A superficial reading of Luke’s description of Jesus in 2:52 (??? ?????? ?????????? ?? ?? ????? ??? ?????? ??? ?????? ???? ??? ??? ?????????) reveals that it is not a direct quotation of the LXX description of Samuel in 1 Sm 2:26 (??? ?? ????????? ??????? ????????? ??? ??????????? ??? ?????? ??? ???? ?????? ??? ???? ????????). However, the repetition of key words (especially the ??????/??? and ???????? pattern) along with the broader thematic parallels in the first chapters of Luke and 1 Samuel, which include many corresponding events: a son born in unusual circumstances (i.e. to a virgin and a barren woman), the regular visits to the temple by Jesus and Samuel’s families (1 Sm 1:21, 2:19, Lk 2:41), Samuel and Jesus staying at the temple as young boys and impressing their elders (1 Sm 2:11, 18, 26, Lk 2:46-7), as well as numerous linguistic and thematic parallels between the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55) and Hannah’s song (1 Sm 2:1-10) , it is clear that Luke alludes to the Samuel story in his account of the young Jesus. Though Craig Evans writes that the allusion to Samuel is “subtle,” and “would be clear only to those knew their Old Testament stories well,” if one accepts that Luke wrote his gospel at least in part to emphasize God’s continued faithfulness to his promises, it is not surprising that Luke would self-consciously and purposefully echo Old Testament narratives in his presentation of Christ. Indeed, this kind of OT echo fits firmly in the Lucan pattern, for Luke, in contrast to Matthew, tends to avoid ‘proof text’ quotations, and, as Darrell Bock writes, instead “alludes to the [OT] text and uses its ideas rather than citing specific texts.” Though the Samuel allusion may be subtle (though surely, not as subtle as some of Luke’s allusions!), it seems clear that the evangelist intend for his readers to see and grasp the connection between Jesus and the young Samuel.

1 Sm 2:26 falls in a pericope that begins after Hannah’s song in 2:12 and is clearly designed to contrast the faithfulness of the young boy Samuel with the failure of Eli and the unfaithfulness of his sons. As Joseph Campbell succinctly puts it, 1 Sm 2:12-26 is “carefully organized to depict the future prophetic figure against a background that is in need of change.” Though some scholars argue the pericope is better defined as 2:11-36, the point remains the same—Samuel and the Elides are implicitly contrasted thoughout. The basic form for the contrast is two negative vignettes describing the Elides (2:12-17, 22-25) alongside one short positive story of Samuel (2:19-21a) and interspersed, significantly, with a series of repetitive refrains describing the growth of Samuel (2:11b, 2:18, 2:21b) that culminate in the statement of 2:26.

Authorial comment in 1 Sm 2:12a, “Now the sons of Eli were worthless men,” sets the tone for how the Elides are to be understood in this text. In 2:13-17, the Elides are shown abusing their priestly role by eating more of the sacrificial meat than belonged to them, and eating it before the fat had burned away, actions which violated Levitical law (Lev 3:3-5, 7:30-34), and amounted to theft from the Lord. In verses 2:22-25, the Elides begin to sin in another direction as they lie with women serving at the temple. Where before the sin of the Elides was primarily directed against the Lord, it is now turned toward the people of Israel; indeed, Eli rightly confronts his sons by saying to them, “I hear of your evil dealings from all the people” (2:23).

Though the space devoted in 1 Sm 2:11-26 to Samuel is significantly less than the Elides, it is obvious that, in contrast to the sons of Eli, Samuel is presented as a true priest of the Lord in both action and dress. In 2:11 and 2:18, Samuel “ministers” to the Lord, forming an inclusio around the Elides’ robbery of the sacrificial meat. Here the verb mesaret is used in a sacerdotal context; according to the word choice, clearly Samuel is being shown as a priest. In 2:18, the young boy is described as “clothed with a linen ephod,” a distinctly priestly garment. As the linen ephod was “not a child’s garment but a priest’s whether he be a youth or a full grown man,” we might easily assume the Elides wore similar garments—the fact that only Samuel is described as wearing the garment underscores whom the text’s author believes to be the true priest. The final distinction is perhaps the most subtle, but no less powerful. As noted above, the author has taken pains to show the Elides’ sin against both God (2:12-17) and man (2:22-23); in contrast, the author particularly notes that Samuel “continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the LORD and also with man” (2:26). Where the Elides are abusing their priestly role for their own gain, Samuel ministers to the Lord and wears the garments of a true priest. Where the Elides incur the wrath of the people (2:23-24) and the Lord himself (2:25b), Samuel grows in favor with both the Lord and the people. As Kyle McCarter puts it, “the good and the wicked, the chosen and the rejected are set before us in an almost simplistic juxtaposition. We are [now] prepared for the fall of the house of Eli and, with equal certainty, for the corresponding rise in the fortunes of Samuel.”

Similarly to 1 Sm 2:26, Lk 2:52 serves as a summing up of a pericope—one that begins in 2:41 and forms a narrative where Luke advances his audience’s understanding of Jesus in at least two distinct ways: as teacher and as son of God. When Mary and Joseph discover their lost child in the courts of the temple in 2:46, Jesus is with the teachers not as a teacher himself, but engaged in their dialogue as would typify a devout young Hebrew. What amazes those who heard Jesus was not the fact he interacted with the teachers, but the manner of his interaction, that is, “his understanding and his answers” (2:47), and this understanding is itself a foreshadowing of the power of Jesus’ future teaching. The Christological nature of this passage is revealed in Jesus’ simple response to his mother: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (2:49) Jesus’ explicit self-identification as the son of God is the central message of the pericope —these are Jesus’ first words in the evangelist’s account, and they speak to both his special identity as well as the locus of his mission being in the temple of his father. In this context, 2:50, which records that Mary and Joseph “did not understand the saying that he spoke to them,” can only be regarded as a foreshadowing of the confusion of many in response to Jesus throughout the rest of his pre-resurrection life—for if even the parents of the young messiah do not understand his identity or mission, neither will the neutral bystander. The pericope culminates in a summary statement in 2:26: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” Though the prominence here of the wisdom of the Christ-child may rise from the Isainic promise of a messiah figure in Isaiah 11:1-2, as noted above, the near-echo of 1 Sam 2:26 brings the story of young Samuel firmly into view. Indeed, it would seem that Luke invites his audience to understand that Jesus grew in wisdom and favor with God and man in much the same way as Samuel in the house of Eli.

But if Luke is borrowing literary styles and themes from the life of the young Samuel in his gospel of Jesus, what is his purpose? Though it is impossible to declare with complete certainty the evangelist’s intentions, I believe there are at least two viable implications of the allusion: by echoing the story of 1 Samuel 2 in Luke 2, Luke compares Jesus to Samuel’s moment in redemptive-history, adding a political undertone, as well as contextualizing the work of Jesus by casting him as a “new Samuel.”
It must be noted that Luke’s original audience would not only have understood the allusion to Samuel’s youth, but they would also have known the whole of Samuel’s life, including what was to come in 1 Sm 4 and beyond, when the Eli and their sons were destroyed and their authority given over to Samuel. With this context in mind, it is not a stretch to imagine that Luke is preparing his audience for what is come in the rest of his gospel: a replacement of the current leadership of Israel with a new and permanent leader in Jesus. Though there is no hint of comparison in Luke 2 between the wickedness of the Elides and the conduct of the teachers at the temple, there is certainly an implicit similarity in their situation. It may be perhaps for no fault of their own, but Luke is hinting here to his readers that Jesus’ presence in the temple signals that the time of the authority of the temple leaders is over in the same way that Samuel signals the end for the Eli and his line—as the fortunes of Samuel and Jesus rise, the dynasties of Eli and the Jewish leaders will certainly fall. This implicitly political tone of Luke’s allusion must not be missed: the shadow Samuel casts in Jesus’ childhood is dark, and its implicit judgment of the current leadership of Israel supports the prophecies of both Mary (Lk 1:51-52) and Simeon (Lk 2:34).

When considering the viability of viewing Jesus as a “new Samuel,” it is first necessary to consider the entire life of Samuel, and especially the way that Samuel functions as a priest, prophet and judge of Israel, as well as the implied connections between Samuel and Moses in the OT.

Though the original authorial intent of the 1 Sm 2:12-26 is certainly primarily to contrast Samuel with the Elides, the young boy is not presented here only as a foil to the wicked sons of Eli. Indeed, the phrase “Samuel grew in the presence of the Lord” in 2:21 (lit. ‘with Yahweh,’) is eerily reminiscent of the description of Moses in Ex. 34:28. The Samuel-Moses connection is also supported by explicit links between the two men in Jer. 15:1 and Ps. 99:6. Additionally, in his farewell address in 1 Sam 12, Samuel seems to self-consciously compare the people of Israel at his time to the people under Moses, and thus himself to Moses:

The Lord is my witness, who appointed Moses and Aaron and brought your fathers up out of the land of Egypt…when Jacob went into Egypt, and the Egyptians oppressed them, your fathers cried out to the LORD and the LORD sent Moses and Aaron who brought your fathers out of Egypt and made them dwell in this place…but they forgot the LORD their God. And he sold them into the hand of Sisera, commander of the army of Hazor, and into the hand of the Philistines, and into the king of Moab…and they cried out to the LORD…and the LORD sent Jerubbaal and Barak and Jephthah and Samuel. (1 Sam 12:6-11)

Along with the connections to Moses, we must note the priestly, prophetic and judicial activities of Samuel. Although Samuel was not a Levite, and did not pass on the priesthood to his sons, his early priestly activities in 1 Samuel 2 have already been discussed, and are continued in his sacrificial practice for the people of Israel in 1 Sm 7:9-10 and 9:13 and the new king Saul in 9:19-24. Though Samuel is not a “classical priest,” he certainly functions as a “kind of” priest for Israel in a time of national transition after the destruction of the priestly line of Eli.

