovereign authority, forego all that he had at present, but engaged himself unto absolute obedience, without any prospect what it might cost him, or what he was to undergo on the account of it, or what was the reward proposed unto him. And the same is required of us.
Fuente: An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews
The Call of God
“By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” Heb 11:8
Whenever we discuss the life of faith, we must begin with the call of God. The first and most important thing in this verse is the call of God by which Abraham was brought to faith in Christ. Gen 12:1 (compare Act 7:2-3) gives us the historical account of that to which the Holy Spirit here alludes.
A Divine Gift
Faith is the gift of God. The life of faith begins with the call of God. Salvation does not begin with man, but with God. It is not in any sense of the word caused by man. It is not to any degree or at any point dependent upon man. Salvation is Gods work, and Gods work alone. Salvation is of the Lord. Abraham was not seeking the Lord. The Lord sought him. Abraham was not looking for God. God was looking for him. Abraham did not come to God. God came to him. Abrahams faith was not the cause of Gods grace to him, but the result. Faith in Christ is the gift of God bestowed upon, wrought in, and given to sinners who otherwise could not and would not believe God.
Faith in Christ is given to lost men and women according to Gods eternal purpose of grace in election (Eph 1:3-4). It is the result of Christs atonement (Heb 9:12). It is wrought in chosen, redeemed sinners by the power and grace of the Holy Spirits omnipotent, irresistible, effectual call (Eph 2:1-10). They and they alone are the called according to the purpose of God for whom all things work together for good (Rom 8:28).
Two Calls
There are two distinct calls from God set forth in Holy ScriptureA General Call and A Particular CallAn Outward Call and An Inward CallA Call that Men Resist and Reject and An Effectual, Irresistible, Almighty, Saving Call of Omnipotent Grace. The general, external call is given to all who hear the Gospel, or come under the sound of the Word of God (Pro 8:4; Mat 20:16; Luk 14:17-18; Pro 1:24-28). All men and women, without exception, stoutly resist this general call.
The special, inward, and efficacious call of God comes only to his elect. This call is always effectual. It is always saving. It always results in faith. It always brings the chosen, redeemed sinner into the arms of his omnipotent Savior. Examples of this omnipotent, irresistible call are scattered throughout the Scriptures. Abraham is here held before us as one of the examples in the Old Testament. In the New Testament era God still works irresistibly in the salvation of his elect (Luk 5:27-28; Luk 19:5-6; Act 9:4-5; Joh 5:25; Joh 10:3-4; Joh 10:16; Rom 8:30; 1Co 1:26-31).
This invincible call of God is an act of Gods sovereign grace, accompanied by all-mighty, irresistible power, giving life to men and women who are dead in trespasses and sins. It brings life, eternal, spiritual life. It brings us “out of darkness into Gods marvelous light” (1Pe 2:9). No wonder David sang about it as he did Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and causest to approach unto thee (Psa 65:4).
A Call from Death to Life
Like all others, Abraham was a lost man, dead in trespasses and in sins, when the Lord God called him by his grace (Jos 24:2). He belonged to a heathen family He lived as an idolater in the midst of idolaters until he was seventy years old. Then God called him! Until God stepped into his life, Abraham lived just like everyone else in that massive, pagan land. He was content with the husks of this world upon which the swine feed, without God, without Christ, without hope, without life! Abrahams experience is repeated and verified by each of Gods elect (Eph 2:1-4).
A Divine Revelation
This effectual call of God comes with the revelation of Christ (Act 7:2; Zec 12:10; 2Co 4:6; Gal 1:15-16). What marvelous grace! The God of glory condescends to draw near to and reveal himself to lost sinners, immersed in idolatry, having no concern for his honor and glory! There was nothing in Abraham to deserve Gods notice, nothing to merit his esteem. Yet, God called him!
This call is a work of Gods sovereign, distinguishing grace. Grace singled out one man from the midst of many. God says, “I called him alone, and blessed him” (Isa 51:2). Why did God call Abraham but not his father and kinsmen? No answer can be given but this: God has mercy on whom he will have mercy (Rom 9:18). He called Isaac and refused Ishmael. He loved Jacob and hated Esau. He accepted Abel and rejected Cain. Why? Because He would. No other explanation is or can be given (Rom 9:16).
