Many Christians have what they call a life-verse. It is one particular passage from the Bible that has a special meaning or importance to them. For me, a verse that has been my focus is in the Book of Hebrews, the first verse of chapter eleven:
“1Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
While the most descriptive text of this passage is in Koine Greek (the common Greek dialect in the first century A.D.), the words seem to be structured in a parallelism, a poetic structure found in the Hebrew Old Testament. This isn’t too surprising given that the intended audience for this verse was Hebrew people. But what is surprising is the nature of the things in this verse that are being related. But first, an aside—
By definition, a parallelism is a connection of meaning through an echo of form, meaning two connected statements seem to say the same thing in different ways. A doctrine or teaching of man has been derived from parallelism called metaphysics. It proclaims that mental and bodily processes are concomitant, both occurring at the same time without either one in consequence of the other. But they still have a loose association, in this case, both processes are parts of living man.
Four centuries before the birth of Jesus, but not before parallelism in Hebrew literature, Aristotle wrote a treatise attempting to relate universal principles to particular ones in a teleological fashion. He proposed that the end result of a phenomenon could be used to explain why it had occurred. He would have looked at this verse in the Book of Hebrews and said that ‘faith’ is a particular phenomenon that reflects a universal principle, there are unseen things in existence.
While teleological thought isn’t favored in the world of science today, it was at the forefront of philosophy in ancient times when the Book of Hebrews was written. This verse would have been understood by the ancients to mean that there are visible and invisible things in life that have a loose, but not dependent, relationship with each other. Yet both must necessarily exist in order to define our cosmos. This hybrid universe is surely his interpretation when two verses later, the author states,
“3By faith, we understand that the universe has been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which are visible.”
Centuries before the invention of microscopes and atomic theory, the Book of Hebrews declared that visible things are built from invisible ones. And, as early scientists proved, it was correct. Regardless of where you stand with the message of Jesus in this letter, no educated person can today dispute the nature of matter recorded in this ancient text.
Now, back to the main thought—
The content of Hebrews 11:1 relates the visible to the invisible, or put other ways, the intangible to the tangible, the abstract to the concrete. The first part of the verse says that faith, an intangible, has substance, something visible. Likewise, the second part claims that abstract faith is concrete evidence of what is invisible to us.
So our hope is substantial and evidential because it is against the natural thought of man. The faith mentioned in this verse and exhibited by the Hebrew recipients of this letter is a confirmation that the promise of heaven with Jesus is real, even though it is currently invisible. Why? Because only God could put genuine belief in the unseen into the mind of man. As verse two of the text says,
“2For by this [faith], the elders obtained testimony.”
They suffered ostracism, deprivation, and for some, death, because of their belief. They didn’t endure such hardship just to deceive the gullible people in their community; they did it because they truly believed the message of Jesus. They looked forward to the invisible benefits offered by his promise.
To put their conviction in contemporary terms, do you think you would believe in protons, neutrons, and electrons without scientific proof? If you were an uninformed person and the majority of people in your community didn’t believe in tiny invisible particles, would you? Would you risk being called crazy? Surely not! Yet that is exactly what this small group of believers did for the promise of heaven. They endured persecution of the worst kind to spread the message of Jesus. Their tangible suffering for the promise of Jesus is convincing proof of its real, though intangible, benefits.
When I was younger, with such proof, I found it hard to understand the disbelief of my peers. But now I see that wanting to believe something and actually believing it are two separate states, one hearing the message of Jesus and the other accepting it as true. You can’t move from the first state to the second unless there is an abstract concept put in you and accepted by you, called faith. That doesn’t happen without the intervention of God. So if you desire genuine faith, it is from Him you must ask for it. And if that is what you receive, it is His will for your life.
