I Like Stories

I like stories, and I really like success stories. In the Bible, the whole 11th chapter of Hebrews is chocked full of success stories, but these aren’t dollar and cents success stories, they are much more important, they are stories about how people bet their lives on what they believed. These are gut-level, heart-pounding stories and the first verse of the chapter sets the tone:

Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds; it is betting your life on the unseen realities. (Heb 11:1 CPV-NT)

Did you get that — faith is betting our life on unseen realities? Unseen and real, can these two attention-grabbing concepts exist together? Well, yes, they can, and they do, and we use them every day, in fact, we do it so much it’s become commonplace. We think nothing of it. Here’s how.

Those in the know have identified an electromagnetic spectrum in our world. The spectrum is a stream of mass-less particles (photons) that travel in a wave-like pattern at the speed of light (even through objects, across a vacuum, and into outer space). That sounds like science fiction — “mass-less particles”, “flying through a vacuum at the speed of light”. Wow!

It gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view. This spectrum has been divided into seven divisions: radio waves, microwaves, terahertz, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. They all travel in wave patterns and the high points (top to top) of these waves vary from thousands of miles (in the low radio wavelengths) down to a fraction of an atom (in the gamma rays). These waves are real but unseen, and we use them for TV, radio, x-rays, microwaves, infrared cameras, GPS tracking, WIFI connections, and on and on. Soon, through new technologies, electricity will travel around the world without wires on one of these waves.

We use this electromagnetic spectrum and the waves pass through and around us, yet we can only ‘see’ about .0035% of the spectrum. That’s what they tell us! The light we see, that light that makes things visible and so beautiful, it’s only .0035% of what is really there. They tell us that if we could see the whole spectrum, the difference between night and day would be about .0035%.

Maybe the Hebrews 11 characters are not so unique after all. We all bet our lives on the unseen realities in our world. For example, we can’t see the heat that comes from the sun, but we feel it. We can’t see the love between a man and a woman, but it’s there, it’s real, and we feel it.

Now back to Hebrews and my success stories. The characters in Hebrews 11 figured out that anyone who is serious about a God-life must bet their life on the fact that God is real, and that he responds to people that seek him.

Sixteen people are named in the chapter and they all bet their lives on unseen realities. These are great success stories! To fill in the details for all of these people plus all the prophets would fill a big book (the Bible maybe). These folks were aware that history is God’s design, and what they saw was only projections of a much larger reality, real but unseen.

Without going into the story of each person, here’s a list of some of their accomplishments:

• · Some went to war against kingdoms,
• · Some carried the banner of civilization,
• · Some obtained treaties,
• · Some muzzled lions’ mouths,
• · Some smothered fires,
• · Some escaped from death by the sword,
• · Some got their second wind when they had given out,
• · Some became highly successful in war, and overcame foreign armies,
• · Some wives, whose husbands were reported dead, got them back alive.

Those events are the substance of thriller stories and suspense.

Other people, however, living by the same unseen reality, had very different experiences:

• · Some people were tortured terribly when they refused to renounce God,
• · Still others took a lot of abuse and beatings,
• · Some experienced repeated arrests and jailings,
• · Some had rocks thrown at them,
• · Some were investigated,
• · Some were hacked apart and butchered with swords,
• · Some wore rags and cast-off clothing, wretchedly poor,
• · Some were hounded,
• · Some were treated disgracefully (people too honorable for the world),
• · Some were herded into slums,
• · Some lived in tenements,
• · Some lived in hovels,
• · Some even lived in holes in the ground. Heb 11:28 (27–38 cont.)

The first group of people lived the kind of lives that fill history books, the second group lived lives that come from refugee camps and rescue missions. They both bet their lives on the same Unseen-Reality, but their experiences were not the same. Why the difference? Their experiences can be different because they all worshipped and followed God for who he is, and not for what he does.

They all bet their lives on the reality of things they could not see, and on things they did not experience. They all died, strong in their faith, they knew that what God had promised them was waiting for them up ahead.

They understood their circumstances. They saw themselves as strangers on this earth, foreigners, just passing through, longing for the city and homeland God had prepared for them. They worshipped and followed God for who he was and not for what he did for them.

Because of their faith, God was not ashamed to be their God.

Those are success stories! Pure and simple! They bet their lives, and God honored their commitment, he responds to people that seek him.