Magyar Egyház, 1956 (35. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1956-02-01 / 2. szám
MAGYAK EGYHÁZ 9 ENGLISH SECTION THE HEIDELBERG CATECHISM Q. 26. What do you believe when you say: “I Believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth”? A. That the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who of nothing made heaven and earth, with all that in them is, who likewise upholds and governs the same by His eternal counsel and providence, is for the sake of Christ His Son my God and my Father; in whom I so trust, as to have no doubt that He will provide me with all things necessary for body and soul; and further, that whatever evil He sends upon me in this vale of tears He will turn to my good; for He is able to do it, being Almighty God, and willing also, being a faithful Father. Hebrews 11:3 Hebrews 11, the chapter from which our text is taken, is one of the best known chapters in the New Testament. It is virtually a catalog of the great figures of the Old Testament, and gives a brief resumé of the history of each one. Listen to this list of names! Every well-instructed Christian ought to know something about every one of them. Do you? — Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel. The author of Hebrews gives this great catalog because he wants to arouse faith in the hearts of those to whom he writes. They have been back-sliding. ‘‘Recall the former days,” he writes. “You endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated.” All this, he reminds them, “you joyfully accepted . . ., since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.” “We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed,” he declares, hoping that those who read his words will join him in this courageous declaration, “but of those who have faith and keep their souls.” From this point, he launches out into the present chapter, and demonstrates that each of these men and women, whose histories are so well known from the Bibles, were people who did not shrink back, but who had faith and kept their souls in very deed. He hammers this point home in the text, when he begins each sentence with the expression “pistei” in Greek, i.e., BY FAITH. So this chapter has become known as the “Faith Chapter” of the New Testament. Well, the first sentence beginning with the offrepeated word “pistei” — by faith — reads: “By faith, WE — By faith, we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” In other words, you and I can be among the heroes of the faith, if we, in the face of the consistent opposition and denial of non-Christians round about us, believe steadfastly the Christian doctrine about the creation of the world, that it was accomplished by God, out of nothing, simply by the Word of His power! We are probably not confronted by such out and out avowals of an atheistic, materialistic viewpoint, as confronts our brethren behind the Iron Curtain in propaganda such as this statement recently made by Kurt Hager, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party is East Germany. Mr. Hager wrote in the publication “Einheit”: While religion is based on biblical traditions and fantastic fairy-tales and darkens the consciousness of man, science is based on facts, on the scientific experiment. It helps man to become better acquainted with the objective laws of evolution in nature and in society, to put the forces of nature into the service of mankind, and it contributes to the uplift of consciousness and to the growth of culture.” Still, again and again, we read in popular magazines, even in such very good ones as “Life” and “Reader’s Digest” so-called scientific accounts of the origin or of the destiny of the world, which leave God completely out of the picture. You, who read these things and can still say with the creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” head the list of the heroes of the faith. By faith you understand that the world was created by the word of God. Many of you boys and girls read in your school books about the origin of the things that exist, both material and animal. Very frequently the textbooks present a completely materialistic view of these things. They ascribe all that has come about to a mysterious something called “evolution” — but they make no mention of God. You, even if you are twelve or thirteen years old, if you take all this with a grain of salt, and stick by what you are taught in the Bible, that the world was created by the word of God, you are at the head of the list of the heroes of the faith, too. As Christians, we reject any and all theories about the world in which we live, no matter what scientific or scholarly endorsement they may have, which do not confess with Holy Scripture: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We beleive in God, the Father Almighty, MAKER of heaven and earth. Be it said at once, that we know this, we understand this, as the text puts it, “pistei” —by faith. And I would like to ask you, how else would anyone know anything about this subject? Faith, says our writer, is “the conviction of things not seen,” i.e., certainty about things which we can have no knowledge bv the ordinary senses, sight, hearing, tasting, touching, etc. Now I ask you, who was there when things as they are began to be? Who saw them start? No one, of course. Therefore, hold this fact firmly in your mind