“The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham” (Act 7:2). I do not know all that is included in those words, but of two things we may be certain: (1.) For the first time in his life God was real to Abraham. And (2.) Abraham beheld God in his glory as God his Savior. Sooner or later, this is what God does for every chosen, redeemed sinner. In the midst of their worldliness, self-serving, self-seeking and self-pleasing rebellion and death, God steps in and makes himself known! Then, they say with Job, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.”
This is how God saves sinners. He “who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2Co 4:6). The chosen, redeemed sinner in whom this miracle of grace is wrought is brought by the power and grace of God out of darkness, bondage and death into the light and life and glorious liberty of the sons of God!
Fuente: Discovering Christ In Selected Books of the Bible
Abraham: Gen 11:31, Gen 12:1-4, Jos 24:3, Neh 9:7, Neh 9:8, Isa 41:2, Isa 51:2, Act 7:2-4
which: Gen 12:7, Gen 13:15-17, Gen 15:7, Gen 15:8, Gen 17:8, Gen 26:3, Deu 9:5, Psa 105:9-11, Eze 36:24
obeyed: Heb 11:33, Heb 5:9, Gen 22:18, Gen 15:5, Mat 7:24, Mat 7:25, Rom 1:5, Rom 6:17, Rom 10:16, 2Co 10:5, Jam 2:14-16, 1Pe 1:22, 1Pe 3:1, 1Pe 4:17
Reciprocal: Gen 6:22 – General Gen 12:4 – departed out Gen 12:5 – and into Gen 15:6 – he believed Gen 15:13 – thy Gen 20:13 – God Gen 22:3 – General Gen 26:5 – General Exo 10:26 – and we Exo 19:5 – if ye Num 9:5 – according Num 10:30 – General Jos 6:12 – the priests Rth 2:11 – and how 2Sa 24:19 – as the Lord 1Ki 17:15 – did according 2Ki 4:5 – she went 2Ki 5:14 – according to Job 36:11 – If Job 42:9 – did Psa 22:4 – General Psa 56:8 – tellest Jer 13:5 – as Mat 1:24 – did Mat 2:21 – General Mar 11:4 – and found Luk 22:13 – General Joh 2:5 – Whatsoever Joh 13:17 – happy Act 6:7 – obedient Act 7:3 – Get Act 8:27 – he arose Act 12:9 – he went Act 16:6 – forbidden Rom 2:8 – and do not Rom 15:18 – to make Gal 3:1 – ye Gal 5:6 – faith Gal 5:7 – obey 1Th 1:3 – your 2Th 1:8 – and that Heb 6:12 – faith
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Abraham-The Friend of God
Heb 11:8-19
INTRODUCTORY WORDS
1. Early beginnings. Perhaps, in all history there is none who has ever attained unto the honor and fame of Abraham. Abraham lived half way from Adam to Christ. He lived five hundred years after the flood.
When the ark rested on Mount Ararat, the peoples of the earth began to multiply with great rapidity. As families grew under the headship of Noah’s four sons, they scattered into various parts of the country. The whole world lay before them and they took their choices in habitation. Abraham’s father, Tera, dwelt in Mesopotamia.
The whole land of Mesopotamia was given over to idolatry. It was mid such environment that Abraham was born. It was there that he lived, and it was there that the glory of the Lord appeared unto him.
When God recounted the beginnings of His people Israel, He said, “Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, thy mother an Hittite.” It was under this similitude, of an infant born of such parentage and cast out to the loathing of its person, with no eye to pity, and with none to have compassion, that God spoke of the natural state of Jerusalem.
2. Abraham’s call. Whether there was something in Abraham that caused God to choose him, or whether it was merely an act of God’s omnipotent elective choice, we may not know. We believe that it was both. God chose Abraham because Abraham, living in a world of sin and corruption, had kept himself clean and pure. God chose Abraham because He saw in Abraham one of undaunted faith, who would be known as the friend of God, obedient to every call of God.
There is a little verse in Deuteronomy which speaks of Israel’s beginning. It says, “the Lord did not set His love upon you * * because ye were more in number than any other people; for ye were the fewest of all people: but because the Lord loved you.”
3. Abraham’s vision. It was in Mesopotamia that the glory of God appeared unto Abraham. We may not know just how God appeared unto this stalwart youth, but we know that He did appear as the Lord of Glory. We know that that vision of God which Abraham had before ever he left home was a vision which caused him to know Him whom he believed. As the years came and went, God often appeared unto Abraham, and spoke unto him as a man speaketh face to face.
