Tim Baldon - October 18, 2026
/Family Bible Hour featuring Tim Baldon. A teaching from Hebrews 11:1–7 on faith as confidence in God’s faithfulness, from the examples of Abel, Enoch and Noah, and from the warnings of Hebrews 6 and 10 on the evidence of faith in a believer’s past.
Transcript
Good morning again. As mentioned, we'll be in the book of Hebrews, and we will be looking at Hebrews chapter 11. Last time we were in Hebrews, we did kind of a big picture overview of the chapter. Today, we're going to start looking in a little bit closer.
So, we'll start in verse 1. By the way, if you're using a device or something and you want to know what version I'm in, I'm using the New King James version, although verses that I have memorized sometimes come out of my mouth in King James because that's the only version I've ever been memorizing since I was a little kid in the King James, and I can't switch over. So sometimes I may not be reading exactly what you're reading if you're looking at the New King James. Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
That's not technically a definition of faith, but it is a description of what faith does in us, what it provides for us. Now, the world has some definitions of faith. There was a cynical editor named H. L.
Mencken, who is quoted as having defined faith as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. And Mark Twain said in two of his novels, faith is believing what you know ain't so. Each of those definitions involves something about belief or believing. And in that much, they're accurate.
Faith is believing. However, biblical faith is accurately, more accurately, confidence in God, confidence in God's Word, confidence in God's promises. Certainly, that involves believing, but it's specifically a belief in God's dependability or God's faithfulness. It's easy to have faith in somebody that you know will be faithful.
You can trust someone who is trustworthy. You can depend on somebody who is dependable. In 11.1, when it says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, it means that we can have confidence in the things that He has promised, and the things that He has promised will be delivered. Likewise, when it says that faith is the evidence of things not seen, it means that even though we cannot yet see with our eyes the things that He has told us, we can be confident that they are real and that they are true, because He does not and cannot lie.
Verse 2. By it, that's by faith, by faith the elders obtained a good testimony. That testimony is a testimony by God. Basically, it's their report card.
They got a good report card. They got an A-plus on their report card when God declared them righteous. When it talks about the elders there, it's not talking about the elders of a church or just the old people, but it's talking about what he said in chapter 1, verse 1. God, who at various times and in different ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.
The fathers, the men of old in the Old Testament, God gave them a good report. He declared them approved. If you think about it, we all have faith. And we all live our lives based on the faith that we have.
The question is whether whatever or whoever we have faith in is trustworthy. By show of hands, how many of you believe that you were born? Okay. I'm glad to hear that.
Now, that's born as opposed to just hatching or maybe just appearing suddenly out of nowhere. Do you actually remember that event? Anybody? No.
So, truth be told, you're believing what somebody else told you. Your parents or your siblings or somebody who was in a position to know. And you believe them? Okay, it's all right.
I think it's fair that all of us believe that you were born at some point. I'm told that I was, and I believe that. Now, by show of hands, how many of you were there watching when the universe began? You see, everybody raised their hand last time, and nobody wants to raise their hand this time.
But, how many of you think that there were any scientists there when the universe began? None? All right. So, we're all in agreement that the universe exists.
What we disagree on, perhaps, is how and when it came into existence. What if we had a reliable witness to those events about how and when it happened? Verse 3, by faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. So, there is only one witness to what happened.
And that is the one who brought it into existence. He spoke it into existence. God said, let there be light, and there was light. Some people are not willing to accept the witness as a reliable witness.
Some are, some aren't. Now, many people are willing, rather, to accept the speculations and guesses of people who admittedly were not there. They didn't see it, and they can't really give testimony. They can just look back and say, well, we think it happened this way.
And their explanation for why it must have happened this way is because they ruled out the one possibility that there was a God who started it. Either way, it's a matter of faith. Do you choose to believe by faith that all of the complexities in the universe just happened by coincidence, random coincidences that happened over billions and billions and billions of years? Even one cell in your body has so much complexity in it that in a lot of cases, if one thing was not there, the cell would not work.
You take one little thing out of there, the cell would not work properly. So all of the complexities have to work together for it to work at all. It can't evolve from where it is if it can't survive to evolve. Or do you choose to believe that it was all designed by someone with greater intelligence and greater abilities than we have?