In 1 Sm 3, when the “word of the Lord was rare” (3:1), Samuel has an extensive vision (3:10-14), issues words of judgment to Eli (3:18), and by the end of the chapter is known by all of Israel as “a prophet of LORD” (3:20). If the point of 1 Sm 2 is to portray Samuel as a new priest to replace the sons of Eli, 1 Sm 3 seems to be intended to show Samuel as a prophet. Later in his life Samuel continues to function as a prophet, warning the people of Israel to avoid idols (1 Sm 7:3-4), proclaiming judgment on Saul for his wickedness (1 Sm 13, 15, 28) and interceding with God for the people (1 Sm 7:8-9, 12:19, 23).

There is also ample evidence for Samuel as a judge: he evidently traveled Israel in order to perform the duties of a judge (1 Sm 7:15-17) and made his sons judges after him (1 Sm 8:1-3). Indeed, Samuel is the last in the line of judges, and when Israel demands a king (1 Sm 8), the office of the judge is ended and transmogrified into the office of the king. The way that Samuel unites the offices of priest, prophet and judge are a convincing echo of Moses’ role for the people of Israel, and indeed, begin to hint at what Luke might have in mind by alluding to Samuel in his gospel of Jesus. H. W. Hertzberg summarizes this point well:

[Samuel] unites the priestly office with the prophetic vocation. He becomes the spiritual leader of his people, and that means that he receives a public, indeed a political status…By now, however, it is already clear that there has not been a man like him since the days of Moses. Samuel should be regarded in this light. Joshua was Moses’ successor, the ‘servant of God’. But he is never called a prophet, nor is he a priest. Here is more than a Joshua. Here, too, we have something more than the prophets of later times, who stood in the midst of the people as the spokesman of God, but in other respects were still on their periphery. Samuel unites in his person the three offices of the Christ who is to come, prophet, priest and king. It is no wonder that the shadow of this particular figure falls over the ‘Books of Samuel’ which bear his name. Nor is it by chance that in the passage which describe the growth of the boy Jesus we find the same words which describe the growth of the young Samuel…the Bible regards [Samuel] as being to a special degree one of the forerunners of Christ, and does so with justification.

As Hertzberg argues, after considering the three offices of Samuel, as well as his connection to Moses, the implications of Luke’s allusion to him in his description of Jesus become more clear: Jesus is the “new Samuel” who is greater than his fleshly precedent, and will complete the work Samuel began. Where Samuel’s actions as a prophet, priest and judge for Israel were temporary and eventually rejected by the people of Israel, Jesus will forever unites the three offices and will never be rejected. Indeed, just as Saul and eventually David are historical replacements for Samuel, Jesus is the new David who completes and fulfills the work of Samuel. Understood in this way, the allusion serves Luke’s gospel purpose of showing the redemptive faithfulness of God by connecting the work of Jesus to his forerunner Samuel, as Samuel provides an “interpretive grid” to understand Jesus’ life and work through. By noting the allusion to Samuel in Jesus’ life, Luke’s readers are encouraged to look forward to what they will find throughout Luke-Acts: the culmination of an ancient story of redemption wherein all the promises of God are fulfilled in the person and work of Christ and his church.

We return now to the original story: Jesus, as a boy stays behind at the temple and amazes all with his understanding and answers, then calmly assures Joseph and Mary that he must be in his father’s house, and finally, his growth in favor with God and man is stated. There is much here on just the surface of this story—a picture of the wisdom of Jesus that will later be revealed, an implicit claim of his messianic identity, and a prediction of the confusion that will follow Jesus until (and even beyond) his resurrection. But when the OT allusions are considered, and the interpretive grid of Samuel stands fully behind the story, we find in its words fuller meaning: an implicit political statement about the future of Israel and its leaders, as well as a revelation of the contextual history of the fulfillment of God’s promises and the consummation of all in Christ. For Samuel was once the hinge on which the history of Israel turned, and here is a new and greater Samuel, one who will turn the history of world.

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Though Anne’s story is a dramatic one, it is also a bit too close for comfort. All of us, if we’re honest, will confess that there have been times when we have wondered if we too are really “of the truth,” as John puts it, and have sought to assure our hearts, but wondered how [FCF]. Sometimes our doubt, like Anne’s, is borne out of suffering—when we struggle physically, financially, or relationally, it quickly lead to doubting whether or not we are truly borne of God. Sometimes our lack of assurance comes because of our sin—whether some deep, dark sin in our past, or simply a constant feeling of failure in our everyday lives. We wonder how God could covenant with someone such as us. Ultimately though, many of us struggle with doubt and lack of assurance not for any particular reason, but simply because we must believe in what we cannot see—the simple fact is, the hope which we have been given has yet to be fulfilled. It is precisely for this reason that John writes his epistle—the church that he writes to has been beset with false teaching and division, and the false teachers have been challenging the assurance of the believers that John writes to—and in Chapter 3, John comforts the believers and tells that they must assure their hearts before God [Scripture Bond].

[Proposition] Since God covenants with us, we must assure our hearts before him.

But how do we know that God covenants with us, and why shall we assure our hearts before him? What reason does John give for confidence before God? Here John does not point his readers inwardly toward meditating on the authenticity of their subjective feelings of God’s love or encourage them to seek an “new experience” of God, but rather he points toward clear and objective reasons for these doubting readers to be sure of their status before God. In turn, John shows us that we can know God covenants with us and assure our hearts before him because God compels our obedience to his word, God keeps his promises to us, and ultimately, because God is greater than our hearts.

[Main Point #1] Since God compels our obedience to his word, we must assure our hearts before him.

John shows the central thrust of our passage in verse 19 when he writes, “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our hearts before him.” But what is the “by this” (en touto) that John refers to? Commentators agree that it is likely that John is
both pointing to the argument in verse 18, as well as pointing forward to verses 20-22. So let’s look at verse 18 to see the first way clear way that John says we shall know that we are of the truth. “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” Here John is making a simple argument—we should know that we are of the truth when God works in us and we love others in deeds and in truth. Don’t hear what John is not saying here—he is not in any sense arguing that we somehow earn our confidence before God by our obedience to God ’s command to love others. Rather he is responding to the question, “How can I tell that I am one of God’s children?” with the simple answer, “Because you act like one of God’s children.” The obedience in our lives to God’s law is not at all done to earn his favor. Rather it is a simple reflection of who we are, and who the Holy Spirit is making us to be. Also important to see is John’s emphasis on actions, in contrast to loving feelings—the question to ask is not “do I feel loving,” but, “do I act lovingly toward (in this context) my brothers in Christ.”

[Illustration] Now, in the Hundred Acre Wood, there lives a bear of not much brain called Winnie-the-Pooh. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Winnie’s best friend is called Piglet, and you can guess what sort of animal he is. If you’ve read these stories, you’ll know that where Pooh hasn’t much brain, Piglet hasn’t much courage, as we’ll soon see. Now one day, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet were taking walk in the forest, and suddenly they see something strange, and try to discover what this strange thing is, which is where we’ll pick up their story.

“Look, Pooh!” said Piglet suddenly. “There’s something in one of the Pine Trees.” “So
there is!” said Pooh, looking up wonderingly. “There’s an Animal.” Piglet took Pooh’s arm, in case Pooh was frightened. “Is it One of the Fiercer Animals?” he said, looking the other way. Pooh nodded. “It’s a Jagular,” he said. “What do Jagulars do?” asked Piglet, hoping that they wouldn’t. “They hide in the branches of trees, and drop on you as you go underneath,” said Pooh. “Christopher Robin told me.” “Perhaps we better hadn’t go underneath, Pooh. In case he dropped and hurt himself.” “They don’t hurt themselves,” said Pooh. “They’re such very good droppers.” Piglet still felt that to be underneath a Very Good Dropper would be a Mistake, and he was just going to hurry back for something which he had forgotten when the Jagular called out to them. “Help! Help!” it called. “That’s what Jagulars always do,” said Pooh, much interested. “They call ‘Help! Help!’ and then when you look up, they drop on you.” “I’m looking down,” cried Piglet loudly, so as the Jagular shouldn’t do the wrong thing by accident. Something very excited next to the Jagular heard him, and squeaked: “Pooh and Piglet! Pooh and Piglet!” …“Pooh!” [Piglet] cried. “I believe it’s Tigger and Roo!” “So it is,” said Pooh. “I thought it was a Jagular and another Jagular.”

You may not believe me, but hidden in this simple and funny story is a significant epistemological, and ultimately, spiritual truth, which is: one way we can know what something is how that something acts. Pooh claims the wild animals are Jagulars because they act like a Jagular should: namely, sitting in trees and calling “Help!” in order to drop on people. Piglet counters that really the animals are acting like Tigger and Roo would if they were stuck in a tree and couldn’t get down—and soon Pooh sees that he is right. Brothers, this is exactly what John to us: since we are acting like God’s children, since God compels our obedience to his word, we can know we are of the truth, and assure our hearts before him.

[Application] This simple truth, that we know we are God’s children because of our obedience to his word, should affect our behavior in various ways. First it should motivate us to love those God has placed in our lives in our actions. In verse 16, John shows that this means laying down our lives for others—It means fairly easy things like with serving our friends and classmates by giving up a parking space to another or studying with someone when it helps them more than ourselves. But it also means more difficult things like self-sacrificially giving to those in need, speaking a word of difficult truth into a friend’s life or controlling our quick temper with our family members. But the truth that “since God compels our obedience, we must assure our hearts” should do more than change our actions. It should also change our attitude toward our own obedience. Many people doubt the validity of their loving actions toward others if there is any element of self-interest in their actions, if their actions are motivated by anything but pure love. But here we see that obeying God’s commands to love our wives or friends because we love them and because we seek assurance for our standing before God are not necessarily mutually exclusive motivations. Listen to how our Westminster Confession speaks of Good Works. “Good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God.”

