The Endurance of Faith | Hebrews 11:32-40
Brian Hedges | February 9, 2025
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Hebrews 11. We’ll be reading Hebrews 11:32-40 here in just a moment.
While you’re turning there, I want you to imagine with me two Christians. Let’s just call them Liz and John. These are two Christians who both attend church regularly, they both follow Jesus. They’re both people of faith who in the same year encounter trials—serious trials—but with quite different outcomes to their trials.
First of all, think about Liz. Liz is a happily-married young woman with three children who is unexpectedly diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. She is shaken by this diagnosis, but immediately she pulls together her close network of friends and asks them to pray her through this trial. They are seeking either healing for the cancer or the grace to walk through it well. She seeks medical treatment and finds it successful. In fact, after only a few months, the doctors are surprised at how quickly the cancer goes into remission. This was beyond anyone’s hopes—not beyond the realm of possibility, but certainly not what was expected. And in her heart, Liz really believes that God has answered prayer, and she attributes her healing to the faith of her dear friends.
Now, through the trial, Liz has grown in her walk with God. The uncertainty was as hard as the cancer itself, and Liz has learned to trust in God’s daily grace in ways that she never has before. She knows that the cancer may return, but she is grateful for the healing she has received for now, and she views every day as a precious gift from God.
Now, compare Liz’s situation with John. John is a middle-aged man who’s a fairly new Christian and finds himself going through an unwanted divorce. He loves his wife, but she does not share his enthusiasm for Jesus or for the church. She just wants to move on with her life. He prays hard, he asks for counseling, but all to no avail.
Around the same time, John loses his job, through no fault of his own; his company is bought by a larger company, and his position is simply eliminated. Between the divorce and the job loss, his finances suffer a very serious setback.
Sometimes John feels deeply discouraged, but the pressures push him to pray and push him to begin really studying his Bible seriously for the first time. His external circumstances don’t get better, but his gratitude for Jesus deepens, and he becomes more empathetic and compassionate to other people who are going through difficult struggles of life.
Now, those are two very different scenarios. We’ve all known people facing those kinds of situations. I just want to ask you, which do you think is a better example of walking by faith? Just think about it for a minute. Liz or John? Which is a better example? Of course, the answer is that both are good examples of walking by faith, so in some ways it was kind of a trick question.
But I draw out those illustrations to begin because I think it exposes a misunderstanding that many people have about the life of faith. Sometimes people have this assumption that if you just have enough faith, you won’t really have any big problems. Or if you do face big problems, faith will help you to overcome every problem so that there will always be healing, there will always be reconciliation, there will always be an answer to prayer. I don’t think such a view of faith is actually biblical, and it’s certainly not what we find in Hebrews, and particularly in the passage we’re going to study together, Hebrews 11:32-40.
Remember the context of this letter. Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians. They have believed that Jesus is the Messiah, but they are suffering persecution. They are suffering pressure, and that pressure has created a temptation for them to draw back away from Jesus into Old Testament forms of worship. To these believers, the writer to the Hebrews is reminding them that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s purposes given in the Old Testament; that Jesus is better, having offered a better sacrifice as the better priest, having brought about a better and a new covenant that’s based on better promises. Jesus is better. They are therefore to hold fast to the confidence of their faith, firm and steadfast to the end. He is calling them to an enduring faith even though holding on to Jesus may bring about suffering in their lives.
That’s really the argument of this letter, and we get to Hebrews 11, which, unlike any other chapter in the Bible, gives us a litany of examples of people who lived by faith. We’ve been in this chapter for several weeks now, and we’ve learned that faith is a conviction that is rooted in God’s Word that leads to a life of worship and walking with God and obedience to him in a hostile world.
We’ve seen that faith is future-oriented, that it focuses on the promises of God yet to be fulfilled, as we look for a better city and as we hope for the future resurrection. And we’ve seen that faith changes people’s lives. It liberates them from sin and from merely temporal concerns and sets their hearts on eternal realities.
Today, we come to the crescendo of this chapter, as the author now just gives off a number of names and then in short fashion gives a number of examples of how people lived by faith. It’s quite an interesting chapter, or quite interesting passage, that shows us a couple of different ways in which faith gets expressed, not only through triumphing over trials but also through endurance of great suffering in their lives.
So let’s read the passage—it’s Hebrews 11:32-40—and then I want to show you three things from the passage. Hebrews 11, beginning in verse 32.
“And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
“And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.”
This is God’s word.
This passage, I think, can be broken down in three ways, three lessons or three truths that we see in this passage.
1. Faith’s Triumph through Exploits and Miracles (vv. 32-35a)
2. Faith’s Endurance through Suffering and Death (vv. 35b-38)
3. Faith’s Perfection in Jesus and the New Covenant (vv. 39-40)
Let’s look at each one of these truths in turn.
1. Faith’s Triumph through Exploits and Miracles
Verse 32 begins with this rhetorical question, “What more shall I say?” The author here has already taken us through the examples of Abel and Enoch and Noah, of Abraham and the great patriarchs of the faith, of Moses and the exodus generation, culminating with the conquest of Jericho and the faith of Rahab. He’s been giving us these examples of faith, and all he has said so far is sufficient to demonstrate the kind of faith that God’s people need and to demonstrate the fact that the faith he is calling us to now is really the same kind of faith that the saints of the Old Testament have.
But now, with this rhetorical question, he launches into just a list of names. In fact, he lists four judges, a king, and a prophet, and then the prophets in general, and then gives a number of examples of the exploits and the miracles that were accomplished through faith.
