By Faith

Hebrews 11

Read Hebrews 11 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1

The Cloud of Witnesses

Hebrews 11 is the most famous chapter in the letter, and probably one of the most beloved chapters in all of Scripture. It is the great faith chapter, the roll call of the saints, the passage every Christian has heard read at funerals and ordinations and confirmations. By faith Abel, by faith Enoch, by faith Noah, by faith Abraham. The phrase repeats like a drumbeat, eighteen times by some counts, through the long procession of those who belonged to God across the centuries before Christ came. The chapter reads like a cloud of witnesses forming around us, each one named, each one pointing to the way of faith, each one bearing testimony that the life we are called to has been walked before by those who made it home.

And the chapter sits in exactly the right place in the letter. In the previous session we heard the writer declare, “But we are not among those who shrink back and thus perish, but are among those who have faith and preserve their souls.” The question that naturally arises is: what does that mean? What does it look like to be among those who have faith? What has faith actually looked like, across the long history of God’s dealings with His people? The writer now answers, at length. He takes us through Genesis and Exodus and Joshua and Judges and Samuel and beyond, naming name after name of those who lived by faith. And as he names them, he is saying to his readers, and to us: this is your family. This is the company you belong to. You are not inventing Christian life from scratch. You are walking a path that has been walked before, by many, and God brought them home, and He will bring you home too.

We will not try to treat every figure in this chapter. That would flatten the text and exhaust the class. Instead, we will pause at a few figures whose stories carry the main theological weight, and we will let the cumulative effect of the rest carry us. Pay attention, as we go, to what faith actually is in the writer’s telling. It is not bare optimism. It is not the confidence that things will turn out well on our own preferred timeline. It is conviction about unseen realities, the realities God has promised, that shapes how we act even when we cannot see the outcome. It is Abraham leaving home without knowing the destination. It is Moses choosing affliction over the palace. It is Rahab welcoming the spies. It is parents hiding their baby from Pharaoh. It is the way God’s people have always belonged to Him: by trusting Him, even when we cannot see.

And notice, as the chapter unfolds, a remarkable theme. Not all the figures in Hebrews 11 received what was promised in their own lifetimes. Some did extraordinary things; others were extraordinarily mistreated, tortured, killed, sawn in two. The same faith produced, in this life, very different outcomes. What they shared was not success (not as the world measures it) but faith. The writer will conclude the chapter by saying that all of them, even in their varied experiences, were commended for their faith, yet none of them received what was finally promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that they would be made perfect together with us. The saints of old and the saints of the new covenant are part of one great family of faith, waiting together for the consummation that only Christ secures.

What Faith Is

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see. For by it the people of old received God’s commendation.”

The writer opens with a definition, though it is less a technical definition than a descriptive characterization. Faith has to do with what we hope for: futures God has promised but we have not yet seen. Faith has to do with what we do not see: present realities that are real but hidden from ordinary sight. And faith is being sure and being convinced of these things. The Greek words are firm ones. The first, hypostasis, can mean the underlying reality of a thing, what stands beneath it; older translations rendered it “substance” or “assurance.” The second, elenchos, is the word for proof or evidence, the kind that convinces. Faith is not a wish. Faith is not a feeling that might be true. Faith is the settled confidence that what God has said is so, even when the circumstances around us seem to contradict it. And notice where that sureness comes from. Faith is not sure because it is strong. It is sure because what it holds onto is sure: the promise of God.

Notice what this means. Faith is not a leap in the dark. Faith is not believing what we know to be false, or believing without any grounds. Faith rests on the word of the God who has spoken. It is the confident trust that the God who promised is faithful, that what He has declared will come to pass, and that the unseen realities He names are as real as the seen realities we handle daily. In fact (and this is the deep Christian paradox) the unseen realities are more real than the seen, because the seen world is passing while the unseen is forever.