Friends, I think that sometimes in our Reformed heritage we are so afraid of anything that might sound like “works-righteousness” that we deprive ourselves of a right assurance of our standing before God based on our good works. For finding confidence for our standing before God in our good fruit and works is not only thoroughly biblical and confessional—it is a profound acknowledgement that our God is alive and powerful, and that his work in our lives will always make a difference in our actions. Friends, if we deny that our obedience is a valid basis for assurance, we do more than weaken our confidence—we deny the power of the living and risen Christ and strike at the heart of the gospel itself. If our good works tell us nothing of Christ’s presence in our lives, then what does that say about Christ? At best, it makes him incidental, and at worst he is impotent. But our Christ is not incidental, and he is not impotent—our Christ makes the blind to see, the lame to walk, the dead to rise, and makes even a sinner like me love his wife and brothers! And when he works in our lives and compels our obedience to God’s word, what can we do but wonder at his power and find comfort in his assurance that we are indeed his, and no one can take us from him? Friends, we must strive to obey God better, but we must strive to change our attitude toward our obedience. For you see, finding assurance in good works is actually the opposite of works-righteousness—it is an acknowledgement of our desperate need for Christ, and the total life-change he brings when he brings us into submission to his rule. Truly, since God compels our obedience to his word, we must assure our hearts before him.

[Main Point #2] Since God keeps his promises to us, we must assure our hearts before him.

In verse 21 and 22, we find the second great way that we may know we are of the truth and that YHWH covenants with us—that is, that God keeps his promises to us.

[Question] What kind of promises?

[Subpoint #1] The promise of provision.

Brothers, what a great and glorious promise is found in verse 22. “Whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.” Now John’s thrust in this verse is not something along the lines of a prosperity gospel—he is not saying that God is some kind of cosmic vending machine that will deliver whatever we ask simply because we hit the right button. Rather, John is emphasizing the covenant relationship and covenant blessings that followers of Christ experience when God is their covenant lord. Basically, what John is saying is this—we may know that we are of the truth because our lives display the markings of one in covenant with God—we do things which please him, loving in deed and in truth, and in response, God provides for our needs.

[Illustration] In Kent Haruf’s novel, Plainsong, the story focuses on a girl called Victoria, a pregnant teenager in a small rural town in Colorado. Victoria’s boyfriend has disappeared, and her mother has kicked her out of the house because of her pregnancy, so Victoria lives with a teacher for a while, but soon she has to find a new place to stay. With more than a little convincing from the teacher, two old bachelor brothers named Harold and Raymond allow Victoria to move in with them. Harold and Raymond are cattle farmers, and they’ve lived alone for their entire lives since their parents died. So obviously there is a period of adjustment when Victoria first moves in, and no matter how well the brothers treat her, she doesn’t feel like she belongs out with them, and they don’t really know how to talk to her—on her days off from school she sleeps all morning, and they eat their meals in silence. But slowly the brothers start to reach out to Victoria, try to bring her into their family. One day they take her shopping to look for a crib for her baby—a real physical need she has—and they end up buying her the best of everything—the best crib, the best mattress, providing for all her needs.

“[Victoria] watched [the brothers] from a kind of abject distance. She had grown increasingly quiet. At last she said, Can’t you wait? It’s too much. You shouldn’t be doing all of this. What’s the matter? Harold said. We’re having some fun here. We thought you was too. But it’s too expensive. Why are you doing this? It’s all right, he said. He started to put his arm around her, but stopped himself. He looked down into her face. It’s all right, he said again. It is. You’ll just have to believe that. The girl’s eyes filled with tears, though she made no sound. Harold took out a handkerchief from the rear pocket of his pants and gave it to her…[That night] the brothers washed up and the three of them ate together in the kitchen and talked a little about the trip to Phillips, about the woman in the store with the brown dress and the boy with the dolly, the look on his face, and after supper the girl read the page of directions while the two McPherons assembled the crib.”

Suddenly Victoria, who beforehand had felt lonely with Raymond and Harold finds new confidence with them—all because of their provision for her needs. Clearly Victoria sees the implication behind their actions—by going out and providing for her needs, Raymond and Harold are saying in the best way that they know how: “welcome to our family.” Friends, in this story, we are Victoria, and God is the old brothers. He welcomes us into his family, and one of the best ways he does this is by keeping his promise of provision. How may we know we are of the truth, why must we assure our hearts in God’s presence? Because God keeps his promise of provision to us.

[Subpoint # 2] Promise of Pardon

Verse 21—“Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God.” What a gentle promise is found in this verse—the promise of pardon. Here we see that the obstacle to confidence in the presence of God is not God himself, but only ourselves. For when our hearts do not condemn us, God does not either—he has promised his pardon to us, and his promise will not fail. When we stand before God with a clear conscience, we can do so without fear that he will use our confidence as an opportunity to condemn us—rather, he will confirm and encourage our hearts, because he has promised his pardon to us, and his promise is sure.

[Application] Brothers, God keeps his promises—his promise of provision and of pardon—and his promise-keeping has implications for our lives. It means that he is in covenant and we with him—because God keeps his promises, we must assure our hearts before him, because we can know that we are of the truth. Here John is arguing that God’s keeping of his promises to us is proof of our belonging to him. But how are we to apply this in our lives, how are we to see and remember the link between God’s promise-keeping and our covenant status? First, we must do away with narcissistic self-condemnation that I know occurs far too often in our hearts. If God keeps his promise of pardon to us, we are great fools to condemn ourselves. This is one place where public confession of sin in our churches can be of great help to us—for when we stand with others around us and corporately confess our sin, we soon come to realize that what we think is our “special” status as sinners is in fact not so special at all. We are sinners like every other Christian. And when the Pastor stands before us and assures us of the forgiveness of our sin, we must hear him and believe. Brothers, if we are to stop our foolish self-condemnation, we need to submit to the church. Since God keeps his promise of pardon to us, we must assure our hearts before him.

How else are we to apply this truth in our lives, how else are we to see and remember the link between God’s promise-keeping and our covenant status? Let us resolve that because God keeps his promise of provision we must not take God’s provision in our lives for granted. This means we must not think God’s provision is due to our effort, or our worth, but we must see what it is—proof of a covenant relationship with the one who has made the earth itself, and provides us with every good thing. We work for our bread, but it is the Lord who must always establish the work of our hands. Because God keeps his promise of provision to us, we also must not look at God’s providence in our lives not as some kind of arbitrary benevolence by some distant god in the sky, but rather as constant proof of the closeness of our God and his daily involvement in our lives.
But how do we do this? I think one of the best practical ways to train our attitude in these two ways—to see the paying of the bills, the provision of daily bread as not due to our own effort, or merely the arbitrary gift of some distant god is in taking seriously something which we probably all due every day—praying before our meals. Brothers, when we give thanks for our food, let’s resolve for it to not be a dry and routine practice. It is so easy we when we pause before meals to only offer thanks out of habit, or because it’s “what Christians do”—and we wouldn’t very spiritual if we didn’t. Rather, let’s pray with fervor and soberness—fervor because of our thanks for our covenant lord’s kind provision, and soberness because of our dependence on it, our need for him. Truly, since God compels our obedience to word and keeps his promise of provision to us, we must assure our hearts before him. But there is one final reason for us to assure our hearts—

[Main Point #3] Since God is greater than our hearts, we must assure our hearts before him.

In verses 19 & 20 we find the final reason we have for knowing that we are of the truth, the final motivation for assuring our hearts before God—the fact that God himself is greater than our heart—as John writes, “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.”

[Question] How is God greater than our hearts?

[Subpoint #1] God is objectively greater than our hearts.
“God is greater than our hearts.” Friends, what comfort is found in these words. For when we confess that God is greater than our hearts, we confess that it is he that is the potter, and we who are the clay, that it is he who is the creator, and we the creature. We confess that God is objectively greater than our hearts, and that in the end, it does not much matter what our hearts think or feel about our salvation, it matters only what God, who is greater, says about our salvation. His word is greater than our hearts, and he overshadows us, disqualifying the authority of our hearts. Here, John is saying: instead of basing your confidence before God on the status on your own heart, base your confidence on the word of God, who is greater. Our assurance should come from this simple fact—our hearts do not have the power to change objective reality. What is at issue here is who is able to name us, who has the power to proclaim our identity—and God is unequivocally saying: “I have that power, and you do not.”

[Illustration] Three weeks ago, I heard the heartbeat of my first child for the first time. One week ago I felt him move in my wife’s womb. There are no words to describe the emotions that ran through my body when I heard and felt those first signs of life. As the months go by, Ami and I are preparing for the arrival of our baby: one of our main tasks is choosing a name for our son or daughter. We haven’t come to much agreement yet, but as we debate the merits of various names, there is something frightening about our task: the realization that whatever name we give our child will have real power in their life. It will determine what others call them, what word they give to identify themselves, and indeed to some extent, how they identify themselves in their own hearts. Our naming of our child in large part establishes our authority over them. If I call my son, “John” and he doesn’t like it, then there is not much he can do about it. Under no circumstances may he inform me one day that he’d rather be called, “George.” The very definition of a name is that it is something that must be bestowed. In this case, I am objectively greater than my child. He has no power over his name or his genetic and familial identity—it will be objectively determined by another. And so, one hot day in August, I will hold my newborn son in my arms, and I will call him by what will be his name. I will have real authority over him—he will forever be identified as my son, with the name that I have given to him—there is nothing he can ever do, for better or worse, to change that objective reality. In the same way, God is objectively greater than our hearts—and the sentiment of our hearts is a poor guide to our status before him—because he is always greater than we are.