Again, what you choose to believe, that's where you put your faith, what you choose to believe will affect how you live your life. If God created the worlds, as He says that He did, then as Creator, He has the right to determine how His creatures should live for their own well-being. However, God has, in His infinite wisdom, given His creatures the ability to choose for themselves. He does not force us to do what He knows is best for us.
He gives us the choice. We can ignore Him. We can even actively, intentionally defy Him. But it will be to our own detriment.
Verse 4 By faith, Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts, and through it, he being dead, still speaks. Let's look back to Genesis chapter 4. Let's see if I can get there. It's all right, I have it in my notes.
Now Adam knew his wife Eve. This is verses 1 through 8. Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, I have acquired a man from the Lord. Now that shows a little bit of faith on her part.
God had told her that her seed, from her seed, there would come someone who would destroy the serpent. Then she bore again, this time his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in the process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord.
It's interesting that he was the first of the two to bring the offering. Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And the Lord respected Abel and his offering, but he did not respect Cain and his offering. And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.
So the Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door, and its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.
Now Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. We don't have a lot of detail given to us in the account of Genesis of what exactly Abel and Cain knew about God. We have no record in the Old Testament anywhere that Eve or Adam ever made an offering to the Lord or that they passed on any instructions to their sons about doing that, how to do it, when to do it, where to do it. We get no instruction on that, no details.
It seems possible and pretty likely that they must have gotten something from their parents to know to do this. We have to be careful how dogmatic we get with things like that. Many have suggested that the difference between the two offerings, why God accepted Abel's offering and not Cain's, was because Abel's offering was a blood sacrifice and Cain's was a bloodless sacrifice. That may be, that may not, I don't know, and God doesn't tell us.
From what I could find, looked at the Hebrew word for the sacrifice there, and said that usually the word that's used there refers to a bloodless, voluntary, not obligatory offering, but it can at times be used of a meat offering. If you look at the Greek in Hebrews chapter 11, the Greek word for Abel's sacrifice would typically include fire, but it does not necessarily involve blood. Now, certainly in Abel's case, it did involve blood because he brought of the fat of his flock. Now, what is certain from this is that Abel's offering was made in faith.
I don't know what that means about Cain's. I mean, obviously, his was not offered in faith. I don't know if he was not really believing that there was a God, and he was just bringing it just in case, or what was happening there. But God actually spoke to, we don't have any record of God talking to Abel, but we have a record of God speaking to Cain when he said, Why are you upset?
If you do what is right, if you do what is acceptable, will you not be accepted? God told him. But instead of doing what God told him, he opted to kill his brother. Think about it.
Abel was born in chapter 4, verse 2. And by chapter 4, verse 8, he had been murdered. Question. This says, in verse 4 of chapter 11 of Hebrews, he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts, and through it he being dead yet speaketh.
Where do we find, I didn't see it in Genesis. Where do we find God testifying of Abel's gifts that he was righteous? It's not going to be in Genesis chapter 4. Actually, where we get that is from Matthew chapter 23, verse 35, takes place between the triumphal entry and the crucifixion.
And Jesus said it. He's speaking of Jerusalem. And he says that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Jesus Christ, as God, gave testimony that Abel was righteous.
And he was righteous by his faith, according to this. Next question. In what way is Abel still speaking? It says he yet speaketh, or still speaks, in the New King James.
It seems we don't have any record of any word that Abel ever spoke, unless you count that God said that Abel's blood called out from the ground. It seems more likely that the verse is talking about Abel's example of faith still speaks to us. We can look at Abel and say there was a man who had faith, and there was a man who was approved of God. He was the first person in the Bible to die physically, and he died for his faith.
The next person introduced in the chapter here, verse 5, is a man who never died, the first of two men in the Bible who never died. By faith Enoch was translated so that he did not see death and was not found because God had translated him. For before his translation, he had this testimony that he pleased God. If you looked at Genesis chapter 5, verses 21 to 24, Enoch lived 65 years and begat Methuselah.
And after he begat Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were 365 years and Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him. We're not given details of how exactly Methuselah walked with God, but it's clear that he spent time with God. He spent time fellowshipping with the Lord and he stayed in a good relationship to God.
That doesn't mean that he never sinned. He never did anything that he shouldn't have done, but it's clear that he didn't leave his own sins undealt with. That would have come between him and God. He did whatever was prescribed at the time that dealt with sin, and he walked with God.
We're told in the New Testament that he was a prophet proclaiming judgment. Jude 1, 14 and 15, says, Now Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men also, saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. Whatever sins Enoch had, like I said, he dealt with. He had fellowship with God, and he kept that fellowship in good order.