“By faith we understand that the worlds were set in order at God’s command, so that the visible has its origin in the invisible.” The first application of the definition is to creation itself. The visible world, the writer says, was not made from visible materials. It was called into being by the word of God. And we perceive this by faith: not because we can point to a scientific experiment that demonstrates it, but because God has spoken and we receive His word about the origin of everything. Faith reaches back to the beginning, and it reaches forward to the end, and everything between is held in the same word of the same God.

The writer then turns to the saints, and the pattern “by faith” begins. We are going to trace a path through a few of them, not all, but enough to feel the shape of the chapter. Abel is first, then Enoch, then Noah. These are the saints before the call of Abraham, the witnesses from the earliest chapters of Genesis that faith has always been the way humans have belonged to God.

Before Abraham

“By faith Abel offered God a greater sacrifice than Cain, and through his faith he was commended as righteous, because God commended him for his offerings. And through his faith he still speaks, though he is dead.”

Abel stands at the beginning of the long line of the faithful. His story is in Genesis 4: two brothers, two offerings, one accepted and one rejected, and the older brother’s envy that ended in murder. The writer of Hebrews pauses only briefly, but his summary is rich. Abel’s sacrifice was greater not because of its external superiority but because of the faith in which it was given. And through that faith, Abel was commended by God as righteous: righteous by faith, at the very beginning of the story, before Abraham, before Moses, before the Law. The first accepted worshiper in Scripture was accepted by the same righteousness that justifies us: the righteousness of faith.

And “through his faith he still speaks, though he is dead.” Abel’s death at his brother’s hand did not silence him. The witness of his faith has echoed through the millennia. The first martyr for faith is still preaching, to anyone who will read his story, that the way of faith is older than any other way, and that dying in faith is not defeat but testimony.

“By faith Enoch was taken up so that he did not see death, and he was not to be found because God took him up. For before his removal he had been commended as having pleased God. Now without faith it is impossible to please him, for the one who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

Enoch is a brief but remarkable figure. Genesis 5 tells us only that he “walked with God, and then he disappeared because God took him away.” He did not die as others died; God simply took him. And the writer uses this small story to make a large theological point. Enoch pleased God. And without faith, it is impossible to please God. Therefore Enoch had faith. The logic is simple but load-bearing. Pleasing God requires faith. The one who approaches God must believe two things: that He exists, and that He rewards those who seek Him. Not complicated theology; two basic convictions. God is real. God meets those who come to Him. And the reward is not wages earned; it is what God has promised to give. On these two foundations, the life of faith stands.

“By faith Noah, when he was warned about things not yet seen, with reverent regard constructed an ark for the deliverance of his family. Through faith he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.”

Noah’s faith was tested by a remarkable command. God told him to build a boat. The boat was enormous, by ancient standards, and it was built on dry land, in response to a warning of a flood that no one had yet seen. Noah was warned about things not yet seen, and he responded with reverent regard, building the ark over many years, laboring at the commission God had given him while the world around him carried on as normal. His faith was not merely intellectual assent. Because he believed the warning, he built, in public, where everyone could see. Day after day, year after year, he built. And when the flood came, the word he had trusted proved true. His family was saved. The world that had not believed was judged.

Notice the phrase: Noah “became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” This is the Pauline formula, appearing here in a non-Pauline letter, applied to a figure from Genesis. The righteousness of God comes by faith. It came by faith to Noah. It came by faith to Abel before him. It comes by faith to us now. The continuity of how God has always justified His people is plain. One doctrine, one righteousness, one means of receiving it, across the whole sweep of redemptive history.

The Long Faith of Abraham

The writer now comes to Abraham, and he lingers. Of all the figures in Hebrews 11, Abraham receives the most space, and rightly so. Abraham is the father of the faithful, the pattern of trust, the one whose story Genesis tells at length precisely so that all who come after him can see what faith looks like lived out over a lifetime.

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, and he went out without understanding where he was going.”

