Though the wicked are distinguished into hypocrites and unbelievers, yet hypocrites themselves are unbelievers too. They have no faith which they can justify, by its prevailing efficacy and works; and therefore have no faith by which they can be justified. Because their discovery is needful to their recovery, and all our salvation depends on the sincerity of our faith, I have chosen this text, which is a description of Faith, that the opening of it may help us for the opening of our hearts, and resolving the great question, on which our endless life depends.
To be a Christian, and to be a believer in Christ, are words in Scripture of the same signification. If you have not faith, you are not Christians. This faith hath various offices and objects. By it we are justified, sanctified and saved, We are justified, not by believing that we are justified, but by believing that we may be justified. Not by receiving justification immediately, but by receiving Christ for our justification: nor by mere accepting the pardon in itself, but by first receiving him that procureth and bestoweth it, on his terms: not by mere accepting health, but by receiving the Physician and his remedies, for health.
Faith is the practical believing in God as promising, and Christ as procuring justification and salvation. Or, the practical belief and acceptance of life, as procured by Christ, and promised by God in the Gospel.
No wonder therefore if the Holy Ghost here speaking of the dignity and power of faith, do principally insist on that part of its description, which is taken from this final object.
As Christ himself in his humiliation was rejected by the Gentiles, and a stumbling-stone to the Jews, despised and not esteemed; (Isa. 53:2, 3.) Having “made himself of no reputation;” (Phil. 2:7.) So faith in Christ as incarnate and crucified, is despised and counted foolishness by the world. But as Christ in his glory, and the glory of believers, shall force them to an awful admiration; so faith itself as exercised on that glory, is more glorious in the eyes of all. Believers are never so reverenced by the world, as when they converse in heaven, and “the Spirit of Glory resteth on them;” 1 Pet. 4:14.
How faith by beholding this glorious end, doth move all the faculties of the soul, and subdue the inclinations and interests of the flesh, and make the greatest sufferings tolerable, is the work of the Holy Ghost in this chapter to demonstrate, which beginning with the description, proceeds to the proof by a cloud of witnesses. There are two sorts of persons (and employments) in the world, for whom there are two contrary ends hereafter. One sort subjects their reason to their sensual or carnal interest. The other subjects their senses to their reason, cleared, conducted and elevated by faith. Things present or possessed, are the riches of the sensual, and the bias of their hearts and lives: things, absent but hoped for, are the riches of believers, which actuate their chief endeavours.
This is the sense of the text which I have read to you; which setting things hoped for, in opposition to things present, and things unseen, to those that sense doth apprehend, assureth us that faith (which fixeth on the first) doth give to its object a subsistence, presence and evidence, that is, it seeth that which supplieth the want of presence and visibility. The Syriac interpreter, instead of a translation, gives us a true exposition of the words, viz. ‘Faith is a certainty of those things that are in hope, as if they did already actually exist, and the revelation of those things that are not seen.’