I. A CALL TO SEPARATION (Gen 12:1-2)
1. Get thee out. The words still ring in our minds-“Get thee out.” Were those words given to Abraham alone? Has not God said unto us, “Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord?”
The call of the whole Bible is a call to separation. Far back in the beginning God separated the light from the darkness. That is the message of Gen 1:3, Gen 1:4. What is the message of 2Co 6:14? It is similar-“What communion hath light with darkness?”
Here is the will of God for each of us-“Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness.”
2. Get thee in. Not only was Abraham to come out from his father’s house and from his own country, but he was to go unto a land that God would show him.
Here is another unvarying truth. When God leads us out of one thing, He will lead us in to something better. We are not asked to give up something for nothing, but we give up one inheritance, that we may receive a better and more enduring inheritance.
Let no one imagine that Abraham’s going out did not mean a real sacrifice. There was much of vital cost in Abraham’s leaving Mesopotamia. He was knit to his family and his friends as we are knit. He loved his native land as we love ours; yet, he was willing to leave all for the Lord.
Christ has said, “If any man love father or mother more than Me, he is not worthy of Me.” We must forsake all to go with Him.
II. ABRAHAM OBEYED, AND WENT OUT (Heb 11:8)
1. The departure. Can you see Abraham making ready to leave? The friends gather round and ask, “Whither are you going?” Abraham can only say, “We are going, we know not whither.” Perhaps they derided the group so eager to start upon an unknown journey. Abraham could well have replied, “We know not the way, but we know our Guide.”
2. The departure was under promise of blessing. God said to Abraham, “Get thee out * * and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” In all of this Abraham believed God, and doubted not.
Even now there comes a call to many a youth to leave all and follow Christ. This call is given under a promise-“If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him.” God will bless all those who walk with Him in the obedience of faith.
3. The departure was an act of undaunted faith. God gave promise of blessing, but God did not give Abraham photographs of the land of promise. Nor did Abraham insist on sending “spies ahead to spy out the land.” He took God at His Word, he stepped out on the promise, and started, not knowing whither he went.
There would, of necessity, be obstacles by the way. There would be difficulties to overcome, disappointments to face, dangers to surmount, distances to cover, delays to encounter; yet, through it all, and over it all, Abraham went. “They went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.” Such were the triumphs of faith. Faith inherited the promises.
III. ABRAHAM EN ROUTE (Gen 12:4)
There are five short, terse statements in chapter twelve, which we may do well to consider.
1. In Gen 12:4 : “And Abram departed.” The underlying thought here is summed up in one word-“tent-dwelling.” In Hebrews eleven we read: “Dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.”
From the day that Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees he reckoned himself a stranger and a pilgrim. He journeyed looking for a city whose Builder and Maker is God. Beloved, we need to take up this same “pilgrim” attitude.
2. In Gen 12:5 : “And they went forth.” The first, “And they departed,” carries with it the backward look, the farewell, the leaving all. The second suggests the forward look-the country toward which they journey, the goal, the far-flung vision of faith. “They went forth” also suggests faith in operation. They believed and they went out in quest of the goal of their faith.
3. In Gen 12:6 : “And Abram passed through.” This verse suggests the dangers by the way. The countries they traversed, the people they met. This verse also suggests that they never were deterred from their great objective. They may have halted here, and stayed there, but they always took up their journey again.
We may pause for a while here on this earth strand, but we have no continuing city-our Home is over there.
4. In Gen 12:8 : “And he removed from thence.” No place in which Abraham tented could hold him long. He could not stop his journeying until he had reached the end of his way.
Some there are who do begin well; for a season they follow on to know the Lord, but soon they falter by the wayside. They become entangled with the affairs of this world. They become settlers, and lose their stranger and pilgrim calling.
5. In Gen 12:9 : “And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south.” Beloved, are we tent-dwellers, or are we house-builders? Are we strangers, or are we citizens? Are we journeying toward a city, or are we content to abide down here?
IV. THE SEPARATION OF TWO LIVES (Gen 13:9)
1. The cause of the separation. It is not easy to judge Lot. Why did he journey with Abraham? They were related by ties of blood, this we know. However, not all of Abraham’s kin left Haran with him. Lot’s father had died, and he, doubtless, had received a goodly inheritance from him. Why then did he cast his lot with his uncle? Did the thought of new scenes and new opportunities appeal to him? Was he swayed by a devout love for his uncle? Did he catch the fire of Abraham’s faith, and delight in Abraham’s God?
