Hebrews 11:3

Hebrews 11:3. Here begin the examples of the power and nature and effects of faith. By faith we know that the worlds (the universe) have been framed by the word of God. ‘The worlds' all that exists in time and space, including time and space themselves (see note on chap. Hebrews 1:2). ‘Have been framed' the reference is to the preparation and completing of the world according to the design of the Founder. The word is translated ‘established' in Psalms 89:37 ‘prepared' in Psalms 74:16. ‘By the word of God;' i.e His command. The explanation is found in Genesis 1, where nine times we read, ‘God said'... ‘and it was so.' It is by faith we understand that God made the universe. The word ‘understand' describes the rational or spiritual act of thought whereby things come to be known: that things had an origin, that they did not originate themselves, that they had an originator whose ability, intelligence, and goodness correspond to the qualities which we see in them, are conclusions to which our rational and spiritual nature lead us (as we are told in Romans 1:20). The conclusions are of the nature of faith; for the process was unseen, and, the conclusions are rather to be believed than demonstrated. When the announcement is made, however, and we believe it, the mystery is comparatively solved; an adequate cause is assigned, and we form a conception of the origin of things which commends itself to our ‘noetic faculty,' or perceptive understanding, as certainly as it commends itself to our religious instinct. Faith, therefore, the belief in the unseen, is as certainly a principle of natural religion, in its rudimentary form at least, as it is of revealed religion. It suggests the solution of many problems. Without it the world itself, in its origin and destiny, is a deep mystery, a maze without a plan.

So that what is seen (the true reading, the visible universe as a whole, not many separate things) was not made (hath not come to be) out of the things which appear. Creation abounds in change and in development the plant comes from the seed, and each man from the race that precedes him; but the understanding of faith leads us to the conclusion that at the beginning it was not so. The series is not eternal or self-created; God Himself is the Creator, and to Him and to His word the visible creation is to be ascribed. The clause ‘so that,' etc., may mean the tendency of the arrangement; the arrangement itself leads to the conclusion; or it may describe the purpose of the Creator, ‘in order that' what is seen might be understood to have come from what does not appear viz., from the Divine mind and plan; but the interpretation given above is the more simple and natural.