Here faith shows itself: Abraham left. He left his home, his extended family, the familiar patterns of his life, because God had called him. And the remarkable phrase: “without understanding where he was going.” God had not given him coordinates. God had said, go to the land I will show you. The showing was yet to come. Abraham had the command and the promise; he did not have the map. And on the basis of the command and the promise, he went.

Consider what this means about the nature of faith. Faith is not certainty about the future in the sense of knowing all the details. Faith is the trust in God that lets us walk even when we cannot see the road. Abraham walked into unknown territory because he trusted the God who had spoken. This is the pattern. We trust the promise-giver, not the promises’ specifications. When God calls us to follow Him into something we cannot fully see, faith is the simple willingness to go on the basis of His word.

“By faith he lived as a foreigner in the promised land as though it were a foreign country, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who were fellow heirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with firm foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

When Abraham arrived in the land, he lived in it as a foreigner. He did not build a city; he lived in tents. The land was his by promise, but he did not possess it by title. He lived out his whole long life in the land as a sojourner, a wanderer, a stranger in the place God had promised would belong to his descendants. And the writer of Hebrews says Abraham could do this because he was looking beyond the land itself, looking forward to a city with firm foundations, built by God. Abraham’s faith was not merely about a piece of real estate in Canaan. It was about an eternal city, of which the earthly land was only a shadow. He saw what the land itself could not finally give, and he held the land loosely because of what he saw.

The writer then addresses the birth of Isaac. The NET reads: “By faith, even though Sarah herself was barren and he was too old, he received the ability to procreate, because he regarded the one who had given the promise to be trustworthy.” The Greek of this verse is difficult, and translators divide over it. Many translations make Sarah the subject, so that she receives the power to conceive; the NET makes Abraham the subject, with Sarah named alongside him. Either way, the point is the same. Both of them were past hope, and both of them had laughed when the promise of a son was spoken (Genesis 17:17; 18:12). Who would not have, at their age? What carried the day was not the strength of their bodies, or even the strength of their faith, but the faithfulness of the One who promised. Faith regarded Him as trustworthy, and He was. The writer continues: “So in fact children were fathered by one man,” and this one “as good as dead,” descendants “like the number of stars in the sky and like the innumerable grains of sand on the seashore.” From a body as good as dead came a nation. The power of God did what their own capacities could not, and faith simply received it.

Then the writer steps back and makes an observation about all the figures he has named so far. “These all died in faith without receiving the things promised, but they saw them in the distance and welcomed them and acknowledged that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. For those who speak in such a way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. In fact, if they had been thinking of the land that they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they aspire to a better land, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

This is one of the most beautiful passages in Hebrews. The saints died in faith, without receiving the things promised. They saw them in the distance. They acknowledged they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. They aspired to a better land, a heavenly one. And God is not ashamed to be called their God, because He has prepared a city for them. The heavenly homeland that Abraham glimpsed in his wandering, the city with firm foundations, is the inheritance of every one who lives by faith. And the God whose word drew Abraham out from his home is the God whose preparation of that city is the final answer to the wandering.

And then the most searching test. “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. God had told him, ‘Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,’ and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead, and in a sense he received him back from there.”

Abraham raised the knife over Isaac. It is one of the most harrowing stories in Scripture. Why would God demand the sacrifice of the son through whom the promises were to be fulfilled? The command seemed to contradict the promise. And yet Abraham went. The writer of Hebrews tells us how Abraham reasoned: God could even raise him from the dead. If God has promised descendants through Isaac, and now God commands Isaac’s death, then God must intend to raise Isaac from the dead. Abraham did not understand what God was doing, but he trusted that God could be trusted even at the limit of what Abraham could imagine. And Isaac was spared. In a sense, the writer says, Abraham did receive him back from the dead; he got his son back from a death that had seemed certain just moments before. And the story points past itself. On that mountain God provided a ram in Isaac’s place, and Isaac walked home. Centuries later God did not spare His own Son, and there was no substitute for Him, because He was the substitute. The faith that walked out of Ur had been refined, across a lifetime, into the faith that could raise the knife, trusting that God would make a way through even that.

