Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Trinity Sermons.
This week we are wrapping up our sermon series on the heroes of faith with a conversation
about super sight.
Faith is all about our vision, not being able to see God's answers to our prayers, not
being able to see beyond our immediate struggles, especially when things don't go as planned.
And so join us as we look at those final heroes of faith and what they have to teach us about
seeing through the eyes of faith.
Our reading today is from Hebrews chapter 11 verses 32 to 40.
And what more shall I say?
I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, and Jephthah, about David and Samuel
and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained
what was promised.
Who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of
the sword, whose weakness was turned to strength, and who became powerful in battle and routed
foreign armies.
Some received back their dead, raised to life again.
There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an
even better resurrection.
Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment.
They were put to death by stoning.
They were sawed in two.
They were killed by the sword.
They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated.
The world was not worthy of them.
They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised,
since God had planned something better for us, so that only together with us would they
be made perfect.
The word of the Lord.
When you think of a Superman, you probably think of his super strength, his super speed.
Maybe you think of his super good looks.
But don't forget that Superman also has superpowers of sight.
That is right.
There are, I think, at least three different superpowers related to vision that Superman
has.
On the one hand, he has x-ray vision.
He can see through things.
On the other hand, he's got heat vision, where he can shoot these laser beams out of his
eyes.
And the third thing is he has telescopic vision, which you can see great distances.
And I just wondered, I just curious, if you could have one of these three types of vision,
whether it was x-ray vision, heat vision, or telescopic vision, which would you choose?
I'll give you 30 seconds to tell the person sitting beside you which of these you would
choose.
Okay, I think my favorite would probably be telescopic vision.
That would enable me to look into the audience on a Sunday morning and see who is sleeping
through my sermons.
I think that would be pretty good.
But no, actually, if you read the comic books and in the movies, the telescopic vision of
Superman is something pretty incredible.
He can scan the whole city just all at once and see any trouble that needs solving.
It even says in the comic that he can monitor distant planets with his vision.
He can see that far away.
So all of us can see what's right in front of us.
We can all see what's right in front of us.
But it takes a special power to see beyond, to see beyond.
Well, here we are.
It's been nine weeks and we're now wrapping up our teaching series, which we've been calling
Heroes of Faith, which we've been looking at one chapter in the Bible, that is the book
of Hebrews chapter 11, at these great heroes of faith and who got to see right in front
of them some pretty amazing things.
We've looked at heroes like Enoch and Noah, and we've looked at heroes like Moses and
Abraham and Sarah and Rahab.
They didn't need telescopic vision, right, to see right in front of them.
They got to see rainbows come out after the floods.
They got to see promised children held in their hands.
They got to walk in the promised land, just as God had told them they would.
They got to see the waters of the Red Sea parted right in front of them.
They saw their rescue.
They saw their miracle.
They saw their salvation with their own two ordinary eyes.
And Hebrews 11 is filled with all sorts of stories of people who saw, right?
And now, as we near the end of the chapter, it's like the author has realized, oh shoot,
I didn't ration my time very well.
I'm running out of time.
There's so many more people I want to tell you about.
I'm going to squeeze them all in.
And so he starts mentioning a whole bunch of people as he moves to the end of the chapter.
So for example, he says, I don't even have time to tell you about Gideon and Barak and
Samson and Jephthah.
Let's play a little game here.
And actually, I've given you some sermon notes this morning.
A little game here.
Let's play Guess the Hero.
Where would we find the stories of these heroes?
Does anyone know?
That's right.
The Book of Judges.
There was a period of time when Israel was ruled by judges.
And if you want to find their stories, you turn to the Book of Judges.
These guys saw with their own eyes, God accomplished amazing victories and triumphs for them.
So let's keep going.
All right.
Those are the judges.
Now, what about these?
He goes on to say, I don't have time to tell you about David.
Now, of course, we all know who David was.
Who is David?
He was a king, right?
And so in some ways, maybe David represents all the kings that he doesn't have time to
talk about.
David, you know, had a hard life for sure.
He had some difficulties, but also got to see God work miracles in his own life.
And he ascended to the throne, right?
I don't have time to tell about David.
He also says, I don't even have time to tell you about Samuel and the prophets.
Samuel is a figure.
We're like, oh, who is Samuel?
Who is Samuel?
Samuel is interesting.
He was, some say, the first of the prophets, but also the last of those judges that ruled
Israel.
And Samuel, so he got to see a lot of stuff go down in Israel.
And on top of that, he was the one who got to anoint Israel's first king, Saul, and the
great King David as well.
Man, he saw so much right in front of his eyes.
Now it gets, he keeps on going and he starts to kind of get a play a little bit of a game
with this is, I don't even have time to tell you about those who shot the mouths of lions.
Who's he talking about here?
