Hebrews 11: On Faith and Righteousness

As people, whenever we look at the world, we are always dividing other people into different categories-- rich and poor, white and black, tall and short, educated and uneducated, cultured and uncultured, and so forth.  We are good at placing people into different groups and showing them different treatment on that basis.  However, when God looks at the world, God does not see these various divisions that we have created.  They mean nothing to God.  But, there is a division that God sees when God looks at people.  The division is not on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, level of intelligence, or anything like that.  As we see from Hebrews 11, the only difference between people is whether or not they have faith.  

For example, Noah was a man of faith.  By this I mean that Noah could see something his neighbors could not see, and Noah acted in accordance with what he saw.  When Noah stood out in front of his home and stared off into the distance, he could see dark and ominous storm clouds forming far away at the very edge of the horizon.  However, the other people in Noah's town could not see this coming storm.  When they looked at the horizon, they could only see clear blue skies as far as the eye could see.  In Noah's case, faith is the ability to see the unseen.  Or to put it differently, Noah had the ability to see what God could see.  Since he saw a storm coming, he built a boat and prepared himself and his family.  When the storm came, Noah and his family entered into the salvation of the ark.  Unfortunately, the ones who had no faith, who could not see the unseen storm coming, were washed away.  The Flood very clearly divided the people into two groups-- those who had faith and those who had no faith.  Reading through the rest of Hebrews chapter 11 reveals that faith divided other people-- Cain and Abel, Abraham and his Canaanite neighbors, Moses and Pharaoh, Rahab and the people of Jericho.  This is the only true division between people.  All other categories are superficial and meaningless.  Except, this is not exactly right.

See faith, which divides people, leads to a second division-- righteous and unrighteous.  Because the saints of Hebrews 11 had faith, they also had righteousness.  Since they could see the things God saw, they began to act the way God acts.  They could see God's perspective and God's priorities and they changed their actions to come into line with this new worldview.  This is righteousness, acting the way God acts and having the character of God.  What I am getting at is that faith and righteousness are intimately linked.  You cannot have one without the other.  Unfortunately, in the Church we've done a good job of separating the two.  We've told people that you can be a person of faith without being made righteous by the transformative power of Christ.  We've made Christian growth and maturity optional.  We've made it an appendix to faith.  This not the message of the Scriptures, though.  To be people of faith is also to allow God to change us.

So I see God drawing a line in the sand through the message of Hebrews 11.  The line is this, "Who will be changed?  Who will be made new?"  Our human nature often tends to resist change and the unfamiliar, but, if we are going to come to Christ by faith, we have to be willing to be changed.  This then is the division between all people-- those who will let God work on them and those who refuse to allow God to change who they are.  Let us be the kind of people who will submit to the transformation that comes from God.