The Choice of Moses

The writer moves through Isaac and Jacob and Joseph briefly, and then he comes to Moses, who receives extended treatment. The story of Moses’s faith is the story of a choice.

“By faith, when Moses was born, his parents hid him for three months, because they saw the child was beautiful and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.” Moses’s story starts with his parents’ faith. In an age when Pharaoh had ordered the murder of every Hebrew male child, Moses’s parents hid him. They defied the king’s edict. They trusted God for their child’s safety more than they feared Pharaoh’s executioners. And God kept their child: Moses was saved, taken into Pharaoh’s household, raised as Egyptian royalty.

“By faith, when he grew up, Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be ill-treated with the people of God than to enjoy sin’s fleeting pleasure.” Moses was raised in privilege. He had every reason to identify with the Egyptian court. And when the moment came to choose his people, he chose the slaves, not the palace. He refused the Egyptian inheritance and cast his lot with the oppressed Hebrews. This was a choice of faith, and it was a choice made at enormous material cost. Moses gave up wealth, status, security, and the future of a prince. He gave it all up for the company of slaves who had no prospects and a God whose rescue had not yet come.

“He regarded abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for his eyes were fixed on the reward.” The phrase is striking: abuse suffered for Christ. The Greek reads literally “the reproach of Christ,” as older translations have it. Moses lived well over a thousand years before Christ’s incarnation, yet the writer says the scorn Moses shared with God’s people was borne for Christ. Moses cast his lot with the people through whom the promised Anointed One would come, and to share their disgrace was to share in the reproach of the Christ who was coming. The Psalms already speak this way of the insults heaped on the Lord’s anointed and on those who belong to Him (Psalm 89:50–51). The Christ who would one day take flesh and bear the reproach of sinners was already the one for whose sake the faithful suffered. And Moses counted that reproach greater wealth than all the treasures of Egypt. Faith gave him eyes to see the true value of what he was trading. His eyes were fixed on the reward, the inheritance that is not subject to time or decay.

“By faith he left Egypt without fearing the king’s anger, for he persevered as though he could see the one who is invisible.” The phrase at the end deserves to be held up. Moses persevered as though he could see the One who is invisible. Faith does not make God visible in the ordinary sense; faith gives us the conviction to live as if we could see Him, because we know He is there. Moses could stand before Pharaoh because he saw, by faith, the true King of whom Pharaoh was only a counterfeit. He could lead the people out through the sea because he saw the God whose hand was moving the waters. The external circumstances were the same for everyone; what differed was what Moses, by faith, perceived. The invisible God was the most real thing in Moses’s experience, and everything else was organized around that reality.

The Cloud Grows

The writer now moves faster. He names the crossing of the Red Sea by faith. He names the fall of Jericho by faith. He names Rahab the prostitute, who welcomed the spies and was saved with her household because she believed what she had heard about the God of Israel. And then, as if realizing he could go on for chapters, he stops listing names one by one and gathers them in a great sweep.

“And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets. Through faith they conquered kingdoms, administered justice, gained what was promised, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, gained strength in weakness, became mighty in battle, put foreign armies to flight, and women received back their dead raised to life.”

A sweeping catalog of the triumphs of faith. Kingdoms conquered, justice administered, promises gained, lions’ mouths shut (Daniel), raging fire quenched (the three friends in the furnace), swords escaped, strength gained in weakness, armies put to flight, dead raised (the widow of Zarephath, the Shunammite woman). The power of God has worked through the faith of His people again and again to accomplish what could not have been accomplished by any other means. The history of Israel is full of these stories. The writer does not have space to tell them all; he names them in summary and moves on.