That's right.
Daniel, right?
Of course, Daniel was as good as dead.
He was thrown into a den full of lions and he somehow lived.
He got to see the next day.
He got to see God deliver him from those trials or he goes on.
He says, I don't have time to tell you about those who quenched the fury of the flames.
Now who's he talking about here?
Murmurs, but I think what you're saying is he's talking about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
These three fellows who were thrown into a fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar and he
jacked up the heat on that furnace.
He wanted to see them burn to death, but they survived.
They lived to see another day.
That must have been something to see.
Now he goes on to say this.
I don't have time to tell you about women who received back their dead, raised to life
again.
Who is he talking about here?
This one's a little trickier.
Who's he?
Remember this is Old Testament.
This is Old Testament.
The Shulamite woman, yes.
And there was another example, the widow of Zarephath, right?
Both under Elijah's ministry, their dead sons came back to life.
You can read those stories in First Kings and in Second Kings if you get out your Bibles
this afternoon and take a look.
What a sight to behold, to see your dead children come back to life.
Now I want to say many people think that this is what faith is.
If you have faith, these are the things you get to see, right?
You get to see victories and triumphs and deliverance and rescue and you get to see
flames quenched and lion's mouths shut.
You get to see people healed.
You even get to see dead people come back to life and we love stories like that.
We love the stories where the doctor says you've only got a month to live and then people
pray and pray and then a year later he's looking at the charts and he's shaking his head in
disbelief and he says it's a miracle.
We love those stories.
We love the stories where someone's business is going under and on the verge of bankruptcy
and then they pray and their friends pray and suddenly everything turns around and they
get to see a victory.
But here is the thing.
We think this is what faith is.
Faith is when you get to see the victory, see things turn around.
But if that's all that we think faith is, we are missing something important.
And what we're missing really is the second half of the reading that Liz read for us this
morning.
See, from Hebrews 11, one to Hebrews 11, 35, actually the first half of Hebrews 11, 35,
it kind of feels like this.
If you've got faith, if you've even got a little bit of faith, if you trust enough,
if you believe enough, you can overcome anything, right?
But the reality is not everybody gets to see the miracle.
Not everybody gets to see the sickness get healed, to see the financial crisis end.
They don't get to see the victory, not everyone.
And if we think that faith means that everything is going to work out the way we want and we're
setting ourselves up for major disappointment.
You know, Joni Erickson, when she was 18 years old, she went for a swim and she dove into
the water and she dove right into some rocks and immediately her life was changed.
She was paralyzed from the neck down.
She became a quadriplegic for life in a wheelchair.
Just 18 years old, right?
Her whole life ahead of her.
What a tragedy.
Now, she had some very well-meaning friends and those well-meaning friends said, Joni,
if you have enough faith that God will heal you and if God doesn't heal you, then it must
mean that you did not have enough faith.
Now why did they say this?
I don't know.
I mean, maybe they only read Hebrews 11 up to verse 35, right?
If to them faith meant you escape the suffering, you overcome the hardship, you, you all
always get the answer to the prayer, you always get the miracle.
Now thankfully Joni, Joni didn't buy into that thinking.
Instead, what she discovered was a deeper kind of faith, a faith with telescopic vision
that could see beyond her current circumstances.
This is the kind of faith that Hebrews 11 is actually calling you and me to.
It's a faith that doesn't end in verse 35, but actually the very next word, the very
next word we're going to look at is a turning point in really the whole chapter of Hebrews
chapter 11.
And that very next word is this word, others.
Yeah, yeah, for some people faith means seeing victory, it means seeing your prayers answer,
but there are others.
There are others who never get to see that.
Let me just give you an example most of us probably would know about, but you know, you
remember Peter?
Remember how Peter got sent to prison and so all of his friends prayed for him that
he would be miraculously released and Peter was miraculously released to prison.
He went back home to his friends, it was amazing.
And then you got the story of John the Baptist and John the Baptist also got, he got sent
to prison and his disciples and his friends prayed that he might be released, but John
the Baptist got his head cut off.
There are others, right?
There are others who did not get to see a victory, who did not see their prayers answered.
There are others who did not get to see the miracle.
There are others, they believed, oh, they believed, yeah, and they had faith and they
trusted God, but man, their lives went in a completely different direction.
Everything went wrong and they did not live to see things work out.
It says in Hebrews 11 that there were others who faced jeers and flogging while still others
were chained and put in prison.
They were stoned.
They were sawed into, they were put to death by the sword.
They were, they went about destitute and persecuted and mistreated.
There are others, but perhaps the most interesting of the others is actually mentioned in verse
35 itself, halfway through the verse, things kind of change.
It says women received back their dead, raised to life again.
We already looked at that.
We know who that was, right?
That was the Shulamite woman and the widow of Zarephath.