[Subpoint #2] God is personally greater than our hearts.

But God is not only objectively greater than our hearts—he is also personally greater. In verse 20, John says that when our hearts condemn us, we can be assured because God knows everything. At first glance, it is difficult to understand the connection between this knowledge and our heart’s condemnation. But the Greek word used for God’s “knowing” is ginosko and the greek word for condemn is kataginosko, a compound word that literally means “know against.” Clearly the words are being set in opposition with each other in this verse—when our hearts “know against” us, we should take comfort, because God knows all things—the implication being that not only does God’s knowledge count for more than our knowledge, not only is God’s knowing a cognitive recognition, but a personally relational act—where our hearts condemn, God assures. Where our hearts know against us, God knows us, overruling and subduing our hearts, not only because he is objectively greater, but because he is also personally greater--reaching out and quieting our hearts in their time of doubt.

[Application] Brothers, at the heart of most of our doubt regarding our status in the kingdom of God is the question of authority. For we are all (more or less) the sons of American revivalism—a movement that historically has emphasized the individual heart as the ultimate arbiter of spiritual reality—a movement that claims our status before God is preserved by maintaining our heartfelt commitment to him. But when trials come into our lives and our heart commitment wanes, when we fall into sin and our commitment seems hypocritical, what is our ground of assurance? American Christianity has often said that we must improve our hearts. But friends, this is not the answer that the apostle John gives—rather he says simply: God is objectively greater than our hearts, he has named us as his own, and what he has done we may never undo. John forbids us to base our assurance solely on our own feelings—in good times and bad. When we doubt, let us not look inwardly toward our wavering heart, but rather outward to the one who is, and always will be, objectively greater than our hearts. Brothers, I am not saying that there is no such thing as an internal witness of the Spirit to assure our hearts. Indeed, since God is not content to remain merely objectively greater than our hearts—no, he comes near us, and is himself personally greater than our heart. Our personal God is not distant, but he is near, and in our times of doubt he will overwhelm us with his assurance. Brothers, the practical impact of all this is that it requires us to not shrink from Church life, not excommunicate ourselves because of how we feel. Many times when we fall into times of doubt, we are tempted to become more introspective, to turn inside ourselves and examine our hearts to see if they are true. Today I am arguing that this is indeed not what we should do—rather, in times of doubt, we should be honest about our wavering feelings, both with ourselves and with others, but what we must never do is withdraw ourselves from church life or community based on our feelings (or lack of assurance). We simply do not have that authority, and indeed, we misuderstand the purpose of the church. Question 172 of the Westminster Larger Catechism puts it very well, asking: “May one who doubts his being in Christ, or of his due preparation, come to the Lord’s Supper?” And the answer, in part: “One who doubts his being in Christ…may have true interest in Christ, though he be not yet assured of it…in which case (because promises are made, and this sacrament is appointed, for the relief even of weak and doubting Christians) he is to bewail his unbelief, and labor to have his doubts resolved; and, so doing, he may and ought to come to the Lord’s Supper, that he may be further strengthened.” Brothers, let us never forget that the church is for the weak and needy—that our weakness is not a reason for disqualification, but rather our badge of membership. Truly, since God is greater than our hearts, we must assure our hearts before him.

[Conclusion] Earlier I spoke of Ami and I naming our child. But friends, the naming of my child will not be over. For one day soon after we choose his name, I will hand my son over to a man, who for that moment, will be more than a man, who will speak with the authority of Christ. And somehow, with water and with words, my son will acquire a new name—he will forever be bound into the bride of Christ, and the strong name of the trinity will be bound unto him. From that day forward my son will be marked out, set apart, and the mark of God’s covenant will be upon him. But brothers, it is not my son only who has been marked—each of us was buried with Christ in our baptism, and if we have been united in his death, we shall certainly be united in his resurrection. In our baptisms, God has made his covenant with us, and since he compels our obedience, keeps his promises to us, and indeed, is even greater than our hearts, we must assure our hearts before him.

So let us examine our obedience and good works and take assurance from them that Christ is at work in us; let us give thanks fervently before our meals for the proof God’s provision is of his covenant with us, and let confess openly that God is greater than our hearts and continue to participate in the community of the church and her sacraments. And brothers, let us give thanks that our God is both powerful and good, that he has called us out and gives us reason to assure our hearts before him.

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These different philosophic concerns lead in turn to similar descriptions of God—though these similarities would seem to be more superficial than real given their different motivations. Both theologies affirm that God exists within a vulnerable, give-and-take relationship with his creatures, and dwells within time. Along with God’s vulnerability, both affirm man’s libertarian free will, and therefore rightly assume that God cannot possibly know the future actions of man. Interestingly, the assertion that God cannot know the future is probably the most obviously objectionable part of both views for evangelicals, and yet, that assertion is nowhere near the heart of argument for either view, but rather only a logical consequence of their own prior assumptions. As the chronological antecedent of process theism, openness theists have affirmed these similarities and have also praised process theism for its critique of the classical view of God, especially in process theism’s view of God’s “persuasive” interaction with man and its solution to the problem of evil.

However, along with affirming the similarities noted, openness theism has made a strong critique of process thought on several fronts: for limiting God’s action in the world to persuasive activity (open theists would say that God can sometimes act coercively), an overemphasis on God’s immanence, and finally, a fatal commitment to philosophy at the expense of biblical revelation. Ironically, in their critique of process thought, openness theists nearly echo evangelical concerns for openness theism itself. As evidence of the difference between openness and process theism, William Hasker writes in The Openness of God that open theism seeks “in fact, to demonstrate that there is a third alternative, a way of understanding God and his relations to the world that embodies many of the strengths of both classical and process theism while avoiding their weaknesses.” Clearly, open theism has done its best to set itself apart from process theism even as it appreciates the fact that both theologies agree on some of their affirmations about God and his relationship to creation.

While similarities between the two views obviously exist, it would be incorrect to argue that openness theism is influenced in a directly causal manner by process theism. Besides considering the fact that open theists deny any direct influence themselves, it also seems that process theism and open theism merely posit similar answers for very different problems. Process theism is a direct response to a perceived disconnection between science and theology; take for example their claim that ultimately, “the natural sciences tell us something about reality and not merely about human experience…people cannot be satisfied with theologies that relegate the revelations of science to the status of information about mere appearance, and thereby fail to discuss science in terms of the same set of concepts used to discuss religion, ethics and aesthetics.” In contrast, openness theism is a theological attempt to reconcile a libertarian view of man’s free will with the biblical record—a Christian theological tradition that stretches back at least as far as Pelagius and notably includes Arminianism and Socinianism. The path for the credibility of openness theism may have been paved by process theology—that is, as Hasker asserts, openness theists may have seen a gap between the process and classical views of God in which they might insert themselves—but openness theism’s influences seem to lie far more in philosophic assumptions about the freedom of man and Christian attempts to account for that freedom than in process theology. After viewing the historical roots of both theologies, it would not be difficult to imagine a world that included openness theism in its present form without the existence of process theology—an ultimate test of non-influence. Similarities between the two views are therefore more incidental than telling—ultimately process and openness theologians are declaring similar solutions to different problems. Ironically, the similarities in the two views may actually point to a weakness in the classical view of God—perhaps the classical view has, at times, been too sympathetic to Hellenistic biases and has overemphasized God’s transcendence and impassability—and therefore perhaps the best way to account for the similarities between openness and process theism might be to admit something like, “you have a point.”

On the surface, openness theism seems to remain within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, as they affirm the historic necessities—a triune God, the historical incarnation of Christ, his historic death and resurrection—in short, there is nothing in the Nicene or Apostles’ creeds which openness theism does not claim to uphold. The most controversial tenet of openness theism, God’s relative ignorance regarding future events, has never been a historic mark of orthodoxy, so it is difficult to declare open theism heresy solely on this charge. More troubling are some of the logical implications of openness theism, implications that would seem to call into question the divine inspiration of scripture, the traditional doctrine of original sin, and especially, the assurance of the saints in the new heavens and earth. But in this discussion, it is important to remember that many heresies in the history of the church also were not heretical when they arose, but had to be declared as such by the church at large. With that in mind, the best answer to the question of the orthodoxy of open theism is: “for the moment.”

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The rest of the song goes:

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
I remember that time you told me
"Love is touching souls"
Surely you touched mine
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time

My blood
My holy wine
Tastes so bitter and so sweet
Well I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said, "Go to him, stay with him
But be prepared to bleed"

My blood
My holy wine
Tastes so bitter and so sweet
Well I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

Evocative and interesting language throughout--good work, especially considering the pop world that Amos is participating in. Also, a subtle double meaning in the title. Is it fine poetry? Probably not. But it's a pretty good bittersweet love song, which is just about as hard to write as any poem. Definitely not Dylan/Townes and not quite Cowboy Junkies/Lucinda Williams, but still, very fine work.

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Ordinary people, all of them—not so different from you and me. Not the two-dimensional Sunday School characters who populated many of our childhoods and seemed so far from our lives, but real men and women who slept and woke and loved and grew lonely and snapped sometimes at their wives or children. And yet each was converted to the worship of the one true God, and so each saw the world with new eyes, and dared to live by faith. Abel looked at the sacrifice of his favorite lamb not as needless waste, but as a gift to the same God who had given him that lamb. Noah looked at the desert around him and saw a rising tide of water, because he believed that God was faithful to keep his promises. Abraham was prepared to murder, in cold blood, his beloved son Isaac because he believed the God he followed was Lord even of death and would make his lifeless child alive again. And Moses—Moses followed the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, leading his people straight into what he must have known was a death trap—the Red Sea before him, the mightiest army on the face of the earth behind, and only his staff and the mighty hand of God to provide a way out. And yet, in the end, each man was delivered. Each followed the God who was faithful to keep his promises, and each dared to live by faith.