Look closely at the names, though. This is not a gallery of moral heroes. Rahab was a prostitute in a pagan city. Barak would not go into battle unless Deborah went with him. Samson broke his Nazirite vow and gave his secret to Delilah. Jephthah made a rash vow that cost him his daughter. Gideon asked for sign after sign, and David was an adulterer and a murderer. Go back up the list and it is no different: Abraham lied about his wife, Jacob deceived his father, Moses killed a man and fled. If Hebrews 11 were a list of people who earned God’s commendation by their character, most of these names could not be on it. They are on it because of whom they trusted, not because of who they were. What God commended was faith, and faith does not commend itself; it is the empty hand that receives what God promises. The glory of this chapter does not belong to the saints. It belongs to the faithful God they held onto, and finally to the Christ He promised, the Christ for whose sake Moses bore abuse and apart from whom none of them would be made perfect. So we do not read Hebrews 11 and resolve to become heroes like them. We read it and find sinners like us, held by the same promise that holds us.

But then, in one of the most important moves in the chapter, the writer turns a corner. The triumphs have been named. Now the sufferings. “But others were tortured, not accepting release, to obtain resurrection to a better life. And others experienced mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, sawed apart, murdered with the sword; they went about in sheepskins and goatskins; they were destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (the world was not worthy of them); they wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and openings in the earth.”

Read that carefully. Some of the faithful received dramatic deliverances: kingdoms won, lions silenced, fire quenched. Others received no deliverance of that kind. They were tortured. They were mocked and flogged. They were sawed apart. They wandered destitute in caves. The same faith that produced the triumphs produced, in other saints, nothing but suffering ending in death. And the writer does not say one group had more faith than the other. He places them side by side in one chapter, under the same banner of “by faith.” Both were faithful. Both were commended by God. The outcomes in this life were different, but the faith that produced them was the same.

This is a crucial pastoral insight. Faith is not a formula for getting what we want in this life. Faith is trust in the God who has promised eternal life, and the particular shape of our earthly experience is not guaranteed by the amount of our faith. The widow who received her dead back and the prophet who was sawn in two were both vindicated by God in eternity. The faith of the one was not greater than the faith of the other. What they shared was the conviction of what they could not see, and what they inherit now is the same: the city God has prepared.

“And these all were commended for their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised. For God had provided something better for us, so that they would be made perfect together with us.”

The chapter ends with this astonishing sentence. All the saints of the Old Testament, the whole roll call from Abel forward, were commended for their faith, yes, but they did not receive what was promised in their own lifetimes. Why not? Because God had provided something better for us. The something better is the new covenant, sealed in Christ’s blood, inaugurating the age in which all the ancient promises come to their full realization. The Old Testament saints were looking forward to what we now look back to. And they are made perfect, brought to the goal, not apart from us but together with us, because we are all one family, one people of God, one company of the faithful, waiting together for the full consummation that Christ’s return will bring.

This is the writer’s closing framing. The saints of old are not distant heroes to be admired from a distance. They are our family. We belong with them. And we wait together (they from their rest, we from our race) for the full inheritance that neither they nor we have yet received, but that Christ has secured for us all. The cloud of witnesses surrounds us. We are not alone. And the path they walked by faith is the same path we walk, under the same God, toward the same city with firm foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Gathering the Threads

A long and vivid chapter. Three movements hold its theological shape.

The first is the definition. Faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see. It is not wishful thinking or a leap in the dark; it is confident trust in the promise of the God who has spoken. And it is the means by which the people of old received God’s commendation, the same means by which every saint in every age has been counted righteous.

The second is the gallery of witnesses. Abel who still speaks. Enoch who pleased God. Noah who built the ark. Abraham who left his home and raised the knife over his son. Moses who counted abuse suffered for Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt. Rahab who welcomed the spies. The judges and the prophets. The sufferers and the triumphers, both commended by the same faith. Sinners, every one of them, held by the same promise. Across the history of Israel, a long procession of the faithful, each one pointing to the pattern of trust in God that has always been the way of His people.