Others were tortured and refused to be released.
Now, who are those?
Who are those others who were tortured and refused to be released?
What's the author talking about there?
A lot of commentators say just because of the way the sentence works, it must be women,
must be women, right?
Some women received their dead back.
Others were tortured.
Any thoughts on, if you look back in your Bible, who are the, who are those other women
who were tortured, refused to be released?
The reason, the reason why you might not be able to kind of place those women is because
actually the writer of Hebrews knew more about the history of Israel than we do.
Especially, he would have known really well the time that occurred between the Old Testament
and the New Testament.
You see, there was 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and that
stuff is not recorded in our Bibles, what happened in that time.
But actually, lots was written during that time.
And it's called, some Bibles actually take all those writings that happened in those
400 years, which they call the Deuterocanonical writings in this intertestamental period,
and they actually do put them in your Bibles.
If you're a Roman Catholic, you might have that part in your Bible right in the middle.
Or if you're an Orthodox background, you might have that part right in the middle of your
Bible.
And there's a bunch of books there that tell the story of what happened in between the
first and second testaments.
And two of those books are called First and Second Maccabees, right?
And they tell the story of something that happened about 150 years before Jesus.
That's not in your Bible.
It's not in your Bible.
See, during this time, there was a horrible, horrible Syrian king by the name of Antiochus
Epiphanes.
And he conquered Israel, he desecrated the temple, and he outlawed Jewish practice.
He was a brutal, brutal king.
What he used to do is he would take people publicly, often very prominent families, he
would take them into the public square, and he would demand that they bow the knee to
him.
They would demand that they renounce their faith.
They would demand that they do something else, like eat pork or something like that, to prove
that they had renounced their faith in the God of Israel.
And if they would not do it, he would torture them, and he would kill them, and he would
do it right there in front of everybody that was watching just to make a lesson of them.
In 2 Maccabees, chapter 7, we read the story of probably the most famous of all these martyrs.
And it was a mother who had seven sons, and they were brought out and they were set in
front of this horrible king, and they were told to bow the knee, and they would not do
it.
And horrible, horrible things happened.
You can go home and read 2 Maccabees 7.
Horrible things are described there.
Tongues cut out.
Limbs lopped off.
Right?
They were scalped.
Roasted alive.
And to make it worse, it all happened in front of the other brothers that were watching.
One by one, one by one, these sons were brought forward, tortured in front of their family,
and then when they were finally dead, then it was the next one, and then it was the next
one, and the next one.
I took out some of the gory bits here, but the king gave orders that pans and cauldrons
were to be heated.
I took out the part about the scalping and the tongues and the limbs, but then when one
of the sons was utterly helpless, the king ordered them to take him to the fire and still
breathing to fry him in the pan, and we read that the smoke from the pan spread widely,
but the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly, saying, the Lord
God is watching over us, and in truth has compassion on us.
Now notice what they did not say.
They did not say, just have more faith, and God will rescue you.
They didn't see the answer to their prayers.
They didn't see a miracle emerge right in front of them.
Instead, they had to have a different kind of faith, a telescopic faith that was able
to see beyond, that was able to look past what they were experiencing.
In fact, look at what the third son said.
The third son courageously, he stretched forth his hands and said, go ahead, take them.
Right?
And he said, I got these from heaven and get this, and from God, I hope to get them back
again.
Wow.
He is seeing all the way to a future, to a day, when he gets his hands back.
And then the mom in all of this says, my child, look, look, where are you looking?
What do you see?
Look to the heavens.
Look at the heavens and the earth and see everything that is in them.
Do not fear this butcher, accept death so that in God's mercy, I may get you back again,
you and your brothers.
She just saw all of her children tortured and murdered in front of her.
No miracle, no intervention, no escape.
But man, her faith is so strong.
It's because she had the power to see beyond.
She had the ability to telescopically see past what was happening.
She even told her son, don't look, no, don't look at this butcher.
Don't look at this monster.
Look to the heavens, set your eyes on God.
This is the story that the author of Hebrews in verse 11, chapter 1135 is talking about.
Now, obviously nothing like this is ever going to happen to you or to me.
I mean, there are times in history, parts of the world where this was a very real possibility
for people.
And the question is, how do you have faith when this is what you see in front of you?
The author of Hebrews tells us, he says, what you got to do is you got to focus on a better
resurrection.
These people were able to endure because their eyes were set on a, what does this mean?
A better resurrection.
They were able to focus and telescope past the suffering to a day when they would get
it all back again.
Here's the actual scripture.
It says, others were tortured and refused to be released.
Why?
So that they might gain a better resurrection.
That is super sight.
That is telescopic vision.
You see past the suffering to a better resurrection.
Now, what do they mean when they say a better resurrection?
Right?
