Useful Bible Studies > Hebrews Commentary > chapter 11
Our faith (trust) must be in the words that God has spoken. It was by his word that God created the world. He caused things to appear that did not exist before that. That wonderful event astonishes us. It seems impossible to explain how God did it. We can only really understand it by faith. We can only trust God’s account of what happened in his word, the Bible.
The author uses an unusual word for the ‘world’ here. It is the word that we usually translate the ‘ages’. He uses that word because he does not just mean the world. He includes everything in it. He includes the sky, the sun and the stars also. He means everything that exists in the present age.
While our present age continues, evil forces still have some power in this world. But those forces will not have any power in the future age. The future age means the time when Christ will rule. Christ already rules in the hearts and lives of his people, so the future age has already begun, in fact.
But the future age is not completely here, yet. When it is, God will create a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1). He will not create these things out of things that already exist. Like the first heaven and earth, he will create them by his word. We cannot prove by our intelligence that God will do such things. And we cannot explain how he will do it. But we can trust him. He has promised to do it, so he will do it. And when we believe that, we show faith in God’s word.
Next part: The faith of Abel (Hebrews 11:4)
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© 2014, Keith Simons.