Beholding: When the Only Place to Look Is Up
September 3, 2023
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Hebrews 11:1–2, 13–19, 39–40
1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 For by it the people of old received their commendation….13 These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. 17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, 18 of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” 19 He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back…. 39 And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40 since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.
It only took us one summer, or just thirteen weeks, to teach through the life of Abraham. But as Abraham lived this same amount of time from Genesis 12–22, he saw something like thirty-five years pass by. Since he’s been with the Lord for four thousand years, we can’t pull Abraham aside and ask, “What do you want us to learn from your life?” We can’t do that. But the author of Hebrews in the New Testament has written us a sermon, and in that sermon he’s highlighted something God wants us to learn from the whole of Abraham’s life. Let’s pray as we study together.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
When I was a kid, maybe a freshman in high school or something like that, I lived in town that had a midnight bike ride once a year in the summer. It wasn’t really a race, so much as a moonlit stroll around town for two hours. The ride started and stopped at a local grocery store and there was food and fun after the ride.
I remember one year very well, or I should say one moment in one year of this ride. I remember it because my high school friends wouldn’t let me forget. At a slow point in the ride where we were all casually riding through a neighborhood, I looked at my friend Kyle and yelled, “Let’s race,” while I proceeded to already be sprinting past him on the right. Kyle was better than me, so I needed that head start—what you might call cheating, but that’s not the point of the story.
Anyway, Kyle took off too, of course, and about five seconds later, I looked over my right shoulder to see if he was gaining on me. The next thing I knew was me upside down in a giant bush, and so was my bike. Kyle won because I had crashed hard. And my friends loved it. From where they were, they could see the whole incident. Thankfully the bush was even softer than it was large, and it didn’t hurt at all. But we had to reach in and pull the bike out.
The point for us isn’t merely don’t cheat and taunt your friends. Not a bad point, I guess. The point for us is that God has designed us to go where we are looking. [BI] This is one of the reasons texting and driving can be so dangerous. As you look down and to the right, your car can drift right. And when that happens in a car at speed, if you only end up in a bush, you might be thankful. The consequences could be worse. We see this kind of drifting in the algorithms behind social media and the streaming services you use to watch movies and television. “Oh, you liked looking at this, did you?” they say. “Well, maybe you’d like to see this as well.” Where you click, you will go.
And what is true of our physical eyes, is true of us spiritually. God has designed us in such a way that we tend to go spiritually where we tend to look. That can be true positively, as we behold God and his gospel and truth and beauty and goodness. But it can be true negatively. Too often we neglect to lift our spiritual eyes to God and too often we prioritize what we can see with our physical eyes over what can and should be seen with our spiritual eyes. [FCF]
As we close our summer series, I want to do so going back over Abraham’s life. I don’t have seven different points we should learn. I’m sure there are seven or even seventy-seven. But I want to go back over his life and talk about this one thing, first through what the book of Hebrews has to say and then glancing over the book of Genesis.
How God Lifted Their Eyes (Hebrews 11 & Genesis 12–22)
What we call the book of Hebrews or sometimes the letter of Hebrews, is best understood as a sermon. I won’t go deep into the reasons why except to say that it’s filled with features familiar to sermons, things like explanations of Bible themes and passages, but also poetic wording and applications that sound like the sorts of things preachers say. A preacher wrote this sermon to a small house church, likely a small group of weary believers located in the metropolis that was Rome.
From reading this sermon carefully and studying the rest of the New Testament, we know this group of believers had been experiencing persecution. We might call the type of persecution they had first been experiencing “soft persecution.” Their persecution involved exclusion and scorn. Their society and their government didn’t like them precisely because they were Christians. That dislike had real and uncomfortable consequences. That changed in ad 64 when an emperor named Nero came to power. With him came what we would call not soft persecution but hard persecution, the kind that involved dungeons and death.
As a response, some members pulled back from fellowship; they stopped coming to church, stopped attending prayer meetings, and stopped fellowshipping with the believers. Many of those who left, and likely many who stayed, wondered if they could just go back to the way things were before, a time before the intense persecution. Maybe, they wondered, we can go back to relating to God through our Jewish ways and through Old Testament sacrifices and not identify by faith with Jesus, not fellowship with Christians.