Here's what they mean.
As good as it is for the widow of Zarephath and for the Shunammite woman to get their
boy back, as good as it was for even the New Testament Lazarus to rise from the dead or
for Jairus, the daughter of Jairus to rise from the dead or come back to life.
These were not real resurrections.
They were just resuscitations.
Even though these people came back to life, they were still going to suffer again.
They could still get sick again.
They could still get a disease again.
They were going to die again.
All that would really happen is you'd kicked the ball down the road a little bit.
But this mother, she set her sights on something better, on the possibility, not of resuscitation,
but on the possibility of not of a miraculous escape, but of a great future resurrection.
That one day death was going to be defeated and reversed.
And she knew that one day there would be a new heaven and there would be a new earth.
And one day she was going to get everything back, every hand back, every tongue back,
every son back, every family back.
She would get the love back.
She would get the whole world back and not temporarily for good.
And because she telescoped her eyes on that day and because her boys did too, they didn't
flinch in the face of suffering.
The late Tim Keller, he says it this way, they focused their eyes on God, not on their
agenda for God.
I mean, you've probably heard people say things like this, I trusted God so much.
I prayed so much.
I really, really, really believed and God didn't come through.
Hebrews 11 might say, well, did you really put your trust in God?
Or was your trust in your agenda for God?
The plan that you wanted God to enact right in front of you.
If that's what you were focused on, if you were focused on God doing this one thing for
you in this one moment, then actually you misplaced your faith.
The faith we need is not focused on getting what you want.
It telescopes past that and focuses just on God.
In other words, the faith where we telescopically focus our eyes, not on the problem that we're
facing, but on the promise, on God's great promise, the resurrection, the new creation
promise that is down the road.
And when we see that promise in our eyes, man, we draw strength from it.
We draw courage from it, hope from that.
Because in the end, what we come to realize is the greatest thing that God can give us
is God himself.
John Piper writes this, it's a good quote.
The greatest challenge of the book of Hebrews is to cultivate such a deep and satisfying
relationship with God that we rest in him, whether living or dying, whether comfortable
or miserable, to cultivate this unshakable confidence that God himself is better than
anything life can give us or the death can take away from us.
Do you remember how Hebrews chapter 11 started?
It started with this verse.
Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
It's all about seeing.
And then of course, right at the end of Hebrews, we come to this, that these were all commended
for the faith, yet none of them saw it.
None of them got to actually receive it, what had been promised.
All the people in this book, you know what makes them great?
It was their superpower of sight.
That's what enabled them to hold onto their faith.
Whether there was a miracle or not, whether it was an intervention or not, whether there
was an escape or not, whether the relationship worked out or not, whether the job worked
out or not, whatever, whether the doctor called and said good news or not, right?
They had this promise.
They had this promise they kept their eyes focused on.
But here, let's end with this.
Let's end the whole nine weeks with this.
We are told somehow that we have it better than any of them did.
Why would the authors say that it's better for us?
It's better for us.
And here's why.
Because we have already gotten a really good look of what they, all those people, all those
heroes never got to see.
You see, they had to look and hope at something in the future.
But Jesus has actually given us a clear picture of what the future looks like.
We actually can have faith in a better resurrection because we have already seen the death and
resurrection of Jesus.
That is something that they did not see.
And that is why we should never say to ourselves, oh, I could never be brave like these people
were brave.
Oh, I could never have faith.
Sawed in two, destitute and mistreated.
I could never have faith like that.
I'm too much of a wimp, we say.
Don't you dare say that.
Because our super sight, our super telescopic vision is actually better than theirs.
We can see better than they can, which means technically we should be able to live lives
of faith better than they did.
Because 2000 years ago, Jesus Christ was put to death.
And a few days later, people started seeing him again.
And then within 40 days, thousands of Jews and Greeks had had an encounter with the risen
Jesus Christ.
It wasn't a mass hallucination, right?
They saw him.
And now they weren't afraid of death anymore.
Moses never saw this.
Rahab never saw this.
Abraham, Enoch, right?
They never got to see this.
The seven sons who were tortured in front of their mother that day never got to see
that.
But we have seen that.
We have the superpower of faith to see what God has done.
That gives us even clearer vision of what God will do.
So that's how Hebrews 11 ends.
And it's no surprise that in chapter 12, which we're not going to get into, it starts with
this.
So let us run with perseverance, the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus.
Keep your eyes on Jesus.
Develop telescopic vision.
Because through the resurrection of Jesus, every one of your sorrows will fade into the
background and you will see the glory and you will see the joy that awaits you.
That superpower of sight that made these people all great heroes of faith can actually also
make us into heroes of faith as well.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Thank you for listening to Trinity Sermons.
This sermon was recorded at Trinity Church, Streetsville on March 2nd, 2025.