Faith in God's Good Purposes (Hebrews 11:3)
This sermon was preached on June 29th, 2025
1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for. 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.
A few weeks ago we got a new chalice for the Lord’s Supper. It was made by one of our members, Anthony Lester. And just by looking at it, you can know a lot about Anthony. You can tell he has an attention to detail. You can tell he has a great eye for design and color, and an artist’s wisdom in discretion—not making it too elaborate or complicated, but just right. You can tell he values doing things well.
In the same way, we can look at what God has created and know him. Theologians have called this reading “the book of nature.” And we read this book of nature alongside the book of Scripture, which is God’s special revelation about himself and his purposes: where God not only tells us that he exists, but God invites us to know him personally. It’s like the difference between knowing an artists through his art, and knowing him as a friend.
The book of nature and the book of Scripture are not at odds with each other or in competition with one another. They have the same author. God shows himself in both of them.
Francis Collins is a scientist who led the Human Genome Project. The HGP was an international effort of scientists to map the entirety of human DNA, it started in 1990 and ended in 2003, and led to many, many insights about the human body, medicine, and the rest. Later, Dr. Collins served as the director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021.
He’s actually a member and worships at a sister church of ours in Mclean, VA. And he wrote this: “When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along. When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”
Dr. Collins was actually an atheist until the age of 27. He had gone to UVA for college. He then got a PhD from Princeton, and an MD from UNC. In the last year of his studies at UNC, he came to faith. He had interacted with patients who, in the face of disease and suffering, clung to the love of Jesus to carry them through. “They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.”
He was given a copy of CS Lewis’s book Mere Christianity. “I was very happy with the idea that God didn’t exist, and had no interest in me. And yet at the same time, I could not turn away.” The epiphany hit when he went hiking in Washington state. He said: “It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt, ‘I cannot resist this another moment’.”
Dr. Collins’ experience is such a great example of how special revelation and general revelation mix together. He had encountered the faith of his patients, and the work of CS Lewis, which depends on how God has shown himself in Jesus and in Scripture. He encountered the revelation of God in his work as a scientist, looking at creation.
We don’t have to fear further discovery. We don’t have to section our faith off—it can withstand the questions and the doubts. Faith doesn’t squash or silence discovery and learning—it should encourage it!
But what about creation requires faith from us? When you think about it, looking at an incredible work of art and determining that someone created it doesn’t take faith. So I ask, why does it require faith to “understand that universe was formed at God’s command?”I think it requires faith because of the brokenness of the world.
We may see a Creator through his creation, but it’s another step to believe in the goodness of this creator and the idea that he has a purpose for this creation.
Because we live in a world where things show evidence of design, but where things also don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Something has caused a malfunction. It’s led some people to deny that there is any design to the universe that we live in. But that’s like my computer getting a virus and that leading me to say that there’s no such thing as Apple.
This virus—this thing that infects God’s good creation and warps it—is the effects of sin and its wrong entering our world.
I’ve often wondered about this. Because sin is a spiritual problem, right? Why would it have physical effects? I think it’s because human beings, we’re a composite of physical and spiritual. And as Christians throughout the ages have pointed out, the physical part of who we are isn’t evil and the spiritual good. Our bodies aren’t just shells or even prisons, and our goal is that our spirits or souls will someday be free.
No, human beings were created by God as physical and spiritual beings. And when our first parents, Adam and Eve, began the long human rebellion against God, the after effects of their sin was both physical and spiritual. All the malfunction and disorder that exists within us can be traced back to the poison of sin entering the human story.
When our hearts desire the wrong things or desire a good thing in the wrong way, it’s not just because we’re ignorant. It’s because of the fallout of sin that permeates humanity and cries out for a Savior.
When our bodies malfunction—when cancer begins to wreak havoc or when disease takes its toll—it, in some way, is tied to the fallout of sin.
Don’t hear me wrongly here: when I say ‘sin’ I’m not saying individual actions you may commit. If our concept of what sin is is just actions that are wrong, then we will miss a big part of what the Bible teaches. Scripture also speaks of sin as a power at work. A power that is opposite of the goodness and beauty and righteousness of God. A power that destroys.
In the video game, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the evil villain Ganon has risen to oppose all that is good, and he causes this substance called Gloom to be thrown into the whole world. It poisons the water. It poisons the land. If you get it on you, it drains your life away, and not only depletes your life, but keeps you from being able to heal from its effects. One of the main aspects of the game is dealing with this Gloom as you’re trying to get to Ganon and defeat him.
Sin is a lot like that, except it’s not a substance we can see. It’s not a thing—the absence of a thing. Just like darkness isn’t a thing, it’s the absence of light, sin isn’t a thing, it’s the absence of goodness, beauty, and truth. And it has cataclysmic effects physically and spiritually.
And this is why faith is required when we look at creation. Not to determine that it has been made by a Creator. Because the effects of sin are so far-reaching that it misshapes us and the world around us in so many ways. Which is why I am grateful not just for the general revelation of nature that tells us there is a God, but the special revelation of Scripture that tell us of God reaching into the brokenness of this world to war against sin and its effects.
Scripture tells us of times throughout history when God intervened to make his plan to defeat the power of sin and bring forgiveness and healing—this actions that he took during the OT that pointed to the definitive breaking-in that he accomplished in sending his Son, Jesus Christ.
The in-breaking of God’s kingdom in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The clearest indication we have, the eternal Word of God—God’s statement of who He is. And the reality of who Jesus is and what he accomplished, and what he—as the ascended and victorious Lord—is continuing to do.
In the here-and-now we entrust ourselves to the God who shows who He is in Jesus, looking to the God-inspired Scriptures to see how He has worked and as the promise that he will not stop until his purposes for creation are complete. He will come through on his every promise and destroy the power of sin in its fulness, making all things new.
Sometimes it’s very hard to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. It’s hard to carry this hope of the gospel sometimes. Because we aren’t just meant to see that God has made all things—to realize there is a Creator that has a purpose is to realize that this purpose is our calling, and seeing him in creation and in Scripture is meant to propel us into this broken world to testify, in words and actions, the truth.
So God’s purposes is our hope and our mission. We love because he first loved us, and because he has fixed his love on us and is growing love within us, we can turn and love like him. We can put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
I cannot help but thing of Sam’s monologue at the end of the Two Towers, the second LOTR movie. Sam and Frodo have been sent on this seemingly impossible task, and are about to take steps into the hardest part of their mission—entering the land of Mordor which has almost nothing redeeming in it, full of darkness and destroyed land and thousands of enemies between them and the goal of their mission.
Sam: It’s all wrong By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for..
Friends, we have Jesus. Or better yet, Jesus has us. And he is the good that is worth chasing after, the good that is worth giving our hearts and lives to.