The audience that today’s passages originally addressed was a community that was experiencing harsh suffering because of their faith in Christ. Perhaps none of us here are being persecuted for the gospel, but each of us are in some way acquainted with suffering. I imagine that very few of us here today know anything like financial stability. It is almost certain that each of us know personally the hand of death on someone close to us. The reality is that [FCF] it is difficult to live by faith, to believe that God is faithful to his promises. There is the medical insurance to be paid for, a paper that has to be written, a wife that has to be loved, even when we don’t feel like it. There is the fear, somewhere hidden down deep within each of us, that our best simply won’t be good enough, that we will fail in the vocation that we have chosen.

And yet today’s passage stands here before us, telling a story of a God who is faithful to his promises, and a people who choose to live as though God’s promises were true. Abraham’s faith is not recorded here to provide us with some kind of moral ideal—rather his story is remembered because it demonstrates one of two ways to live; Brothers, either will we will live by faith in the promises of God, or we will waste our lives. There is no middle ground. Brothers, today’s passage teaches us that…

[Proposition] God is faithful to his promises.

But how do we live by faith? What does that look like in the gritty reality of everyday life? From the story of Abraham recorded in today’s passage, we can learn some specific application of what God’s faithfulness to his promises means for our lives. From today’s passage we can learn that to live by faith means simply to see with new eyes, to wait with new patience, and to obey with new hope.

[Main Point 1] We must see with new eyes.

From verse 8, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.” We have to be careful not to let the impact of this verse wash over us because it is a familiar one. The story here is a man packing up his family and all his belongings to travel to a new land, a land he does not even know. Folks, how does a man leave the only home that he has known all of his life? How is this possible? There is only one way—because he sees the world around him with new eyes. Can you imagine Abraham’s friends and neighbors? Seeing with their old eyes, they must have thought he was a crazy old man to leave everything behind. But where they saw a crazy gamble, Abraham’s new eyes saw a wise and logical decision. Where others saw loss, he saw gain. Because God is faithful to his promises, Abraham saw with the eyes of faith and knew the only wise path to follow was the very one that seemed foolish. Remember the context of this passage—in 10:34, just a few verses before, we find that the audience is a community whose possessions were plundered because of their faith in Christ. Seen with normal eyes, this would seem to be a disastrous event—but when viewed with the eyes of faith, suffering and persecution is a sign of blessing. Remember the words of Jesus, who told his disciples in Matt 5, “Blessed are you when others persecute you…rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

Brothers, this is what happens when we are converted to the worship of the one true God, the one who upholds the world with his mighty hand and is faithful to his promise to always care for us. We see the world with new eyes, with the eyes of faith.

[Illustration] In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, the story’s two central characters, Benedick and Beatrice, seem only to hate each other in the beginning of the play, as they constantly cross their saber-like wits, mocking each other in turn. But all this changes one day when Benedick overhears two friends speaking of the love they say Beatrice has for him. Benedick’s friends are lying, and intend to gently trick him into loving Beatrice, but their lie makes no difference. In an instant, Benedick truly believes that Beatrice does love him, and realizes that he in turn loves her. In a moment, he is completely converted to love. From that point on Benedick’s conversion to love changes everything, and Benedick sees the world with new eyes. Whenever Beatrice speaks sharply to him, just as she has always done, Benedick can only hear the voice of love. When she mocks him, Benedick only falls more deeply in love with her. Benedick constantly sees her harsh words as only more evidence of Beatrice’s love for him. Before long Beatrice realizes that she also loves Benedick, and the two court and marry—all because one was converted to a new way of seeing the world.

And so it is also with us. For when God calls us to himself, when he enlarges his covenant and encloses us within it, we cannot help but be changed. And when we dare to live by faith, we cannot help but see the world around us with new eyes.

[Application] Just like Benedick, we have been called to see with new eyes. The faith ascribed to Abraham isn’t some extra special kind that only people whose stories are in the Bible have. We are all the children of Abraham, and our faith changes us in the same way that his did. And this shift in vision is exactly happens when we see with the new eyes of faith. This means that we must learn to see the world the way that it is described in Scripture rather than the way it normally appears. How does this come about? One of the best ways is when you publicly and corporately confess the church’s creed in worship every week. When we stand and speak the Nicene Creed as one body it is not just an affirmation of the things we believe about God, it is a description of the world around us, a description that flies in the face of the dominant stories of our day. The world around us confesses that the earth came into existence through random chance. We stand and declare that one God made all things. The world around us bows to the military and economic power of the United States. We stand and declare Jesus Christ as Lord. The world around us confesses that life ends in death, or at best continues in some ethereal and distant way. We stand and declare that the dead will rise again. How do we measure up to this new way of seeing, how do we know that we are seeing the world with new eyes? The best way is not to ask yourself whether you would leave your home at the drop of a hat, like Abraham did, but rather if you are trusting God in the everyday realities of the life into which He has placed you. It is easy to romanticize dramatic sacrifices, and very hard to not speak sharply at your wife when you are worn out from a long day of work. But whether we succeed or fail at this task is largely based on how we see our wife, whether we see her as another human being whose primary function is to keep our bed warm at night or fill the lonely hole in our hearts or keep the house running, or whether we see her precisely as Christ sees his church—for unless we see her the same way he sees his bride, we will never love her as we ought.
The implications of seeing with new eyes does not end with how we view our wives—it extends to every area of our lives. Do we respond to suffering, like the Christian community addressed in this epistle? It depends on our how we see. How will we respond to God’s call to trust him to provide, as he called Abraham? It depends on our eyes.

Because God is faithful to his promises, we must learn to see with new eyes. What is another right response to God’s faithful-promise keeping?

[Main Point 2] We must wait with new patience.

In verses 9 and 10, we find that Abraham went to live in the land that God would give him, but he lived in it as a foreigner, always looking forward to the heavenly reward that waited for him. In light of this example, let us dare to wait with new patience, living in the tension, as though the promise of God were already fulfilled, and waiting for its complete fulfillment.

[Subpoint 1] We must live as though God’s promises are not yet fulfilled.

In verse 9 we see that Abraham lived by faith, but lived as though God’s promises are not yet fulfilled. By faith Abraham went to live in the land that he was promised, acting on the good word of God. By faith he left his home and dwelt in the country that had been given to him. But look at how he lived. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that he lived “as in a foreign land.” Even though Abraham believed that God had promised him the land of Canaan, he did not presume on the promise, for he knew that it would be fulfilled in God’s good timing, and not his own. In addition, when we read this passage in the original Greek, we see that the word for “live” that is used in the passage translated “By faith he went to live in the land of promise” is not the “regular” Greek word for dwell. Instead, it’s paroixew, a word that carries with it a connotation of “sojourn”—and that’s how it’s translated in many of the older translations. Again, this linguistic point helps us see that writer is emphasizing the way in which Abraham lived as though God’s promise was not yet fulfilled, and still he persevered. The final way the author shows us Abraham’s conviction that God’s promises to him are not yet fulfilled is the way that he dwells in tents, instead of in a more permanent dwelling. Clearly, the writer is setting Abraham as an example of a man who waited patiently in faith, actively living in a way that constantly reminded him that God’s promises are not yet fulfilled.

But what is another way that we must wait with new patience?

[Subpoint 2] We must live as though God’s promises will one day be fulfilled.

Look with me at verse 10. “For [Abraham] was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” What a great contrast we have here! In verse 9, we find that Abraham lives his whole life in dusty tents—tents that are hot in the day and cold at night, tents that must be set up and taken down over and over again. And in verse 10 we have this wonderful picture of a city, but not just any city, a city built and designed by God! And why is Abraham content to dwell in the temporary? Why is he at peace to sojourn as a foreigner in the land that God promised would be his? Because Abraham was a man who saw with the new eyes of faith, and what he saw was a city that would be his eternal reward. Abraham believed in a promise that would one day be fulfilled. And not only did Abraham believe the promise, he lived in a way that pinned all his hopes on that promise. Again, think of the meaning this verse must of have had for Hebrew’s original audience. They knew what it was to live in temporary dwellings. And here the writer exorts them to look forward to the promise.

Abraham’s story shows us that live by faith means to live in tension, to live as though God’s promise are not yet fulfilled, but that God’s promises will one day be fulfilled.

[Illustration] On July 11, 2002, about 2 ½ years ago, in a spot right off the Blue Ridge Parkway, a little spot nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians, I got on my knees and asked my then girl-friend to pledge to marry me. Somehow or another, Ami said yes, and we soon decided that since I still had a year of college left, that May of the next year would be a good time to get married. Those ten months must have been the longest months of my life. On the one hand I had the promise that Ami had made to me, and the ring she wore to prove it, but on other hand the promise was not yet fulfilled. Every day I had to get up and go to class, work on my thesis, interact with my friends, go sleep alone in my bed at night, enjoying none of the benefits of marriage—In short I had to live as though the promise of my marriage to Ami was not yet fulfilled. But at the same time I lived as though the promise would one day be fulfilled. I began to save money. I began to look for a job to provide for the woman who was not yet my wife. I began to search for a house for us to live in. I stopped spending time alone with other women my age. I was beginning to act as a married man, even though I was not yet married. All because of a promise that Ami would be there with me on the day in May when we would say our vows. Because I believed that Ami would be faithful to her promise, I waited with patience, living both as though her promise had yet to be fulfilled, and yet as though one day it would be fulfilled.

