PART TWO
PART TWO
Faith Leads to Mighty Deeds
Thus far we’ve seen a number of things that faith does in our life. But in verses 32-35 our author mentions yet another: faith enables God’s people to accomplish amazing things.
We start with a list of names in verse 32. The first is Gideon, whom we have mentioned already. Barak was a great general under Deborah (Judges 4). Samson famously defeated the Philistines (Judges 13 – 16). Jephthah was a great warrior (Judges 11). David was God’s king. Samuel and the prophets spoke for God and upheld truth.
These people, along with others not explicitly listed, accomplished mighty things. We are told in Hebrews 11:33-35 that they “conquered kingdoms” (referring to countless military victories in the lives of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah and David); “enforced justice” (this was the job of the judges, particularly Samuel); “obtained promises” (God had promised to give Israel the land of her enemies: Joshua 1:1-5; Judges 1:2); “stopped the mouths of lions” (this was done by Samson in Judges 14:6-7 and David in 1 Samuel 17:34-36); “quenched the power of fire” (likely a reference to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3); “escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (referring to the many battles and victories won by Israel’s leaders such as David, Barak, Gideon and Samson); and “women received back their dead by resurrection” (referring to miracles performed by Elijah and Elisha in 1 Kings 17:17-23 and 2 Kings 4:18-36).
As we look at the story of God’s people, we realize that it is possible to obey God and do amazing things by faith—and always by grace because God is at work. These figures trusted God, and he chose to work powerfully in their lives.
And, of course, you cannot do good works alone. How did Moses, or Gideon, or any of these saints have the strength to obey? Each of them needed to be empowered by the Holy Spirit. They “were made strong out of weakness” (Hebrews 11:34). This is proved by the example in verse 35: “Women received back their dead by resurrection.” Raising someone from the dead is something no one could do—except God. It is by his power alone.
Like all these people, you and I need divine help. It will never work to try to obey in our own strength. But with the help of the Spirit, obedience is the inevitable result of God’s grace working through us by faith. Who knows what he may accomplish through us?
Faith Endures Suffering
After the list of amazing deeds, there is a shift in verse 35b: “Some were tortured.” The list continues into verses 36-38: God’s people have suffered mocking, flogging, and imprisonment in chains; they have been stoned, sawn in two, and killed with the sword. They have been clothed in unpleasant clothes; they have been destitute, afflicted, and mistreated; they have wandered around in deserts and mountains and caves.
It is not a great advert for the Christian life, is it? Don’t bother with all the pleasures of the world. Follow Jesus and have a life of persecution, poverty, and loneliness instead!
On a human level, no one would ever sign up for that—which is exactly why it is a mark of faith. It is people of faith, who value and love Jesus more than anything, who are willing to suffer in this way.
We can connect most of the things in this list to individual stories in the Old Testament, or to traditions outside the Old Testament. Many of the prophets were “tortured” (v 35) or endured “mocking” (v 36), or “chains and imprisonment,” particularly Jeremiah, the “weeping prophet,” who was beaten, put in stocks, thrown in prison, and eventually cast into a cistern (Jeremiah 20:1-2; 38:6). 2 Chronicles 24:20-21 tells us that the prophet Zechariah was “stoned” (Hebrews 11:37), and other historical sources, tell us that the prophet Isaiah may have been “sawn in two.” In general, God’s people were “destitute,” wearing animal skins and often “afflicted and mistreated,” and often went on the run in the desert or ended up hiding in caves (1 Samuel 22:1; 1 Kings 19:4).
These verses may come as a shock after all the amazing deeds listed in the previous section. But there is a vital point to note here. God does not promise that if we follow him we will have health and wealth—becoming successful or rich. There is a sad trend in evangelicalism today of teachers claiming that if you follow God it will make your life better in earthly ways. Of course, it is better to follow Jesus; but that does not mean bigger bank accounts or more popularity. This is not your best life now. You could be hated; you could be persecuted; you could be put in jail.
In fact, our passage states the opposite of the “health and wealth” gospel when it reminds us that “all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised” (Hebrews 11:39). To be clear, this doesn’t mean God failed to keep his promises to these Old Testament saints. It is referring to the fact that God promised to do amazing things in the distant future—things these saints would never themselves have a chance to see. And yet, even without seeing those things, they still believed God would do them.
Does that mean their faith was a waste of time? Not at all. Even though they didn’t get to experience certain blessings in their own lifetime, they will experience them in the future when God finally fulfills all his promises. In this way, these saints reflect a very common pattern in Scripture: God’s people may suffer in the present, but they will receive glory in the future.
In the new covenant, of course, God has “provided something better for us” (v 40). We have the privilege of living in a time when many of the Old Testament promises have been realized. Even so, that doesn’t mean we should expect our fullest life now. Even New Testament saints should expect hardships and persecutions until Christ returns. Indeed, Paul suffered for Christ and this forced him to look to the future:
“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him … Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:8-9, 13-14)
If you follow God, you do not get it all now. In Christ you do get it all; but you get it on that final day when Christ looks at you and says, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23).
The question, then, is, are you ready for that? Do you have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Can you forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead?
That is the challenge we are offered at the start of Hebrews 12.
The Great Race
My son loves to run—track in the spring and cross country in the fall. So, I decided to get him a book about the Scottish Olympic runner, Eric Liddell. Brought to popular attention by the film Chariots of Fire, Liddell was a sprinter in the 1924 Olympics who refused to compete in the 100 meters because it would have required him to run on a Sunday. Instead he ran the 400 meters and ended up winning the gold medal.
Although hailed as a hero now, Eric was not viewed as such in Great Britain when he decided not to run. He was mocked and ridiculed for his faith. Most people didn’t realize that he was running a much more important race than the one in the Olympics—he was running the race of the Christian life.
