There are some specialized chapters in Scripture, such as the "love" chapter (1 Cor. 13), the "godly woman" chapter (Prov. 31), and the "resurrection" chapter (1 Cor. 15). But the best known is Hebrews 11, the "faith" chapter.
One of the challenges to a right understanding of Hebrews 11 is our temptation to extricate it from its context and interpret it as if it stood alone, as if it really were the "faith" chapter. But Hebrews 11 is not an independent treatise on faith. It is one piece of a sustained argument woven into the warp and woof of the whole letter to the Hebrews.
The author of Hebrews is writing to believers in Christ who are under the pressure of various persecutions (10:32-34) and are considering throwing in the towel on Christianity, leaving its invisible realities to return to the visible and safer realities of Judaism.
For Jewish believers accustomed to a visible temple, priests, and sacrifices, whose fathers were promised a visible inheritance and tangible blessings, it was difficult to follow an invisible Savior, a great high priest serving in a heavenly tabernacle. It is still a challenge today to worship and serve an invisible God in a visually oriented world that largely rejects him. We twenty-first-century believers, no less than the original readers of Hebrews, have a desperate need for an enduring faith in Jesus Christ.
The key to understanding the place of Hebrews 11 in the author's overall argument is in its bookends. Immediately preceding Hebrews 11, the author tells his tempted and tried readers, "You have need of endurance" (10:36). And then on the heels of Hebrews 11, he implores them to "run with endurance the race that is set before us" (12:1). It is in Hebrews 11, right between the recognition of the need for enduring faith and the call for it to be exercised, where the author brilliantly and pastorally lays out the basis for that enduring faith in Christ. (1)
He starts in Hebrews 11:1 by describing how faith works, and it is a deep and daring description. Sadly, the force of it is blunted for many of us by the perpetuation of an unfortunate translation of that verse. The ESV, for example, represents the gist of most modern translations in saying: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." A translation along these lines communicates that faith is our subjective experience of assurance and conviction of future divine realities. But if faith stands or falls on our feelings of conviction and assurance, then faith’like Scrooge's sight of Marley's ghost’could be at the whim of "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato"! (2)
Happily, the virtually universal academic consensus is that the Greek words translated in 11:1 as assurance and conviction do not carry that subjective meaning. It is more accurate to render them (as the KJV does) as substance and evidence: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." That is admittedly difficult language, but it communicates a breathtaking truth: faith actually involves a present witnessing of and participation in divinely promised future realities. For us, that means the Holy Spirit, through God's word, implants in us faith as a gift that is more than a subjective confidence in Christ for the future, and which allows us to witness and participate now in the not-yet kingdom realities. As believers in Christ, by faith we are assured of future peace, and in the midst of our present turmoil, we actually know and experience "the peace of God" that "surpasses all understanding" and "guard[s] [our] hearts and minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4:7). By faith in Jesus we are given a present partial participation in a future perfect divine reality.
As wonderful as that is, the author in Hebrews 11 is not primarily focused on our faith. He is describing the faith of Old Testament saints and how it worked in their lives. His remarkable point is that those Old Testament saints, by faith, witnessed and participated in what was, from their historical vantage point, all a future reality’the future promised salvation of God bound up in the gift and mission of his Son Jesus Christ. And in doing so, they received testimony from God about Jesus Christ. That is the force of 11:2. It is not so much that the Old Testament saints were commended for their faith, but that by faith in the Father's promise they received testimony from God’testimony about his coming ultimate salvation in Christ, testimony that the author's original readers needed to hear, and that we need to hear today as well.
This is why the author does not describe the Old Testament saints he catalogs in Hebrews 11 as "examples" but rather as "witnesses." They are "the great cloud of witnesses" (12:1) who encourage us by their testimony concerning salvation in Christ to "run with endurance the race that is set before us."
That athletic imagery of the race has led some to incorrectly conceive the Hebrew 11 witnesses as passive spectators watching us from heaven. In fact, the New Testament understands "witnesses" not as people who watch but as people who testify. The Hebrew 11 saints are men and women who function as both "receivers" and "transmitters." They received testimony from God (through words and the sovereign unfolding events of their lives), and they transmit testimony to us (also by their words and the way they lived, all as recorded for us in Scripture).
Contrary to the usual take, the members of this great "Hall of Faith" are not primarily heroes to be imitated. This is not to say that these Old Testament saints have no exemplary power. The author earlier expresses his hope that his readers would be "imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (6:12). But that is a secondary concern in Hebrews 11. The author primarily wants us to hear their faith-borne testimony about the real hero, "Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith" (12:2).
The argument is brilliant. Writing to people who are considering going back to the safe haven of a visible Judaism, the author shows from Scripture that the patriarchs to whom his readers would return lived by faith in and testify to the reality of Jesus Christ, the very Savior from whom they want to walk away.
Space prevents hearing the testimony of all the witnesses in the "Hall of Faith," so let us touch summarily on just two of the towering figures: Noah and Abraham. In 11:7, we are told that Noah received testimony from God in the form of a warning about an unseen future reality’divine judgment. His faithful response of building an ark and saving his household, while condemning the world, testifies to us that to survive God's future judgment, we need a savior. Noah testifies to us of Christ by becoming a type of Christ. And by becoming an heir of the righteousness that is by faith, Noah testifies to our same need for an alien righteousness so that we might enter into God's kingdom’a righteousness ultimately found by faith in Jesus the righteous.
Abraham, who gets the fullest treatment in Hebrews 11, received testimony from God in the form of a covenant-bound promise of land and descendants. In response, Abraham interestingly testifies to us by not receiving the Promised Land and also by refusing to go back to the land he left (11:9, 13, 15). This divine delayed gratification taught Abraham (and he testifies to the fact) that God's unseen promised future is ultimately to be realized in a heavenly country (11:10, 14, 16). He affirmed that lived-out testimony with verbal testimony, acknowledging that God's people are strangers and exiles on the earth (11:13).
In the birth and near-sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham received testimony from God in the form of the delay of the birth (until it was humanly impossible) and the baffling subsequent command to sacrifice that long-awaited son (11:17-18). Through his faithful response, Abraham testifies to us of the future substitutionary death of an even greater Son of promise; but more than that, Abraham bears witness to the resurrection of the dead, the central reality of the gospel, as he figuratively received his son back from the dead (11:19).
The common denominator of the Hebrews 11 witnesses is that they did not receive what God promised, because that would only fully come to pass in the life and work of Jesus, the "something better" that God provided for us (11:40). We have something better because, in Christ, we have the privilege of witnessing (through the incarnation) the fulfillment of the promises made to the Old Testament saints. But there is a now and a not yet to the gospel: we have its promises and benefits, but not in their final consummated form. Much like the Hebrew 11 witnesses, we also hope for an unseen future reality. That reality will come upon the return of the king when, together with the Old Testament saints, we will be made perfect in Christ. As Hebrews 11 brilliantly affirms: there is one faith, one people of God, one gospel, one Savior and Lord’and his name is Jesus.
2 [ Back ] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1858), 17.