The third is the unity of faith across the covenants. All these were commended for their faith, but they did not receive what was promised. God had provided something better for us, the new covenant sealed in Christ’s blood, so that together we would be made perfect. The Old Testament saints and the New Testament saints are one family, waiting together for the full inheritance. The heavenly city is our shared destination. The God they trusted is the God we trust. The Christ we know was, mysteriously, the Christ they hoped for.

The pastoral payload of the chapter is immense, and it is worth naming explicitly. First, you are not alone. The way of faith has been walked by many, and their testimony surrounds you. Second, faith does not guarantee any particular outcome in this life; it guarantees the commendation of God and the inheritance of the eternal city. The question is not whether faith produces the circumstances we want; the question is whether we are living as those who trust God regardless. Third, the Christian community spans the ages. Abel and Abraham and Moses and the prophets belong to the same family you belong to. You will meet them one day. In the meantime, their testimony is yours to draw on. They have done this walk before. God brought them home. He will bring you home too.

The writer’s great argument in Hebrews 11 is that faith is not an innovation of the new covenant. It is how God has always saved His people. The cloud of witnesses assembles not to intimidate us but to encourage us: to show us that we are on a well-trodden road, that we have many companions who have gone before, and that the path leads home. Chapter 12 will pick up this image of the cloud of witnesses and call us to run the race with endurance, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus. But first, chapter 11 has given us our family tree. We are the heirs of the faithful. We belong to the company of Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham. And the God who carried them home will carry us home too.

For Discussion

1. The writer defines faith as “being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.” How does this definition differ from common modern understandings of faith as wishful thinking, blind leap, or mere optimism? Where does your own faith feel sure and convinced, and where does it feel weak? When it feels weak, where does God’s promise meet you?
2. Abraham “went out without understanding where he was going.” Faith walked into territory it could not map. Are there places in your own Christian life where you have walked without a clear map, trusting God for what you could not see? What did you find?
3. Moses “regarded abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.” What does it look like, practically, to make this kind of valuation, to see the suffering that belongs to Christ’s people as greater wealth than what the world offers? Where have you had to make such a choice?
4. Some of the faithful in Hebrews 11 received dramatic deliverances; others were tortured and killed. The writer places them side by side under the same banner of faith. What does this teach us about the relationship between faith and outcomes in this life? How does it guard us against the false teaching that faith always produces visible blessing?
5. The writer says the saints of old “did not receive what was promised. For God had provided something better for us.” How does it change your sense of Christian identity to know that you are in some sense the completion of their waiting, that they were looking forward to what you now look back on? What does it mean to belong to one family of faith with Abel and Abraham and Moses?
6. The chapter’s image is of a cloud of witnesses surrounding us. What saints, biblical or more recent, have surrounded your own faith as witnesses? Who are your Hebrews 11 figures, and what has their testimony meant to you?

Looking Ahead

Session 13 takes up Hebrews 12:1–17, where the writer applies the image of the cloud of witnesses to the Christian life directly. We must get rid of every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and run with endurance the race set out for us, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. The chapter then turns to the discipline of the Lord (how the hardships we endure can be received as the loving correction of a Father who is shaping us for holiness) and closes with a warning against bitterness and Esau’s example of selling one’s birthright for a single meal.

Before next session, read Hebrews 12:1–17 carefully. Notice the image of the race and the posture of keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus. Notice the teaching on discipline and how it is meant to shape Christian endurance. And notice the warning at the end, which picks up once more the pattern we have seen throughout the letter: the call to vigilance against anything that would cause us to shrink back.

Closing Prayer

God of Abel and Enoch and Noah, of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and Rahab and the prophets: we thank You that You have always gathered Your people by faith. Grant us the faith You gave them, being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see. Let us walk as they walked, trusting You for what we cannot see, choosing the reproach of Christ over the treasures of this world, running with endurance toward the city You have prepared. And when we stand at last in that city with them, let us find that You were preparing us, together, for the inheritance we will share forever in Christ. Amen.