Verse of the day · October 1
What does Hebrews 11:6 mean by a rewarder of them that diligently seek him?
Enoch was taken out of the world without dying, and nothing says he had ever seen God.
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But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Hebrews 11:6
The chapter this verse sits in is a roll of names — people commended one after another for their faith. It was written for men who were proud of being descended from them, and the point of it was that the descent counted for nothing without the faith. The second name on it is Enoch, and he lived before the flood. He walked with God, and the walking was a life rather than a mood: he was being made like him, he kept company with him, he took his pleasure in him, and he did it in earnest and to the end. He did it alone: the generation around him was a wicked one, he is the only man in it the record singles out, and he seems to have spent his life reproving them and warning them that judgment was coming, in a world that scoffed. Before he was taken, this was said of him — that he pleased God, a testimony he had from God, from men, and in his own conscience. Faith was at the bottom of it: the faith made the pleasing, and the pleasing was the ground of the taking. Then God took him into heaven, so that he never saw death at all, and he simply was not there any more — not among men, not anywhere in the land of the living. And the chapter takes him for a man who believed in a God he had not seen; it never says he was shown him.
The name before his is Abel, one of Adam's own sons, and Cain is in the same verse with him — not on the roll, but as the measure: Abel's offering is described by being better than his brother's. After the fall — the first man's rebellion against his Maker, which ruined him and brought sin on everyone after him — God opened a new way for men to come back to him in worship, and it was a wonder of mercy that the fall had not cut off every dealing between God and man. The way was sacrifice, and a sacrifice was a confession as much as a gift. What the killing of the animal said was that the man had sinned, that his own life was what sin had forfeited, and that he was looking to a Redeemer still to come who would be a ransom for men's souls. There was no special merit in a lamb; it was the sacrifice because God had appointed it to be a figure of the one sacrifice that was coming.
So Abel brought of his flock, owning himself a sinner who deserved to die and hoping only for mercy through that great sacrifice, looking through his own lamb at it. God testified of his gifts and witnessed that he was righteous. How the verdict was given the record does not settle; the likeliest account is fire from heaven that came down and burned up Abel's offering. It did not save his life. His brother, the one whose offering had been passed over, killed him. A man God accepts has to expect the envy and malice of the world, and God does not let the injuries done to his people go unpunished, or their sufferings go unrewarded. Not in this life, though. Not for this man. The verse says of him that being dead he yet speaketh — his case still making the point that there has to be an atonement, and that God accepts no offering that is not joined to it. So the roll opens with a man who died for his faith and a man who never died at all, and God himself bore witness to both.
Cain brought only a thank-offering, the fruit of the ground, with no confession of sin in it and no regard to a ransom. A thank-offering was a proper thing to bring; what was wrong was that he brought nothing else, so the one thing sacrifice existed to say went unsaid. He was acting only out of the habit he was raised in, or out of natural conscience, with no apprehension of what sin deserved or of God's holiness; he did not feel he needed the offering that had been appointed on account of sin. His brother, raised the same, was acting out of faith. And that is the mistake the letter was written against: there is no dependence to be had on birth privileges, or on outward actions.
Not one of them had seen that sacrifice: the people on this roll saw what was promised a long way off, were persuaded of it, and died still holding it — they had the figure and not yet the thing itself. What is asked of a man is faith according to the revelation he has been given, and theirs was a promise where ours is a thing done.
And that is what the verse says next, straight off the back of Enoch's case, flat out. But without faith it is impossible to please him. And the requirement is not arbitrary. It is what anyone asks of a child, or a friend, or a wife: you cannot be pleased with someone who will not believe what you tell him or trust you to keep your word. Distrust like that makes a house miserable, and God is no different on the point. There is an order in it as well, and the two brothers show it: God accepted Abel before he accepted Abel's offering, so the gift was received because the man was — and even the appointed sacrifice would not have been accepted if it had not been brought in faith. Works with no root in God are splendid sins — impressive, and still sins. No man is accepted, any more than Cain was, without faith in God through Christ, the great sin-offering. Prayer, praise, sitting under the word, any good work whatever: apart from faith it is done outside Christ and without his Spirit, so none of it has the right principles or the right ends, and none of it is acceptable.
The verse calls the man in it he that cometh to God — the same going in to worship that Abel was doing with his lamb, and what it looks like now is a man praying, asking God for mercy and asking him for help; a man at the house of God, there to worship and to be in his company. And it names two things that man has to believe. The first is that God is: the true self-existing God, the source of all being. And it is God as he has made himself known — of infinite perfections, and Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That last is not an extra item on a list; it is the shape of the coming itself. A man comes to the Father, through the Son, who stands between, and by the help of the Spirit — so the God he has to believe in is the God who makes the approach possible. And what is asked for is more than a general agreement that God exists. The belief has to be awake in the act of drawing near, so that the man is aware he is actually before a God who sees everything. Believed like that, the plain fact that God is there works on a man from both sides: it holds him back from sin like a bridle, and drives him on into obedience like a spur.
The second thing is that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and it is needed just as much as the first. What is required is the belief that he rewards. Wanting the reward is not being named here as the reason a man should go looking for him; on that the verse makes no claim either way. The reason is plain: if a man could not believe that God hears prayer and answers it, there would be no encouragement to call on him. In English the same word does for both — that he is, and that he is a rewarder — but in the Greek they are two different words, and the second one carries the sense of becoming: that God turns out to be a rewarder. That is what he turned out to be to the man who was taken. Being taken alive was the proof, not the pattern: it showed there was another world, and that a body could be in it. God could do the same for any of his friends and does not, and among the reasons is that faith is meant to rest on what a man cannot see.
What he turns out to be is the reward itself: given by grace, and what is given first and above everything else is God himself, the exceeding great reward of the men who seek him. In this life he is sought and walked with, and the communion is partial; afterwards it is full. None of it is measured against what a man has earned. It rests on a free promise.
That leaves the seeking, and the first thing to say about it is that not one of them started it. They are the men God sought out first, and God comes to a man before the man comes to him. The word behind diligently seek means seeking God out — striving after him. Those who mean to find him have to start early rather than put it off, seek him in earnest, and keep on with it. They look for him in Christ, which is the only place he is to be found, and they look with their whole hearts and above everything else. It was true of Enoch as well: his acceptance with God was in Christ, whom he never saw.
What a man lost in the fall was God himself: the light, the life, the love, the likeness, the company of him. And the way back to him is Christ. Enoch walked with a God he could not see. He kept walking, and what the record says came of it is that God took him — out of the world and into heaven. What he was looking for and what he was given were the same person.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made