So God took him out of the world without him dying to get out. There are people who believe that Enoch will return as one of the two witnesses that are mentioned in Revelation 11, who will prophesy during the end times, and we will have to wait to find out if that speculation is correct. We do not know for certain. It is clear that he had a good testimony on earth while he was alive.
People knew that he pleased God. The author of Hebrews tells us that Enoch pleased God. May we all have that aspiration that we would please God. If we have that goal, then we need to pay very, very close attention to the next verse.
It is impossible, without faith, it is impossible to please Him, that is God. For he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. How could we please Him if we didn't even believe that He existed? If we doubt that His promises are genuine, then why would we bother to believe?
God keeps His word. Interestingly, God keeps His word not only to people who believe, but God keeps His word even to unbelievers. What He says, He does. He makes promises of good things to those who believe, and He makes promises of judgment to those who do not.
And both promises will be fulfilled. The ones He is pleased with are the ones who trust Him and act on what He revealed to them. Take Noah, for instance. By faith, Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.
That single verse covers four chapters' worth of Genesis. The author of Hebrews is intent on showing us that faith is made visible by action, the actions of those who have faith. Noah had not seen a worldwide flood before. Neither had anybody else.
The only thing he had to go on was when God told him that there was going to be a flood. It was going to wipe out everything on earth. And Noah responded with godly fear. Fear of the Lord.
And he knew he needed to take action. And God gave him instructions exactly what kind of action he needed to take if he wanted to escape this flood. God gave him everything he needed to know. He needed to build a big boat.
Get into it. Noah didn't turn away because of the size of the task. He spent a hundred years building that boat and took the action that God recommended. And it does make it, it does appear that he made an effort to convince others.
If you look at 2 Peter 2, verses 4 and 5, it tells us, if God did not spare the ancient world, but save Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing the flood on the world of the ungodly. He was a preacher of righteousness. He told others. The only people who listened to him were his own family.
When it says that Noah condemned the world, I don't think that means that he spent his time going around telling people, you're going to hell. You're going to hell. You're going to hell. You're going to hell.
All you people are going to hell. God is going to destroy all of you people. I don't think that was his approach. And he certainly was not the one who brought the judgment on the other people.
When it says he condemned the world, it's not that he was the judge and he said, okay, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, all of you, you're out. God is the one who pronounced the sentence of judgment. Noah simply agreed with God's assessment, and he agreed with God's plan to escape the judgment. He recognized God's ownership of the world and God's right to judge it.
And the fact that he acknowledged those things was enough for God to declare him righteous. Any other people who might have agreed with Noah would have received the same mercy. But they didn't. God's testimony of Noah is that Noah became the heir of the righteousness which comes by faith.
So he inherited the same righteousness that Abel had. The same righteousness that Enoch had. Each of those men trusted that God is gracious. And he applied the righteousness of Christ to their accounts proactively, beforehand, before Christ walked the earth.
His righteousness was already being put on their account. And he forgave, God forgave, all of their own unrighteousness. Now, as we've seen in the past few chapters, God promised not only to forgive sin, but also to forget it. I've got a question for you.
What will God not forget? Then turn back to chapter 6. The scary part in verses 4 through 8. Well, that's the portion of chapter 6 that many people think the author is warning his readers that they're in danger of losing their salvation.
Now, God, well, the author of Hebrews here, assures them that he has confidence that they are believers, that they were believers, because there was evidence that they were saved. Listen to this. Verse 9. But, beloved, we are confident of better things concerning you.
Yes, things that accompany salvation, though we speak in this manner. For God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love, which you have showed toward his name, in that you have ministered to the saints and do minister. God tells us in chapter 8 of Hebrews, in Jeremiah 31, that God forgets sin. But he says here, God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which you have showed toward his name.
He is not in any way suggesting that their works saved them. But he states clearly that the works accompany salvation. They were saved, so they did work. Just like in Ephesians 2, by grace you were saved.
Through faith, and that not of yourselves, it's a gift of God. The salvation is by gift. Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.
Good works won't save you, but if you're saved, you're created unto good works. In other words, we see like we did a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago with the rat trap faith tester, that faith itself cannot be seen, but there is evidence of faith that can be seen by works. They provide the evidence of a saving faith. Now, in chapter 10, the other scary passage, the other really scary passage, 26 to 31, a lot of people get the impression there as well that God is, or that the author of Hebrews is telling them, folks, you're in danger.