To these persecuted believers, the preacher opens his sermon with a statement about the power of the word of Christ, how God now most especially speaks to his people through the Son of God, and how Jesus is better than angels, Jesus is better than Moses, Jesus is better than Old Testament priests, Jesus is better than the law and animal sacrifices. You’d have to read his sermon to get all of that. But he’s saying through the early chapters, “I know what you can see with your physical eyes is a harsh reality. If you had spiritual eyes to see, then you would know Jesus is better, and he is enough.”
Then the preacher comes to chapter 11, where he points their eyes to Old Testament believers who had come before, showing his audience how faith enabled these saints to see what couldn’t be seen.
Look at vv. 1–2. We read, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.” The preacher describes faith as seeing what is real but what can’t be seen with physical eyes. And this kind of seeing—this kind of faith and assurance—produces hope.
Then he says that by this kind of looking up to God, “the people of old received their commendation.” The way God loved them and changed them and approved of them and, we would say, saved them, was not by their doing good works but by their seeing and believing truth. Then the preacher gives the whole chapter to more than a dozen examples, giving considerable time to Abraham’s spiritual eyes.
In v. 10 we come to the line we referenced a few times this summer, the line we named the sermon series after, the line about a city with foundations. I’ll read vv. 10–16.
10 For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. 11 By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore. 13 These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
I love that line about Sarah and her faith. She, too, had eyes to see what God was doing. And I love the line about Abraham being “as good as dead.” Church, you are not too old for God to use you. In fact, some of my favorite sermons—if we could call them sermons—are not the ones we preach from the stage but the ones our older members preach from the pews. Week after week, year after year, storm after storm, your presence here among us, and your spiritual looking to God have a way of pointing us all to the sufficiency of Jesus. Church, you’re not too old for God to use you, even if the way he uses you looks differently than you expected.
We also see in these verses that Abraham looked for a city with foundations. Then later, a better country, a better homeland, a heavenly city and homeland. He looked for a place with security and substance. Remember, Abraham would have primarily lived nomadically in a tent with wooden poles covered with animal skins. He longed for permeance and depth, a dwelling that was lasting and strong.
Imagine how this language would have popped to the Hebrew audience in a small house church in Rome. They knew cities; they knew Rome’s beauty and strength. But their cities also had decadence and crime and persecution and poverty. Like Abraham, these believers wanted a place to dwell with God and his people in safety and joy.
You have these same longings. Maybe not exactly these, but you have them too. They are embedded within everything you do and everything you desire. When I read these lines from Hebrews 11, I often think of something the author C. S. Lewis said about our desires. “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists,” he writes in Mere Christianity. “A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. . .”
Then Lewis adds, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . . I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death . . .” He concludes, “I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.” What Lewis calls “a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy” and a desire for “that other country,” the preacher of Hebrews calls a better country, a better homeland, a better city.
The desires we have for a better city and a better homeland—to be loved by others for who we are, to find work that is meaningful—are not bad desires. They point our spiritual eyes to greater realities, to the city with foundations “whose designer and builder is God.” The feeling of being out of place, of what the passage calls being strangers and exiles, that is, not perfectly at home, is normal and part of God’s grace to us. Remember, this was said even as they were in what we call the Promised Land. From the Promised Land they looked for the better Promised Land beyond the grave.
Speaking of the grave, in vv. 17–19 the preacher of Hebrews points our gaze toward the events of Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac that we preached last week.
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, 18 of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” 19 He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.
Do you remember how this was worded in Genesis 22? Abraham told the men who came with him, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you” (22:5). The author of Hebrews says Abraham would say this because he has the spiritual eyes to believe God could raise the dead.
And right at the moment Abraham was going to offer Isaac, God told him to stop. And in Genesis 22:13 we read “And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” Don’t miss the wording, “And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold.” That’s sight language. The author is making a point. We tend to go where we tend to look.
