the nation of Israel was completely faithless.
or were they?
‘They forgot his works and the wonders he had shown them.’ - Psalm 78:10-11; 17
‘For so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, . . . and they had feared other gods, and had walked in the statutes of the nations whom the LORD had cast out from before the children of Israel. II Kings 17:7-8
Hebrews 11. The ‘Hall of Faith’. The passage in which many Christians turn to often in order that they may gaze into the distant past and remark upon the magnificent faith of the Venerable Ones. As I was prompted to look upon this Scripture and ask the less obvious questions, I ran smack into a brick wall.
Why why why was the nation of Israel, the whole nation — not just a few picked-out individuals — mentioned in verse 29-30? Sure, Abraham, Moses, and Sarah [largely] had their moments of doubt in the Lord of Heaven and Earth. Yet, beside the gross treachery performed in Israel toward God, their neighbor, and even unto themselves seems microscopic. To even begin describing the destruction wreaked by their unfaithfulness should bring anyone to their knees in despair for the human race.
Mass murder of children to the gods of the air, water, and every natural phenomenon.
The complete annihilation of the sacred traditions the LORD God had richly bestowed upon His Chosen.
Complete disregard for the might of the Lord on Sinai, where Moses met and begged God to spare Israel.
Complaint after complaint after complaint.
40 years of wilderness-wandering only to have two men found faithful out of millions to enter the Promised Land.
Yet, the Hebrews writer thought it fitting that they ought to be included in this metaphorical Hall of Faith. Why, I ask again?
In order for me to have gotten my question answered, God first had to introduce me to a little Hebrew word [that wasn’t too small at all, it turns out]: emet.
Emet translates into English as ‘truthfulness’ and ‘faithfulness’. Or, if used to describe human character, ‘one who is of trustworthy character’. And when emet is used in relation to God, it means not only that He speaks truth, that He stands for truth, but that He is faithful and trustworthy. “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness — emet — and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” - Deuteronomy 32:4.
He’emin, the Hebrew word that means ‘to consider someone trustworthy’ or ‘to have faith’, directly derives from the verb form of emet. In Exodus 14:31, the Israelites considered God to be faithful and trustworthy, and so naturally, they responded in faithfulness and trust in Him. Why do I mention these Hebrew words?
The Hebrew language conveys connotation and description in one word, that the English language does in dozens of various adjectives or verbs. The poetry, the cosmology, and the metaphysical realities that formed the minds of the Hebrew natives were all born out of language. Thus, I feel it is essential that we must step back and view emet, Hebrews 11, faithfulness, trust, and what exactly it means that God is faithful, as all part of a large picture with all the smaller puzzle pieces that fit together to form a cohesive whole — or at least, as whole as we can picture it in this reality.
Contemplate the hundreds of years of slavery that the Israelite nation endured. The intense suffering and brutal destruction of the male children when Pharaoh’s fear burned within him. The whippings they felt as they toiled under the weight of heavy bricks. The loud wailing of the Hebrew mothers as their young boys were ripped from their arms. And amongst the chaos, they wept and cried aloud for God to hear them, to answer them in the midst of their hopelessness and bitterness. In the moment of the lifting of their voices to God’s ears, they showed he’emin in the emet of God — they found his character to be consistent and trustworthy.
And yet. I still searched for something else. The prophets uttered lamentation and fevered warning after fevered warning to the Israelites, begging them to return to the God of their fathers. I could not fathom why God would bestow upon them an ‘honorable mention’ so to speak, next to these other great heroes of faith.
In the turmoil of my wavelike thoughts, all became quiet. In a breadth of a second, I could see. Like the father of the demon-possessed child crying out in deepest despair, “I believe; help my unbelief!”. Like Simon Peter gazing out toward the merciless waters and away from the Point of it all, I suddenly realized my complete lack of deeper understanding because my thinking was too conformed to the silly modern notions of our time.
Hebrews 11:29 did not account for the longevity nor amount of faith that the Israelites displayed on the banks of the Red Sea, because it simply did not matter. All this time, I’d been willingly caught up, almost blinded by my own ideas of faithfulness and trust, that the moral, for lack of better word, had evaded me:
The people themselves were not the focus of Hebrews 11:29.