We may not know all of these things; we do know, however, that Lot was a righteous man, and that he loved right things. However, the time came when the two men grew to such proportions in flocks, and herds, that the land was too narrow to hold them both. Thus Abraham suggested that they separate.
2. Abraham’s noble spirit of generosity. Abraham said to Lot, the land is before you, take your choice. Lot did not go to the Lord for guidance. He simply saw that the land that lay toward Sodom was well watered everywhere. He only saw a good pasture for his cattle, and the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as strategic centers, where he could sell his cattle.
Thus, Lot chose him that course, and pitched his tent toward Sodom. Times of vital decisions come now and then in most lives. Times of decisions which will work for weal or woe in a large way. From a spiritual standpoint Lot’s choice was most disastrous.
3. God’s pledge to Abraham. After Lot was gone, God said to Abraham, “Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.” Abraham looked to God and God led him into Mamre-the place of fatness.
V. THE BATTLE OF THE KINGS (Gen 14:8)
1. Four kings fought against five. The result of the battle was that the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, with their confederate kings, were taken captive and “they took all the goods of Sodom and. Gomorrah, and all their victuals, and went their way. And they took Lot, Abraham’s brother’s son, who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed.” This was God’s first great warning to Lot. He was carried away, and all that he had was led into captivity.
2. Abraham to the rescue. When Abraham heard that his nephew was taken captive he armed his trained servants and pursued after the enemy. He overtook them, scattered them, and brought back all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and brought also Lot and his goods.
The king of Sodom went out to meet Abraham after the slaughter, and he offered unto him all the goods which he had taken. There is no doubt but that Abraham had already considered this, for he had a perfect right to retain all that he had captured. However, Abraham said to the king of Sodom, “I have lift up mine hand unto the Lord, the Most High God, the Possessor of Heaven and earth, that I will not take from a thread even to a shoe latchet, and that I will not take any thing that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich.” Here was a noble resolve indeed on the part of Abraham.
3. Abraham meeting Melchisedec. As Abraham returned from the battle, he met Melchisedec, the priest of the Most High God. To this man, who was also king of Salem, Abraham gave a tithe of all that he possessed.
Melchisedec was made after the pattern of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was both King and Priest. First of all He was King of Righteousness, and after that He was King of Peace.
When Abraham gave Melchisedec tithes, he set a pace for Christians of today. Would that all of us might bring in our tithes that God’s storehouse might be full!
VI. ABRAHAM AND LOT CONTRASTED (Gen 19:29)
It is most striking to compare Abraham in Genesis eighteen and Lot in Genesis nineteen.
1.Abraham dwelt in the plains of Mamre.
oLot dwelt in the city of Sodom.
2.Abraham sat in the tent door.
oLot sat in the gate of the city.
3.Abraham was visited by Heavenly Guests in the heat of the day.
oLot was visited at eventide.
4.Three men came unto Abraham.
oTwo men came unto Lot.
5.When Abraham urged his Guests to wash their feet and rest, they said, “So do.”
oWhen Lot wanted to welcome his guests, they said, “Nay; but we will abide in the street all night.”
6.Abraham ran to meet them, and hastened to welcome them.
oLot rose up to meet them, and pressed upon them to turn in.
7.God said of Abraham, “He will command his children and his household after him.”
oLot seemed as one who mocked to his sons-in-law.
VII. THE SON OF PROMISE (Gen 12:7)
God gave Abraham definite promise that unto his seed, that is his son, would He give the land. The Holy Spirit in Galatians, commenting on God’s promise said, “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” As the years came and went Abraham resorted to various schemes to help God out on His promise.
1. Abraham said: “What wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?” Then God said, “This shall not be thine heir,” but thine own son shall be thine heir.
2. Abraham, urged by Sarah his wife, took Hagar to wife, and Ishmael was born unto him. Then Abraham said to the Lord, “O that Ishmael might live before Thee!” God immediately said, “No, not Ishmael, but Isaac.”
Then God spake to Abraham and said, Sarah shall have a son. It was then that Abraham’s supreme faith shone forth. He, in hope, believed against hope. It was for this cause that Abraham was called the friend of God. He believed God; he trusted implicitly in God; he knew that what God had promised He was able to perform.
The years went by until Abraham had reached his hundredth year, and Sarah was almost as old. Then Isaac was born.