[Application] Well, in just the same way I waited for Ami to fulfill her promise, we must must wait for God to fulfill his promises to us. For Abraham was not alone in looking forward to the city that was built by God. Indeed, Isaac looked forward to that city. As did Jacob. As did David. The original audience of Hebrews looked forward to that same city, and brothers, so do you and I. The promise is not yet, but the promise will one day be fulfilled. Can you imagine it? The picture here is of God, the same God who spoke the world into being in verse 10:4—That same God is coming near his people, building the very houses and rooms in which they will dwell—and not as foreigners—no, brothers, we will dwell there as sons, as children of the living God. For did not Jesus say to his disciples, on the eve of his death, “Let your hearts not be troubled…In my father’s house, there are many rooms?”

To wait with patience, as though God’s promises are not yet fulfilled means that we must not live as though this world matters more than it does. This means the obvious things like being content with the possessions God has given you, but it means also that we must be content with the talents and experiences God has given us. We live in an intensely competitive atmosphere. The reality is that most of us want the same jobs in the same denomination, and the temptation to compare ourselves to our neighbors, to sort people into categories in our heads, is nearly unavoidable. As I preach now, I know that some of you are comparing me to yourselves, just as I will later measure you against me. Friends, this is not a question of a little friendly competition, or boys being boys. This valuing other students or valuing ourselves primarily for our gifts and abilities is fundamentally a question of whether we believe the world ends here, or whether we believe it doesn’t. Either God is making a new heavens and a new earth, or he isn’t. And if he is, then we must live as though his promise is not yet fulfilled, and if what’s waiting for us is a city made by God, and if what we’re living in here is dusty tents, it doesn’t much matter who puts up and takes down their tent better than their neighbor. We are looking forward to a city made by God, an eternity living with new, resurrected bodies feasting and worshiping and singing in the presence of the glorified Christ. Let us not be, as C.S. Lewis put it, like children playing in mudpuddles and never dreaming of the seashore; let us not lust for the admiration of our peers or the affirmation of our professors and never imagine the depths of the glory that awaits us when all of God’s promises are fulfilled. The basic problem with narcissism, with social and academic categorization and competition is not that we want too much, but rather that we desire far too little. Instead brothers, let us spend our lives like Abraham, let us wait with patience, living both as God’s promises are not yet fulfilled, but that one day they will all be fulfilled, and that they will come to pass in ways that we cannot really imagine.

We have seen that because God is faithful to his promises, we must dare to live by faith by seeing with new eyes as well as waiting with new patience. What is another response to God’s promise-keeping?

[Main Point 3] We must trust with new hope.

[Analytical Question] Why must we trust with a new hope?

[Subpoint 1] Because of our weakness.

In verses 11 and 12, our passage reads, “By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.” Clearly, Abraham, and now Sarah’s, story shows us that as we begin the process of trusting in God promises, we soon run straight into a definite reality—the reality of our weakness. Abraham and Sarah were trusting God to keep his promises to make them into a great nation, and yet they had no sons. Not only did they not have any sons, it was clear after years of marriage that they were barren. Not only did they not have any sons, not only were they barren, they were also both very old. Abraham was about 100 years old, he was “as good as dead,” and, as Genesis puts it, “the way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.” God had made a promise to Abraham, and also to Sarah, but because of their absolute weakness, they were completely unable to grasp the promise in their own strength. A stark choice faced Abraham and Sarah—either they could despair and give up hope for God’s promises to be fulfilled, or they could trust with a new hope. They took the latter choice, and the world has never again been the same.

We must be prepared for the fact that we will not be able to fulfill God’s promises to us because of our weakness. Therefore, we must also trust with a new hope…

[Subpoint 2] Because of God’s strength.

In verses 11 and 12, right alongside the reality of Abraham and Sarah’s weakness, we find a deeper reality, the reality of God’s strength. For Sarah did not stay barren, and it did not matter that she was past the age of child-bearing—in verse 11 we read that “she received the power to conceive,” and in verse 12, the writer tells us that “from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars in heaven.” The foolish old man and wife were fools no more! Sarah’s old body began to swell. By this the promise of God was fulfilled—Sarah’s old body began to swell. Can you imagine it—the old stubborn man and the old sharp-tongued wife—the first time she felt the babe move inside her? How she must have run to find her husband—how they must have laughed—laughed and wept at the power of their God, at the unlikelyness of it all, and at the sheer joy of having, in their old age, their first child. No wonder Abraham was willing to kill that same son some years later, believing he would be raised from the dead! For he knew that no matter what happened, the fulfillment of God’s promises was entirely due to God’s strength.

Abraham and Sarah’s story show us the two reasons we must trust God with new hope – because of our weakness, and because of God’s strength.

[Illustration] In my family, my father has a tradition of taking each of the kids alone on a backpacking trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia when we are about 10 or 11. Well, the time came when I turned 10, and Dad and I planned our trip. The first night and day were great—we slept in our tent and cooked dinner over the campfire and were just enjoying the woods and views and the comfortable silence and the time together. The second night was when things started going wrong. I woke in the middle of the night and found I couldn’t breathe through my mouth, like my lungs would constrict whenever I tried to breathe in air—this kind of thing had never happened to me before, and obviously it scared me. Somehow I was able to go back to sleep (luckily I could still breathe through my nose), but in the morning we found that we were quite in a fix. I still couldn’t breathe, and there we were, up in the mountains, literally miles away from a phone or any kind of communication. Obviously the only thing to do was to try was to walk back to the car, even though we were a long way out. Now I can’t tell you how much this scared me. At my age, I wasn’t old enough to really be able to think through everything, but I was old enough to know that we could be in some trouble if I couldn’t walk out, and I didn’t know if I could. I was in a place where I felt totally helpless. In my weakness, I didn’t have any choice but to trust my father and try to follow him as we hiked back the miles we had come. Now I trusted my father not only because of my weakness, but also because of his strength. He knew the best thing to do in this moment of crisis, far better than I did. He knew the way back—I would have been lost on my own. He had the strength to carry both his pack and mine too when I felt too weak to do anything but put one foot in front of the other. Well, we got back, and the next day I went to the doctor’s and was diagnosed with asthma, and now I never travel anywhere without an inhaler to clear up my lungs in situations like that. But friends, the way I trusted my father that day in my weakness is the same way that we must trust our heavenly father in our weakness. God’s strength coupled with our weakness means that we must trust him with new hope.

[Application] In a culture that emphasizes self-sufficiency and frowns on any kind of neediness, it can be difficult to truly trust God in light of our weakness, for often we act simply as though we are not weak at all. We think that because our lives are not quite as desperate as Abraham’s and Sarah’s, perhaps we do not need to trust God with our day to day lives. After all it is not as though we find ourselves trying to have a baby when we are 100 years old. But this is a lie. And it is a lie that will soon be uncovered in the fellowship of other Christians. Small groups, by which I mean a group of several men or women who meet regularly to both confess their sins to one another and pray for their needs, serve many useful functions. They force us to care for others. They help us practice the discipline of prayer. But another benefit of small groups is that they force us to see our weakness. When we spend time confessing how we fail to follow God’s law—how we give in to anger, or selfishness, or lust throughout the week, how we fail to love those that God has given us to love, it does not take long before we realize how deep our need for God is, how living righteously is not that much different from a barren woman and a 100 year-old man trying to have a baby. When we meet to confess our needs, and each week we see our needs met, and then tell others about it, we also begin to believe in God’s strength in a way that is not just simply theologically accurate, but rather encoded in the very way we live. To truly trust God with new hope, we must learn to really believe that we are weak and that he is strong. Let us embrace the community that God has given us, learning, in spite of what our culture tells us, that our weakness is not a cause for shame, but rather for comfort, for the God that we follow is as strong as he is faithful—and deserves all of our trust.

[Conclusion] A young man, binding the legs of his first and best lamb before slitting its throat on an altar…rewarded with the favor of God.

An already old man, over a span of a century, gathering wood and piecing together a massive boat in the middle of a barren and dry land...through whose family God would save the world and keep open the promise of redemption.

A tired wanderer binding the legs of his son, placing his knife against his throat…and then stopped by the voice of an angel.

A prophet, with an angry army threatening to destroy his people, raising his staff over the waters…which parted at his command, clearing the way for God’s people to walk through and then, again at his command, came crashing down on God’s enemies.

The message of Hebrews 11 is not simply to describe the faith shown by God’s people, but rather to display the greatness of God’s response in the lives of those who followed him and lived by faith. This is the message the author of Hebrews 11 was sending to his suffering community, and it is the message for us today—when we, God’s people, see the world with new eyes, wait with new patience, and trust with new hope, we must prepare ourselves to be overwhelmed by the power of our God—because our God is always faithful to keep his promises. And the promises that wait to be fulfilled will break our hearts with their beauty. For did not the writer to the Hebrews tells us that “these all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth?” For brothers, truly, “no eye has seen, and no ear has heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.”


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Contrary to what seems obvious from the chapter divisions given in modern versions of the book of Exodus, the bounds of the pericope of Moses’s birth and deliverance story should be set as Exodus 1:22-2:10 instead of simply 2:1-10. When Pharaoh commands his people to cast the sons of the Hebrews into the Nile, a new and distinct problem is introduced in the narrative which is then intensified in 2:2, which records that a Levite woman gave birth to a son. Obviously, if 1:22 is not part of the story, then the birth of a son is a joyous occasion—but given the context of Pharaoh’s threat (the story’s “preliminary event”), the birth of a son is source of great tension in the story (and serves as its “occasioning incident”). Though not common, this view of the pericope in question is supported by at least one major commentator. After the son who is born under the threat of death, the second problem in the passage is a more subtle one, for after Moses records that the Levite woman conceived and gave birth, the literary pattern he has established for himself demands that the name for the son be given (cf. Gen 21:2-3; 29:32,33,34,35, etc.) but here the name is withheld—a fact that would have been glaringly obvious to Moses’s original audience. The action of the narrative rises as the mother seeks to hide her baby from the Egyptians, finally settling on a plan of hiding him in a basket. The turning point of the story comes in 2:5-6, when the daughter of Pharaoh spies the basket that holds the Hebrew baby and commands her servant woman to bring it to her. At this point the suspense of the story is the highest it has been thus far—the audience must surely wonder, with Brueggemann, “What will [Pharaoh’s daughter] do when she sees the baby? Will she replicate her raging father and kill the baby?” This tension is resolved when the princess shows pity on the baby, and consequently the action quickly falls as the sister and mother of the baby leap back onto the scene. The two original problems in the narrative are both finally resolved in 2:10, signaling the end of the pericope, when the baby becomes the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, thus finally and completely removing Pharaoh’s death threat from him (at least for the present time), and Pharaoh’s daughter gives a name to the previously nameless baby.