This, however, was sometimes a struggle for Abraham, just like it is for us. Perhaps you remember a line from Genesis 15 where Abraham said to God, “Behold.” It’s an interesting phrase to speak to the Lord. He asks the Lord, “Do you see?” At this point, Abraham had had the promise of a child for years, but he didn’t have any children. “Can you not see this, Lord?” he essentially says. “This guy, Eliezer of Damascus, will get all my stuff, and he’s not even family. Then what comes of all your promises?”
What was God’s response? After voicing his complaint, God invites Abraham out of his tent and says, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. . . So shall your offspring be” (15:5). Lift up your physical and spiritual eyes, God tells him. Behold that.
We likely don’t notice at first the repetition of these phrases in the Abraham narrative, but there are many of them. Over and over, God tells Abram to look up. Consider a few passages. In Genesis 13:14 we read God tell him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward.” In Genesis 18:2, before his encounter with God, we read, “He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.” Even the key phrase, within the key verse, within the key passage of the Abraham narrative, implies a looking up and out: “Go . . . to the land I will show you,” God says (Gen. 12:1).
These “looking” phrases serve as a dramatization of faith. To look up to God and to lift one’s eyes and to behold are not merely actions we do with our physical eyes but also with our spiritual hearts and our eyes of faith.
But we should also note that these phrases have a darker and sinful counterpart across the same passages of Genesis: we can just as easily, and sometimes more easily, look down and look in. The narrator repeatedly shows people turning the eyes of their hearts, and sometimes even their physical eyes, away from God. Abraham does it with Eliezer. Abraham’s nephew Lot does the same thing. When God presents Lot with his choice of land, we read, “And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar.” Then the narrator adds in parenthesis, “This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah” (13:10). Lot found land that looked good, even like Eden, but oh, by the way, the land also runs toward Sodom and Gomorrah. What looked to Lot like living in paradise turned out to be living in the suburbs of Sodom. Lot’s wife has a similar lust for Sodom. In Genesis 19 we read, “But Lot’s wife . . . looked back” and then she too, along with the city, was destroyed (19:26).
In each of these passages—Abram, Lot, Lot’s wife, and others I don’t have time to cover—it’s as if the narrator wants us to behold the ways we relive Genesis 3. “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened” (3:6). But where they open or closed? The opening of their eyes in one direction closed off their seeing the beauty of God. God’s provision didn’t seem like enough when Satan pointed out that God was holding out on them.
Here we find the central dilemma for Abraham and for us: will we look up or look down? Although at times he struggled, Abraham looked up. This is why the author of Hebrews can summarize Abraham’s life of faith as “looking forward,” specifically looking forward to the city with foundations. Indeed, even Jesus describes Abraham to the Jewish leaders in this way, saying, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).
So, to sum up all of Hebrews 11 and Genesis 12–22, it was like God was using everything he was doing, all the good and all the hard, to get people his people to see that God was enough for them now and especially forever. I like the way one of my favorite authors puts it. “I have a problem with all the ‘chase your dreams!’ cheerleading from Christian leaders. It’s not because I begrudge people who want to achieve their dreams,” he writes, “but because I think we don’t readily see how easy it is to conflate our dream-chasing with God’s will in Christ.” Then he adds, “You know, it’s possible that God’s plan for us is littleness. His plan for us may be personal failure. It’s possible that when another door closes, it’s not because he plans to open the window, but because he plans to have the building fall down on you. The question we must ask ourselves is this: Will Christ be enough?” (Jared C. Wilson, The Story of Everything, 122).
How God Lifts Our Eyes
That’s a challenging quote. But thankfully, God has not left us without means to help us see the beauty and sufficiency of Jesus, the enough-ness of Jesus. One of the main ways, although certainly not the only way, God lifts our eyes is through our gathering on Sunday mornings.
This aim of seeing with spiritual eyes is why we give a large portion of our service to studying the Scriptures with a particular view to seeing the beauty of Jesus in every passage of Scripture. We believe that this kind of spiritual gazing on the beauty of Jesus is in fact Spiritual, that is, the work of the Holy Spirit among us. Christians often talk of being Spirit-filled and mean by that all sorts of ecstatic behaviors, and it may mean some of that or it may not. But being Spirit-filled certainly means having our affections stirred for Christ. One of the primary ministries of the Holy Spirit is acting as a flood light in a dark world to shine a spotlight on Jesus so our eyes can see he’s enough.