AN ILLUSTRATION
PLEADING THE HANDWRITING
“‘We have a strong tie upon God, because He giveth us the promise, which is our ground of hope. Surely we may put His bonds in suit, and say, “Thy handwriting is placed before Thee, O Lord.” We say among men-we have it in black and white, and there is no getting over it: a man’s handwriting binds him. Now, we may be sure that the Lord will never deny His own writing, nor run back from a bond given under His own hand and seal. Every promise of Scripture is a writing of God, which may be pleaded before Him with this reasonable request, ‘Do as Thou hast said.’ The Creator will not cheat His creature who depends upon His truth; and, far more, the Heavenly Father will not break His Word to His own child. ‘Remember the Word unto Thy servant, on which Thou hast caused me to hope,’ is most prevalent pleading. It is a double argument: it is Thy Word, wilt Thou not keep it? Why hast Thou spoken it if Thou wilt not make it good? Thou hast caused me to hope in it, wilt Thou disappoint the hope which Thou hast Thyself begotten in me?
“How sure are Thy promises, O my God! Forgive me that I ever doubt them, and give me more faith, that I may treat them as the blessings which they guarantee, even as men pass checks and notes from hand to hand as if they were the gold they stand for.”
Fuente: Neighbour’s Wells of Living Water
Heb 11:8. The main point that showed Abraham’s faith was his obedience even when he did not know where he was going. But God promised that it was to be towards a place which he should some day inherit.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
Heb 11:8. By faith Abraham, when being calledthe reading, he who is called, has less authority than the common text, though it makes a good sensehe who is called the father of nationsobeyed and went; his confidence showing itself in this way.
And he went out, not knowing whither (where) he was going. When Abraham left Chaldea he had no promise; that was given afterwards in Canaan (Gen 12:7). In Noah faith showed its power by the feeling it produced; in Abraham by obedience. It works, if it be true, now through feeling,fear, love; and now in an obedient life.
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
The next illustrious instance of the efficacy of faith we have here in the person of Abraham, who obeyed the call and command of God in leaving his own native country, to go he knew not whither, and to receive an inheritance he knew not when.
Where note, 1. The foundation of Abraham’s faith and obedience, and that was the call of God; he had an immediate command to go out of his own country into a certain place, with a promise to receive it for an inheritance: Get thee from thy country, relations, friends, and all outward enjoyments, is a command becoming the greatness of God to give; and self-denial in fact or resolution to comply with such a command from the great God, is the foundation of all sincere profession.
Note, 2. What was the principle of Abraham’s obedience in complying with this call of God, and that was his faith: By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed. True faith, wherever it is, bringeth forth sincere obedience; these two can no more be separated then the light and the sun, than the fire and heat; obedience is the daughter of faith, and faith the parent and principle of obedience.
Note, 3. The difficulty, and therein the excellency, of his obedience; He obeyed, and went out, not knowing whither he went. If faith be once satisfied in the call and command of God, it will follow him when he cannot see a step of its way; over hills and mountains, through dales and vallies, fearing nothing. He that has God’s call, need not fear God’s conduct.
Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament
The Faith of Abraham
Abraham left his own home and was willing to live in tents because he looked forward to a heavenly home, not an earthly one. Since Isaac and Jacob also lived in tents, it seems they too had this goal in mind. Remember, Abraham and Sarah lacked the needed faith to believe they would have a child. Despite God’s promise to make of him a great nation in Gen 12:1-3 , Abraham questioned whether a servant would be his heir ( Gen 15:1-4 ). Abraham and Sarah tried to help God out by using Sarah’s handmaid Hagar in Gen 16:1-16 . In Gen 18:12-15 , Sarah laughed to herself at the thought of bearing a child. However, the writer of Hebrews indicates that Sarah’s doubts were overcome by her faith. Remember, all of this occurred when she was barren and past child-bearing age ( Heb 11:10-11 ; Gen 17:15-21 ).
Because of Abraham and Sarah’s faith ( Rom 4:18-21 ), they, though dead in the reproductive sense, were able to bear that son of promise. His descendants were to be many and would obtain the land of promise ( Heb 11:12 ; Gen 12:1-3 ; Gen 15:5 ; Gen 22:17 ; Isa 51:1-2 ; Eze 33:24 ).