As God’s Chosen Nation stood gazing out upon the peaceful waters, with the roaring of chariots and horsemen behind, the words of Moses rang out: “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today…” (Ex. 14:13). They had two alternatives before them:
To he’emin in the considered and proven faithful character of God and move forward in this truth or
Shrink back from the breaking of their chains, to be driven back into bondage, intense loss, and physical pain
And in that millisecond moment, they chose the first. And that was enough. It took only a fraction of a minute for them to completely reframe their entire futures, for them to see the goodness and miraculous love of their LORD God. The length of time in their faith and the measurable amount of faith didn’t matter, in the end. Rather, the decision to either live in their faith or to live in their fear were the only two options. Nothing in the middle, no neutral territory.
The precarious and rocky future faith of the Israelites is still recounted and shown to us as a warning. And yet, it took one infinitesimal choice [that wasn’t too small at all, it turns out] to break the pattern of literal slavery they had been living in for hundreds of years.
So why does any of this matter?
If you will, let me make a personal comment: For these past two or three years of my life, I didn’t believe I could ever really live above my momentary desires, my chaotic thoughts, and the fear that drove me to hurt myself and others. I thought that the cycles of anxiety, attention-seeking, dependence on everything and everyone else, those were all going to follow me until death. That only when I reached the gates of Paradise would I at least be in the silence of Peace. Only then, would I feel the burden of years of heavy weight and toil from earthly affairs truly fall from my shoulders. A quote from The Pilgrim’s Progress comes to mind, even as I write this:
“Up this way, therefore, did burdened CHRISTIAN run; but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.
He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as CHRISTIAN came up to the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble; and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.
Then was CHRISTIAN glad and lightsome, and said, with a merry heart,
"He hath given me rest by his sorrow,
And life by his death."
Christian still had yet many sorrows before him as he journeyed toward Heaven’s door. Yet, his burden had fallen from him.
I know that I have taken some time in reaching my concluding thoughts. But I’ve chosen to take the scenic route because I believe that it is the only way for any of us to truly see.
Many disciples — most, I would boldly claim — speak as if they know freedom, as if they have it within them. The trouble is, I’m not sure they have. I know I didn’t until the last few months. Our Father in Heaven offers us the freedom from the fear, from the dreaded cycle of hurtful thought, from the person who has consumed us from the inside out, from the ties we have formed unnaturally, from the angst and the “I could never’s!” that haunt us and threaten to bury us. We are free so that we may live in freedom. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1).
Do I harshly cast aside the journey that one finds oneself on as you begin to discover life after alcoholism, pornography addiction, or constantly lying when you full well know you ought to speak the truth? No. I know the powerful hold that a ninety foot high golden Nebuchadnezzar does to the soul. Bit by bit, we have constructed our statues made of precious materials, only to realize we have built the cages we stand in. Gilded cages. That is what anything but the freedom of the Lord Jesus gives us, in the end.
I know full well the helplessness that weighs on the heart. But we cannot even walk through a door that we can’t or won’t truly acknowledge exists. There are not two options, like the Israelites had, if we cannot see that the freedom Jesus has already offered to us is available. In Exodus 14:15, the most incredible evidence for the emet of God is displayed: “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.” The future acts of God, in his eyes, weren’t future at all. They were complete, done. As finished as Christ’s act at Calvary. Therefore, the freedom we can walk in, God confirms is our’s. The keys to the self-constructed golden bars are in our hands. What shall we do with them?
To [finally] conclude this: I have two last comments to make, two ‘takeaways’ as the pastors say —
First, am I one of the people God would look upon and call emet? Not only faithful to him, but can others he’emin in me? Can the image-bearers around me rely on my consistency of character, my reliability?
And secondly, in Exodus 14:14, Moses says to the people, “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” What does this mean? Faith requires stillness. Sometimes, in order to move forward, we must stand still. In the silence, in the stillness, in surrender and in faith, perhaps we can find the freedom that was waiting for us, all along.
“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…” - Exodus 34:6