Sermons

Summary: This is the first in a series of sermons on Hebrews 11, Heroes of Faith. God is the hero we look at, and His heroric act of creating this world and a people for Him to love.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The text for tonight’s proclamation is taken from Hebrews 11:3;

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

In the name of Jesus dear Christian friends, while looking at the Heroes of faith in Hebrews 11, one fact hit home, of all the members of the hall of fame of faith listed, one name seemed to be missing; mine. Where would I be placed within the halls of faith, if the author of Hebrews wrote this Epistle years after I was taken into heaven. Would I make the cut? Would I be mentioned at all? Then I thought about those mentioned already. What do each of the members of this group have in common? Are they without sin? No, for we know that they were all born in sin. What made them stand apart? Their faith? But I have faith, and as I will tell anyone, the amount of faith is not what saves. What saves a person is that faith exists at all, and that is faith in Christ and Him alone. So, even these giants of faith have something in common with you and I, a faith that was given to them, created in them, that saved them and will save us as we live it out. Tonight we focus in on a hero of faith that does not seemed to be emphasized as much those who follow, but without this hero, our faith and the faith of the others, would be useless. Tonight we focus in on the hero of creation, the creator Himself, God.

“It is impossible to explain the universe or anything about life as we know it without God.” This was a statement I bumped into while studying for this sermon. We can try to explain creation without God, but look at how the Old Testament begins, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen 1:1)”

The simple statement, that God created the heavens and the earth, is one of the most challenging ideas for anyone to understand. Think about the galaxy we live in; the galaxy is spinning at a speed of 490,000 miles an hour, however, even at that breakneck speed, our galaxy still needs 200 million years to make one rotation. And there are over one billion other galaxies just like ours in the universe.

God created all this. Some scientists say that the number of stars in creation is equal to all the grains of all the sands on all the beaches of the world. Yet this complex sea of spinning stars functions with remarkable order and efficiency. To say that the universe “just happened” or “evolved” requires, in my mind, more faith than to believe that God is behind these amazing statistics. God truly did create a wonderful universe.

My wife once told me that one of her students stated that the Bible proves that God created the world by the “Big Bang” theory. She asked him to prove that, and I was rather interested in the answer. I used to believe that God, in what ever fashion He felt necessary, created the world and everything in it, so the “Big Bang” theory and even a modified theory of evolution seemed to make sense to me.

Then I read Hebrews chapter 11, and I learned something fantastic about the first hero of faith listed. The Bible tells us, again, that God created all we see out of nothing. That’s what our text tells us, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

There were no pre-existing materials for God to make anything out of. It happened, as Genesis tells us, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ... And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. (1:1, 3)” The Psalmist also writes, “By the Word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of His mouth. (33:6)” Out of nothing, by His Word alone, all was created. All was good, very good, and blessed.

Why God is the #1 hero of faith? First, God created everything, out of nothing, by the power of His Word alone. Not by any of the Scientific methods and theories, but by the Word of God, as Scripture tells us. In all this creation, all God created was good, very good and blessed. But then trouble in paradise, Adam and Eve fell into sin and there needed to be another creation.

Yes, God could have started over, but God created our universe out of love. Almost every scientist has an opinion on the origin of the universe, but only the Bible shows God creating the earth out of His great love and giving all people a special place in it.

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