Fuente: Gary Hampton Commentary on Selected Books
Heb 11:8. By faith In the divine promises; Abraham when he was called The call here intended is referred to Gen 12:1; to go out From his fathers house and native land; into a place far distant, which God promised he should afterward receive for an inheritance Without disputing or murmuring, obeyed; and Relying on the power and veracity of God; went out, not knowing whither he went Although he did not know the country to which he was going, nor whether it was a good or a bad land.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Heb 11:8-22. Passing now from the men of the primeval world, the writer comes to the patriarchs, and especially to Abraham, who stands out in the OT as the chief example of faith. Abraham showed his faith by his obedience to Gods call, and by his refusal to make a permanent settlement in the land of Canaan, even though it had been promised to him. His heart was set on Gods ultimate promise of an eternal rest in the heavenly city (Heb 11:10). His wife Sarah shared his faith and became a mother in her old age, so that Abraham, when his life seemed as good as ended, became the progenitor of a great people. And as the patriarchs lived in faith, so they died (Heb 11:13). They only saw the promises from afar, as the traveller sees the distant city which is his goal; and in their dying words they confessed that they were strangers on the earth (cf. Gen 23:4; Gen 24:37; Gen 28:4; Gen 27:9). Such confessions implied that they were longing for their own country; and if it was merely their native country on earth that was in their minds, they could have returned to it whenever they pleased. As it was, the home they desired was in heaven, and in recognition of this faith God called them by His name, as the destined people of His heavenly city (Heb 11:16). The crowning instance of Abrahams faith was his offering up of Isaac. Although he was confident in the truth of Gods promise, he was ready at Gods command to sacrifice the son through whom alone the promise could have fulfilment (Heb 11:17 f.). He believed that God would effect His purpose even though it should be necessary to bring Isaac back from the dead; and the restoration of Isaac was indeed a type of the resurrection (Heb 11:19). That faith is able to triumph over death is shown more clearly still by the examples of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. Each of them, when on the point of dying, looked forward without misgiving to a fulfilment of Gods promise in the future. To themselves it had been denied, but they believed that it would be realised through those who would come after them.
Heb 11:19. in a parable: this does not merely mean that Isaac was so nearly slain that he did, in a manner, come back from the dead. We have rather to translate by way of a parable. The wonderful escape of Isaac was a kind of parable, illustrating the fact of the resurrection.
Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
Verse 8
Abraham; Genesis 12:1-4.
Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament
11:8 {7} By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
(7) Abraham and Sarah.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
2. Faith in the Patriarchal Era 11:8-22
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
Like Abraham we should look forward to our inheritance in the coming world and should live as strangers and pilgrims in this world (1Pe 1:1). [Note: See Daniel J. Estes, "Looking for Abraham’s City," Bibliotheca Sacra 147:588 (October-December 1990):399-413, for evidence of Abraham’s pilgrim character in Genesis.] Abraham demonstrated faith in three phases: when God called him to leave Mesopotamia (Heb 11:8), when he reached the Promised Land but still had to live in it as a foreigner (Heb 11:9-10), and when God called him to sacrifice Isaac (Heb 11:17-19).
"Abraham’s faith accepted God’s promises and acted on them even though there was nothing to indicate that they would be fulfilled." [Note: Morris, p. 117.]
As Abraham later received some of the land he formerly lived in as a stranger, so we will, too. The city Abraham looked for was a city God would provide for him. A city with foundations offered a permanent, established home in contrast to the transient existence of a tent–encampment.
"To cultured men in the first century, the city was the highest form of civilized existence." [Note: Ibid., p. 118.]
We look for such a habitation as well, namely, the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:1; Rev 21:9-27).
This writer referred to Abraham 10 times; his example is especially helpful for those tempted to abandon faith in God. Only two other books mention him more: Luke (15 times) and John (11 times).
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
CHAPTER XI.
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.”– Heb 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 etherealised 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]
FOOTNOTES:
[258] 1Pe 3:20.
[259] Heb 11:8.
[260] Heb 11:9.
[261] Act 7:5.
[262] Heb 11:10.
[263] Rev 21:10.
[264] technits.
[265] dmiourgos.
[266] aspasamenoi (Heb 11:13).
[267] Heb 11:14.
[268] xenoi kai parepidmoi.
[269] patrida.
[270] Heb 11:16; Heb 2:11.
[271] Gen 4:3.
[272] 1Jn 3:12.
[273] Jam 2:19.
[274] Heb 12:24.
[275] 1Jn 3:19-20.
[276] Gen 22:8.
[277] Luk 20:38.
[278] Heb 11:12.
[279] kai en parabol.
[280] Joh 8:56.