The story moves quickly between various scenes, using repetition of the word ‘take’ (lqh), to unify the story, pull the narrative along and divide all but the first and last verse into four scenes. “The man of Levi takes a wife (2:1), the woman takes a vessel (2:3), the maidservant takes the vessel (2:5), and the mother takes the boy back (2:9) [to Pharaoh’s daughter].” If one takes 1:22 and 2:10 to be individual scenes, the narrative then divides easily into six total scenes: Ex. 1:22 with Pharaoh’s death command provides the context and underlying tension for the entire passage, 2:1-2 introduces the dual problems of the birth of a boy-child and the lack of a name, 2:3-4 describes the mother and sister’s response to the first problem, 2:5-8 shows the turning point of the story, where the baby is discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter and shown pity, 2:9 returns the baby to its mother and shows the spoiling of Pharaoh, and 2:10 formalizes the baby’s adoption by Pharaoh’s daughter and gives him his name, resolving the story’s two primary problems and signaling the end of the pericope. Considered spatially, 1:22 uses the widest-angle lens, as Pharaoh gives his command to “all his people,” but the story quickly narrows to focus in one family and ultimately, one son of all the Hebrews. The narrowest lens is used in verses 2:3, when the making of the basket is described in detail, and in 2:6, when Pharaoh’s daughter opens the basket and discovers the baby. The placement of the characters (besides the baby, who is the story’s central focus, but most passive character) throughout the narrative form a rough chiasm, as the story opens with Pharaoh in 1:22, moves to a Levite man and woman (focusing mostly on the woman) in 2:1-3, noting the activity of the baby’s sister in 2:4, closely examining the activity of Pharaoh’s daughter in 2:5-6, reintroducing the baby sister in 2:7, returning the baby to the Levite woman in 2:8-9 and ending with the focus on Pharaoh’s daughter in 2:10, who is a kind of parallel to Pharaoh, given their relationship and her subversion of his command (Pharaoh commanded Hebrew boys to be thrown into the Nile, Pharaoh’s daughter names her son Moses because she drew him out of the water). The effect of this chiasm is obviously to focus the audience’s attention on the Pharaoh’s daughter’s discovery of the baby and her pity on his cries, which is the turning point of the story, and can be seen to parallel God’s pity and action in response to the cries of the people of Israel in Exodus 2:23-25 and 3:7-8.

Other literary considerations include the use of the Hebrew ‘tov,’ translated alternately “fine” (NIV and ESV), “beautiful” (NASB) and “goodly” (KJV) to describe the son born to the Levite couple, which according to Nahum Sarna, echoes the key “good” phrase in the Genesis creation account (e.g. Gen 1:4) and “suggests that the birth of Moses is intended to be understood as the dawn of a new creative era.” Additionally, the Hebrew ‘tevah,’ which is selected to describe the baby’s basket, is found elsewhere in the Old Testament only in Genesis 7-9, where it is used to describe the ark that saves Noah. As Terrence Fretheim writes, “Both Noah and Moses are adrift in a watery chaos, but they are divinely chosen ones in and whom the good creation will be preserved.” The words of the story of Moses’s birth not only echo earlier narratives, but also point forward to the corporate fate of Israel, for “[t]he child once abandoned in the reeds (suph) along the shore of the Nile will later lead his people in triumph through the Reed Sea 9 (yam suph, cf. [Exodus] 13:18).” Indeed, in a sense, the story of Moses’s birth and deliverance can be understood to prefigure and serve as a miniature version of the entire Exodus narrative of all the Hebrews. Moses is threatened by the tyranny of Pharaoh, just as the Israelites later will be; he is delivered out from a watery death by a strong power outside himself, just as the Israelites will be; and his mother “spoils” Pharaoh by taking wages from the royal treasury in return for caring for her son, just as the Israelites will later plunder the Egyptians (Ex. 12:36). And so, for Moses’s original audience, the story of his birth would have been worked to show himself as a man specially delivered by God to prepare him for his service, as well as underscoring the power of their God over against the gods of Egypt, and reminding them that they served a God who had sworn promises to their forefather, Abraham, and would always remember and act upon his promises to his people.

The story of Moses’s birth and deliverance is explicitly referenced twice in the Bible, both in the New Testament. The first reference is found in Acts 7:19-21, during Stephen’s speech before the Jewish leaders who accused him of speaking blasphemy for claiming Jesus was God’s son. Moses’s birth story is referenced by Stephen as part of his recitation of God’s active work in the history of Israel, stretching from Abraham to Solomon, and is given to the Jewish leaders to deepen the contrast between God’s graciousness to their forefathers and their forefathers’ rejection of Moses’s leadership at Mt. Sinai in Acts 7:39-41. Of course, Stephen cites the story of the rejection of Moses in order to lead into his general indictment of the current Jewish leaders because of their rejection and participation in the death of Jesus (Acts 7:51). Here, Stephen’s use of the birth story of Moses is used in much the same way Moses himself uses it in Exodus—that is, Stephen tells the story of Moses’s birth to further legitimize Moses’s status as a prophet of God and therefore undeserving of the later disobedience of the Israelites.
The second explicit reference to the Moses birth narrative is found in Hebrews 11:23, where the author of Hebrews commends the faith of Moses’s parents demonstrated in understanding that he was a “beautiful child” (ESV) and hiding him, not fearing the edict of Pharaoh. Here the application of the text is focused on the active faith of the parents of Moses, which is used in Hebrews 12 to encourage the recipients of the epistle to endure in their faith. Interestingly, the accounts of Moses’s birth in Acts and Hebrews both remind their audiences of the beautiful appearance of the infant Moses, underscoring the importance of its presence in the original narrative and perhaps lending legitimacy to the creation parallels drawn by Sarna and others.

The larger story of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt that the Moses birth story is both the beginning and a miniature version of is a narrative that is referenced and applied throughout the Old and New Testaments. Some of the most significant applications of the Exodus story occurs where it is said to be the basis for various covenant rituals of the Israelite people, including the Passover meal (Ex. 12:26-27) as well as the motivation for the consecration of the first-born son in each Israelite family (Ex. 13:14-16). Additionally, God, through Moses, cites the Exodus story as ethical motivation when he instructs the Israelites to not oppress the foreigner in their land (Ex. 23:9), to not permanently enslave other Israelites (Leviticus 25:39-42), to be diligent in their observance of the Sabbath rest (Deut. 5:12-15), to offer their first-fruit and tithe (Deut. 26:5-11) and indeed is given as the primary motivation for all of God’s commands to Israel (Deut. 6:20-24). In all these verses, and indeed, throughout the Pentateuch, the Exodus serves as the primary basis of the Israelite identity—in their “confession of faith” in Deut. 26:5-11, the Israelites were instructed to essentially recite the story of the Exodus. The Exodus also serves as the primary way Yahweh identifies himself to his people, introducing the Ten Commandments by reminding his people, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:1). The theological importance of the Exodus does not end with the generation who experienced it—Joshua reminds the people of the Exodus when he challenges them to renew their covenant with God after they have settled in Canaan (Joshua 24), Isaiah uses language that clearly brings to mind the Exodus from Egypt to prophecy about Israel’s new Exodus (Isaiah 11:15-16), and many of the Psalms give praise to God for the Exodus story (among others, Psalm 66, 68, 78, 81, and especially 105). Besides Acts 7, where, as mentioned before, Stephen compares the Exodus generation’s rejection of Moses with the Jewish leaders’ rejection of Jesus, the Exodus story is explicitly mentioned in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 10, where Paul writes to the Corinthians that the Exodus generation is to be an example to them, so that they may avoid their sin and disobedience.

The story of the Exodus has been interpreted and applied in a variety of ways throughout church history. Many prominent theologians, including John Calvin, have seen the Exodus of Israel as a picture, or foreshadowing of the salvation Christ has wrought for his church. In his comments on the preface to the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:1) in the Institutes, Calvin writes:

"In order that it may not seem that [the exodus] has nothing to do with us, we must regard the Egyptian bondage of Israel as a type of the spiritual captivity in which all of us are held bound, until our heavenly Vindicator, having freed us by the power of his arm, leads us into the Kingdom of freedom. At a former time, God, intending to gather the scattered Israelites to worship his name, released them from the intolerable dominion of Pharaoh by which they were oppressed. So today all those to whom he professes himself their God he releases from the devil’s deadly power—foreshadowed by that physical bondage."

Calvin goes on to argue that, like Israel’s physical Exodus, this spiritual Exodus that we have experienced is the proper motivation for our obedience of God’s law. Later in the Institutes, Calvin also argues for a typological reading of the deliverance of the Israelites through the Red Sea, seeing in the death of Pharaoh and the Egyptian army the death of Satan’s power over the Christian, and the entire event itself being analogous to the sacrament of baptism.