That is how our author describes it in 12:1: “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” Everything in verses 1-3 wraps around this theme. We are not told to walk through the Christian life, to meander or stroll along. We are told to run. It is energetic. It involves perseverance.
Our author draws on athletic imagery from the Greco-Roman world, mentioning three things every runner needs: fans cheering you on, freedom from entanglements, and a finish line in your sights.
Fans Cheering You On
Verse 1a begins with the fans: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…” All those Old Testament figures mentioned in chapter 11 are now surrounding you, watching you as you run—cheering you on.
In the crowd sits Noah, who endured much hardship and faithfully built an ark; and Enoch, who loved God intimately and walked with him; and Sarah, who trusted God’s promise and received power to conceive. In the crowd sit Abraham and Moses and Rahab and all the others.
But there is something very different about this crowd. They are not there to watch you. They are there to be seen by you as you run. This encourages you about what is possible. There will be times when you think you cannot finish; you cannot push past the pain. But then you realize the stadium is filled with people who have finished the race. It can be done.
I can remember going to basketball games at the Dean Dome when I was a student at the University of North Carolina. If you looked up in the rafters, you would see the names of the greats that had gone before: Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Sam Perkins. When the players are tired or discouraged, I can imagine it is a great motivation to look up and see those names. It is a reminder that you wear the same uniform and can accomplish the same great things.
Freedom from Entanglements
The second thing runners need is freedom from anything that will slow them down. “Let us … lay aside every weight” (v 1b).
Nobody would go for a serious run in a business suit; that would slow you down. Appropriate clothing was necessary in the ancient world as well. Runners would never run in a traditional robe—it would just trip them up. They would “lay aside” such garments so they could run more freely.
And if that is true for physical running, how much more is it true for spiritual running! We need to make sure that anything that could trip us up or drag us back and ruin our race is stripped off. We need to make sure we have freedom to run as we should.
Our author applies this principle in two ways. First, we should cast off “every weight.” The implication here is that it doesn’t have to be a bad or sinful thing to need casting off. It just has to be a thing that slows you down.
There are many things that could hinder our running, even if they are not bad in and of themselves. Maybe you’ve been sucked into social media, and it’s becoming a weight or a distraction. Maybe you’re watching a lot of television or are preoccupied with sports. These things are not sinful in themselves, but the question is, are they helping you run? It is so easy to spend so much time on other things that you take yourself away from what is better.
But the second application is more obvious: we need to strip off the “sin which clings so closely.” The NIV translates this phrase particularly well: “the sin that so easily entangles.” Easily. You do not have to work very hard to be entangled by sin. In fact, that is the default in life. If you do nothing to fight it, sin will cling to you tightly. So if you are going to run the race, you have to be proactively casting off sin.
Is there any sin you are not repenting of? Is there any sin you are holding close to yourself and not getting rid of? That is like running with a rope around you, pulling you back. You are going to end up tripping and falling.
We all make mistakes, but the key to the Christian life is to own our mistakes, repent of them, and turn from them onto a new pathway of obedience. The quickest way to ruin your Christian life is to be unrepentant about sin. We have seen repeatedly through the book of Hebrews that if you hold on to sin, you are actually in danger of not finishing the race at all.
Focus on the Finish Line
One of the classic rules of running is that you don’t look around at the runners next to you to gauge your progress. Instead, you stay laser-focused on the finish line. We too have a finish line. When we run, we should be “looking to Jesus” (v 2).
Waiting for us is not just another member of the Hall of Faith but “the founder and perfecter of our faith.” Other translations render “founder” as “pioneer”—that is, Jesus is the one who carved the path in which we walk. He has run the race for us, so that we might follow in his footsteps. Thus, he can rightly be considered the “perfecter” of our faith. He brings it to completion. The upshot of using this language is that it is clear that we do not run the race in our own strength. We are in the race only because Jesus has entered us in the race by his grace. He will sustain us by that same grace until we finish.
Jesus also functions as an example for us to follow. There are several things we can learn from Christ’s race which will encourage us as we run.
First, he ran the race with great endurance. He “endured the cross”! When you think that your race is hard, look to Christ. Crucifixion put criminals on display for the whole world to see and to mock and deride. It was as much about shame as it was about physical suffering. Yet Jesus “despis[ed] the shame.” He counted this as nothing for the purpose of finishing the race for us. He endured.
He also ran “for the joy that was set before him.” By running the way of the cross, Jesus was going to achieve the saving of a people for himself. That was the joy set before him: the joy of you and me being with him as his people forever. He was running to save us.
There is a paradox here. Having a hard race does not mean you cannot have joy. We tend to wish we had an easier race so we could be happier. But in the Christian life pain and joy often go together. In the midst of very deep struggle, pain, and suffering, you still find joy. Most of us want our trials and challenges to go away; we think that if we can just get rid of the hard parts of life, then joy will be ours. But that is not how it works. For Christ, joy was a result of the pain.
And so Jesus received his reward. He is now “seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” He resisted temptation and sin and fleeting pleasures, and came into the presence of God with perfect righteousness. He was crowned the winner of the race.
For us, our reward is Jesus himself. He is the crown. He is going to give us himself, forever. We will be beside the throne in heaven. He will be ours. And looking forward to that reward in faith is the only way you can run the Christian race. If you have your eyes firmly fixed on Jesus, the pain in your side doesn’t hurt quite so badly.
Thus our passage concludes—with a final exhortation. “Consider him … so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted” (v 3). Even though our race may include a lot to make us weary, we must focus on the finish line that is Jesus. Those who do so “shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31).