You are in danger of losing your salvation. But he never actually says, you are in danger of losing your salvation. In fact, in verse 32, he goes back to what he did in chapter 6, right after the scary part. Fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
And he says, but recall the former days in which after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings, partly while you were made a spectacle, both by reproaches and tribulations, and partly while you became companions of those who were so treated. For you had compassion on me in my chains, and joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods, knowing that you have a better and an enduring possession for yourselves in heaven. He takes them to the same thing, and he says, folks, there is evidence. I have personally seen the evidence that you have faith in God, that you are believers, you are saved.
I know it because you treated me. When you first got saved, and I went to jail, you guys aided me, and you were joyful in it. In spite of your suffering, in spite of the ridicule that other people heaped on you, in spite of the fact that you lost property over it, there was evidence of your faith. I find it interesting that the Holy Spirit used the same sort of illustration both times when he was talking about when their faith was faltering perhaps and they're thinking, man, I don't know.
He takes them back and says, look back. Look back. I see evidence of your faith. I see evidence of salvation in your lives.
From the past. And then here in chapter 10, he tells them, you recall the past. Recall where you were then. There is evidence of your salvation.
They might have been concerned that they had lost their salvation, or that they were about to lose their salvation, or that they might lose their salvation. And he says, no. There's evidence. So there was evidence in their past that they were believers, they had faith, and they had proven it by their actions.
And the Holy Spirit had the author remind them of that evidence, and then to tell them in chapter 10, verse 39, but we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul. I know that sometimes the we, in some of these verses, like verse 26, it says, if we sin willfully, and people say, well, the author was not actually including himself, because he was definitely saved, and he wasn't going to lose his salvation, but they might, and he was warning them, and he was using a we, like the nurse says, we're going to have a bath now, and you know good and well that she's not going to have a bath, you're going to have a bath, so. But then the same people, that we, they take it and they say, you. He's really saying you, not we.
He's not including himself. But then when you get to verse 39, they want to take that we and say he's using the royal we, you know, we are speaking from the pulpit this morning, which we are not, I am. But they take that and they say, we are not of those who draw back, that he is saying, you guys are in danger, but let me tell you, I am not one of the ones who is going, if it's we here, it's we here. And when he said, let us, let us, let us, earlier in chapter 10, he's talking about us, all of us, not just them.
He's not pointing at them. I don't believe. I don't think he is writing to unbelievers or to almost believers or whatever. He is writing to people who are saved.
They may be doubting. They may be scared of one thing or another. But he knew from the evidence that they had faith. And he was told by the Holy Spirit to remind them of those things.
It makes me think that perhaps when someone among us is discouraged, disgruntled, whatever, tempted to withdraw from assembling of ourselves together, like it talks about in 10, 10, 24, and 25. Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another and so much the more as you see the day approaching. When we see somebody who is discouraged, when we see somebody who is drifting away from the faith, we should do the same thing. Remind them of where they were in the past.
If we have seen evidence of salvation in their lives in the past, we need to remind them of the evidence that we have seen. We need to remind them to look back and see where they were then. And if we are discouraged, you or I are discouraged, then we should take that advice. Recall the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings, etc.
Look back at the past, at the evidence that was there before. Let that build up, let that strengthen your faith, and continue to do what you ought that provides evidence. In either case, if we look at someone else who is discouraged and thinking about giving up, going back to the old ways, and we don't see any evidence in the past of any actual faith, then we need to be trying to get the person saved. You know, okay, there's a reason why you're feeling like leaving, why you're feeling like, you know, it's not worth it.
Are you really a believer? If we look at our own lives and we say, hey, there is no evidence, really, of faith in my life at any point, we need to be asking, why not? I hope that each one here can look back in their lives and say, yes, there is evidence back there of salvation. And I will continue to walk with the Lord.
He has been faithful to me in the past. He has always come through for me in the past. I can tell you that God has brought me through a lot of things in my life, and I am grateful for every one of them. And I lean on them when things get tough.
I look back and I say, God has always been faithful. He will be faithful in this. What I am facing now, he will be faithful. Father, we come to you and we give you thanks for your word.
Thank you that it is trustworthy, that you are always faithful. We ask that you would help us to continue to believe and to continue to live in such a way that others can see that we believe. We ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.