The Belgic Confession advances a view of the relationship between the Exodus and baptism similar to that of Calvin, claiming that the effects of baptism come to us not by the external water, “but by the [internal] sprinkling of the precious blood of the Son of God; who is our Red Sea, through which we must pass to escape the tyranny of Pharaoh, that is, the devil, and to enter into the spiritual land of Canaan.” Here the Belgic Confession, coming some twenty years after the first publication of the Institutes, expands upon and develops Calvin’s view, seeing that just as every Israelite had to pass through the Red Sea in order to leave the bondage of Egypt, so also every member of Christ’s church must pass through him in the rite of baptism. Interestingly, this relationship between the Exodus and baptism is not more fully developed or even mentioned in later confessional documents. However, both the Westminster Larger & Shorter Catechisms in their commentary on the preface to the Ten Commandments echo Calvin’s belief that the Exodus should teach us of God’s power and care for his covenant people, and that power and care should compel us to obey him. The Westminster Shorter Catechism succinctly states it thus: “The preface to the Ten Commandments teacheth us, That because God is the Lord, and our God, and Redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all His commandments.”

While not all of liberation theology has operated within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, as a theological stream of thought, many liberation theologians have helped the Christian world remember and reflect on the fact that the Exodus story was not only a picture of the spiritual reality yet to come, but was indeed a primarily physical deliverance from bondage, with implications for how God cares for and desires his people to care for those who are oppressed. Instead of merely a picturing or foreshadowing a spiritual truth, the physical and spiritual realities of the Exodus are inexplicably bound together. In his seminal work, A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutierrez explains, “The Exodus is the long march towards the promised land in which Israel can establish a society free from misery and alienation. Throughout the whole process, the religious event is not set apart. It is placed in the context of the entire narrative, or more precisely, it is its deepest meaning.” Gutierrez also helpfully notes that the Exodus was intrinsically an affirmation of creation and the physical place of man within it. “If faith ‘desacralizes’ creation, making it the area proper for the work of man, the Exodus from Egypt, the home of a sacred monarchy, reinforces this idea: it is the ‘desacralization’ of social praxis, which from that time on will be the work of man.” And so the Exodus is not simply a picture of what Christ has done for us in triumphing over the devil, but it is a call to the importance of the physical world, for Christ came not only to spiritually liberate the oppressed, but to feed the hungry, heal the sick and liberate the demon-possessed. Like the Exodus, Christ’s resurrection is a spiritual reality bound up in a body of flesh, and like the resurrection, the Exodus affirms the importance of our body as much as it does our soul. And, as Gutierrez argues, “All this means that building the temporal city is not simply a stage of ‘humanization’ or ‘pre-evangelization’ as was held in theology up until a few years ago. Rather it is to become a part of a saving process which embraces the whole of man and all of human history.” The story of Moses’s birth signals the start of and prefigures the larger story of the Exodus of Israel from their bondage in Egypt which in turn has found legitimate application throughout the Bible as reason to obey, trust and praise God, and has been applied throughout the history of the church as a picture of the spiritual Exodus of the church as well as affirming the essential goodness and value of the human within creation.

Though I had not reflected on it at any great length when I began this paper, I share much in common with the original audience of the Moses birth story. Like them, in my baptism, I stand on the other side of the Red Sea. Like them, I easily forget the benefits of my deliverance and wonder if God is now silent, if he has indeed forgotten me and my family. Essentially, my original summary of the story is the same as it was when I began. There are no major discontinuities between my original belief that the narrative of Moses’s birth spoke of God’s power and faithfulness to his covenant promises and what I have seen in considering the original audience, the rest of the witness of scripture, or significant theological applications throughout church history. There have, however, been nuances and expansions on that view. By considering the original audience and probable authorial intent, I see now my story’s role in establishing the special calling of Moses, as well as the contrast between the power of Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt and the power of Yahweh. Alternately, by gaining a broader view of scripture’s use of the Exodus narrative, I see that the Exodus was meant not only to teach the Israelites (and myself) about the nature of God, but it was also intended to provide motivation for my ethical behavior—how I treat those around me, and how I submit myself to the rule of God. Finally, in the writings of Gutierrez, I see now how the Exodus reaffirms God’s creative act, and necessity and importance of its historical, physical nature. Still, some of my original questions remain. I believe that more study is needed to discover why God is absent from these first two books of Exodus, especially when he is so present in the rest of the book. The larger question here has to do with why God is not mentioned and seems absent in other parts of the Bible as well, such as the story of Joseph or the book of Esther. However, as a baptized Christian, the relevance the story of Moses’s birth and deliverance, and indeed the entire story of the Exodus, brings to my life is in how well it paints a vivid portrait of the God who has sworn an oath to give an inheritance to the descendants of my forefather, and how he has been, and is now, faithful to that vow, and is also powerful enough to bring it about.


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When writer of the epistle to the Hebrews reminds his audience of these men that had gone before them he does so not to simply provide moral exemplars—indeed, Abraham, Moses and Noah were all terribly flawed men. Instead, these men are described as a “cloud of witnesses” – they are not to be our focus, but rather to point our gaze to the thing that they ultimately witness to, that is, Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Jesus is the one who has converted them, the one who has called them to himself, and Jesus is the only reason that each of them can see and act as they do. Indeed each example stands before us and implicitly challenges us with its own story, calling us to remember our own conversion, to see with new eyes. Therefore, since we also have been converted, let us fix our gaze on Jesus, and see with new eyes of faith.

The author of Hebrews writes: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Let remember the cloud of witnesses and look to Jesus, the writer commands – and how easy it is for us to spiritualize this demand. “Turn your eyes upon Jesus,” the old hymn goes, “Look full in His wonderful face, And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, In the light of His Glory and Grace.” But while reflecting popular Christian belief, this song surely does not ring true with reality. For when Abraham gazed on Jesus and found the strength to raise the knife to slay his son, did the things of earth grow dim? Did he somehow disconnect himself from the sound of Isaac’s sharp cry, look away from the terror in his eyes? No, rather Abraham saw all these things but yet believed in a reality deeper than what his eyes and ears revealed to him – despite the seeming tragedy the death of Isaac would bring, Abraham knew that God would yet deliver and raise up his son – and indeed, so it came to pass. When we look to Jesus, instead of crowding out the physical things of this world, our risen Christ becomes the new lens through which we see all the world, and for the first time, see all the world true. For this conversion and these new eyes are found at the very heart of faith—for what is faith but the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Indeed, the writer of Hebrews, with his stories and even his direct commands issues a call to us – a call to remember our conversion, a call to fix our eyes again on Jesus, a call to see with the new eyes of faith.

And so, every day we look with the eyes of faith on the world around us. We offer God his tithe even when the bank balance drops toward zero. We love the wife of our youth even when she grows old. We sacrifice our lives for our children and families even when they seem not to notice. We wait patiently for God to provide the job and our eventual vocation even when we cannot see the long path of our lives. We meet each week and recite publicly our belief in a God who created the world out of nothing, a virgin who birthed a son, and a baptism that promises the forgiveness of sin. We take and eat wine and bread, call it blood and flesh, and believe it will sustain us through the long weary week. We look, with our father Abraham, for the very resurrection of the dead. The way is narrow, not broad, and there is only one way to live like this—and that way is to be converted, fix our gaze on Jesus and see with new eyes.

In the Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, the main love story centers around two characters, Benedick and Beatrice, who seem only to hate each other in the beginning of the play, as they constantly cross their saber-like wits and cruelly mock each other. But all this changes one day when Benedick overhears two friends speaking of the love they say Beatrice has for him. Benedick’s friends are lying, and intend to gently trick him, but their lie makes no difference. In an instant, Benedick truly believes that Beatrice does love him, and realizes that he in turn loves her. In a moment, he is completely converted to love. From that point on Benedick’s conversion to love changes everything. Whenever Beatrice speaks sharply to him, just as she has always done, Benedick can only hear the voice of love. When she criticizes and mocks him, Benedick only falls more deeply in love with her. Before long Beatrice realizes that she also loves Benedick, and the two court and marry—all because one was converted to a new way of seeing. And, Brothers, so it is with us. For when God calls us to himself, when he enlarges his covenant and encloses us within it, we cannot help but be changed. And when we follow the command of Hebrews and fix our gaze upon Jesus, we cannot help but see the world around differently. Therefore, since we have also been converted, let us remember our conversion, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, and see all with the new eyes of faith.


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Questions for the hunt—Literary context:

What language is being used? What kind of literature is this? What is the history of this kind of literature? For what use is it typically put to? Who are some of the great practitioners of this kind of literature? How is the work is question relating to other works in the past? How do this piece of literature advance or change the basic form within which it operates?

Biographical/Historical context:

Who is the author? What do we know about his life? About his historical period? What are the dominant philosophical, governmental, economic and religious themes of his day? How did he interact (confirm or challenge) these themes? For whom did he write? How was his work? Why did he choose this particular language and literary form in which to write?

Style and Plot:

What is distinctive about this writing style? What makes his writing unique or enjoyable? How does the writer use the specific tools of his chosen form? Outline the basic plot of the work. How does the story foreshadow itself? Who is the protagonist? Who or what are his antagonists? (God, human, natural, societal) Where are the plot’s surprises? Is the ending tragic, comic, or epic? What is enjoyable about the story? What is difficult?

Reflection questions:

Given what we’ve learned about the writer’s historic and literary context, how might he have intended his story to be understood in its particular culture? How can we interpret the story in today’s world? According to Leithart’s model, is this a redemption story or a fall story? Remembering Sproul, Jr.’s essay, where can we find shadows of the gospel story? Is this a true story or a false one? What are the true parts and which are false? Where can we find the themes of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation in this story? Finally, how does this story help us better understand the stories of our culture? How does it help us better understand the story of scripture, the story of history, and our own particular life-narrative?


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