Not only do we pay great attention to what we preach and how we preach, we also pay attention to what we sing. Matthew Westerholm is a professor who did his doctoral studies on what modern Christians sing in church compared to other generations. Note what he says, “Among many similarities,” he writes, “one difference was striking: Our churches no longer sing about Christ’s second coming as much as we used to.”
Just to give one example I thought of, compare the modern rendition with the classic hymn “It Is Well.” I actually like aspects of the modern version and think it has lines that I really like that are not in the original. I love the line about the wind and waves still knowing his name. The new version, is missing the explicit atonement verse that the original had about the bliss of this glorious thought of our sin, not in part, but the whole, nailed to the cross.
Also missing is the wonderful and triumphant lines about the return of Christ. Listen to these words: “And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight / The clouds be rolled back as a scroll / The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend / Even so, it is well with my soul.” The modern rendition does speak of the Lord’s care for his people when we’re suffering, but it fails to point our eyes explicitly to the hope we have when we suffer. We don’t sing only hymns, because that’s note the point. The point is to sing the best songs that point us to all that God is for us in Christ.
There are plenty of ways this works out in our fellowship outside of Sunday morning as well. Many of our people join groups that meet regularly where Bibles are open and lives are open to each other for prayer and encouragement and even challenge and confession. The goal of these groups is to build within us spiritual eyes, not only in ourselves but in others.
When we come back to Hebrews 11, let me read how the very next chapter beings. Now that we’ve seen how the people of old looked with spiritual eyes, where does the preacher tell us to look?
12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.
The passage in chapter 12 begins with “therefore.” And while some passages describe the Christan life as walking, what does the preacher tell us here? We are not to walk. We not to meander. We not are not to pack heavy. Instead, we must pack light so we can run! And when you run, you can’t run fast, and you can’t run smooth, when you’re looking at your shoes or looking behind you, or when you’re paying attention to what everyone else is doing or not doing, and what other person really needs this sermon.
We mainly talked about Abraham. But there are others described in Hebrews 11. And the preacher calls them together the “great cloud of witnesses.” He pictures the Christian life run in a arena, where together this little house church helps each other throw off sin and pursue Christ.
When I read this passage, I think of something one of my seminary professors did. He was a pretty good marathon runner, and at many of the large marathons, especially near the end, you have crowds of people cheering the runners. And they often yell generically, “Good job, runner.” Stuff like this. He took a white shirt and wrote “Christian” on the front. And as he finished his race, he had people cheering him on, but they yelled, “Good job, Christian! Keep running hard.” “Good job, Christian, you can see the finish line.” In a way, that’s what these Old Testament saints are doing for you. Yes, we preached about Abraham, but in this way he is preaching to us. “Good job, Christian! Keep running hard.” “Good job, Christian, you can see the finish line.”
Far more important than Abraham preaching to us, we have Jesus. When he died for you, when he suffered your shame, when he bore in his body the punishment for sins that you deserved, we might think he did this begrudgingly or with agitation and annoyance. But that’s not what the author of Hebrews tells us. Look to Jesus, he says, “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
When the door closes, when the window doesn’t open, and the house falls down, Jesus is enough. He’s seated at the right hand of God praying for us, leading the great cloud of witnesses in their cheering for us, and he will come again with them and bring the heavenly city to earth, a city with foundations where the people of God will feast in victory.
But you have to ask God for the spiritual eyes to see it.
I’ll invite the music team forward so we can have a time of response through singing. Let’s pray.
“Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
When thinking back over the life of Abraham, what most jumps out to you from his story? What were memorable sermon moments? Any enduring applications or encouragement?
Read and discuss the definition of faith offered in Hebrews 11:1. What is clarifying about the definition? Why?
When we read Genesis 12–22, it seems as though God is frequently telling Abraham to “look up” with his spiritual eyes. How are we like Abraham in this need to keep focused by faith on who God is? Where is your gaze off-center?