“And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon—” Remember, Gideon is one of the judges in the book of Judges. He had an army of 32,000 people going up against 135,000 Midianites. You remember that God essentially told Gideon, “Your army is much too large. Let’s whittle it down to size.” And eventually Gideon, with just three hundred men armed with torches and pitchers and trumpets, defeats the Midianites. It’s an example of how God shows his strength through human weakness to accomplish his great purposes.
He mentions not only Gideon, but Barak and Samson and Jephthah. These are other figures that are found in the book of Judges. We don’t have time to go into detail in all of these. But what we find is that all of these figures were flawed men in some ways, and yet they were men of faith who walked by faith, who lived by faith, through whom God accomplished deliverances for his people.
Then he mentions David, Israel’s greatest king, and Samuel, and the prophets. And then he says in verse 33, “...who through faith…” and he gives us a lengthy list of nine things that are accomplished through faith that are recorded in the next two verses.
Now, one of the commentators, named Gareth Cockerill, has said that these nine things really can be broken down into three groups, three categories of the triumphs of faith.
The first category he calls political successes. You see this in verse 33, who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises. And it kind of looks back to those early days within the people of Israel when they took the promised land, where they received the promises of the promised land and where the monarchy, the kingdom—and especially the Davidic kingdom—was established. And it was a kingdom established in justice and in righteousness.
Then the second category is deliverances from death. He says, “Through faith they stopped the mouths of lions.” Remember Daniel and the lions’ den from Daniel 6. “They quenched the power of fire,” probably recalling the story of the three Hebrew children in that fiery furnace. They were thrown into this fiery furnace because they wouldn’t worship the pagan image, and they were willing to die for their faith, but they were delivered. In fact, a fourth was seen in the fire there with them, one who was likened to the Son of God, perhaps a preincarnate Christophany, an appearance of Jesus Christ. “They escaped the edge of the sword.” These are different kinds of deliverances from death.
Then the third category is military victories. “They were made strong out of weakness.” Again, stories of Gideon and Samson and others demonstrate this. “They became mighty in war, they put foreign armies to flight.”
And then there’s a tenth thing added in verse 35, where it says that “women received back their dead by resurrection,” which ties into a thread that has been through this chapter, a thread of life out of death, the hope of resurrection. It recalls for us the stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. You remember Elijah and the widow of Zarephath in first Kings 17, and then Elisha and the Shunammite woman. These are two stories in the Old Testament where these widows had lost a son by death, and the prophet comes and through faith and the power of God the sons are raised to life.
Now, all of these are examples of the exploits and the miracles that are accomplished through faith in the mighty power of God, and they are some of the most inspiring stories in all of the Old Testament.
You have similar stories in the New Testament, and you have stories like this throughout church history as well.
Here’s one. Dale Ralph Davis, in one of his helpful little expositions, tells the story of Maria Linke, who lived in Berlin and was married there just prior to World War II. After the war, she was taken captive by the Russians and was incarcerated in one of their prison camps for nine years, from 1945 to 1954.
There, she was interrogated; she was beaten, kicked, stomped on. Her questioners wanted her to become a voice of propaganda to build the Eastern German regime, but she refused to comply. On one occasion, she told Lieutenant Khorobrov that she was a believer in God, that she could not in principle work for an advocate of an atheist regime. And so Korobov went to his holster, he pulled out his pistol, he put it to her head, she looked down the dark barrel; he asked, “Do you still believe in God?” And she said, “The bullets have nothing to do with the matter.” He cannot kill her unless God allows it.
He pulls the trigger, and nothing happens. There’s no explosion. There’s no blinding flash of light. Nothing happens. He looks at the gun; he adjusts it, he reloads, he pulls the trigger again. Nothing happens. In frustration, he threw the revolver across the room, and she was allowed to live.
It was one of those miraculous, unexplainable deliverances from God. Now she’s still in prison, but she was eventually released and wrote a book to tell the story. But it’s one of those examples in history that show us that God sometimes delivers his people in miraculous and remarkable ways, ways that human beings cannot explain. Faith triumphs through these difficulties, through the miraculous deliverances of God. That’s true both in biblical times and sometimes today.
It’s a great encouragement to us that God has the power and sometimes chooses to bring these kinds of deliverances into our lives as well. And maybe one of the primary application points from these stories and from the whole of Hebrews 11 is the importance of you and I reading and knowing Christian history and Christian biography. Because as we know these stories, as we learn these stories, it emboldens our hearts to trust in God in the midst of our own trials, our own struggles, reminding us that God is able to do far and abundantly above all that we ask or think.
So, whatever situation you’re facing today, I want to encourage you: God can bring deliverance, and in his sovereign goodness, he sometimes chooses to do so. If you find yourself in an impossible situation, know that the Lord can work in ways that you have not yet considered. Take your burdens to him. If you are burdened and praying for an unbelieving loved one whose heart seems so hardened in sin and in unbelief, don’t give up. Keep taking that to the Lord in prayer. God can change any heart. If you are faced with personal trials, whether it’s battling illness or anything else, take that matter to the Lord in prayer and trust that God is able to bring deliverance or He’s able to bring sustaining grace to help you endure the trial, because sometimes that is how God hears our prayers.
2. Faith’s Endurance through Suffering and Death
We see in this passage not only how faith triumphs through these great exploits and miracles; we also see faith’s endurance through suffering and death. And it’s just as valid an expression of faith as the triumph over trials.
Charles Spurgeon one time said, “Faith is the force by which brave deeds are done and great sufferings are endured.”
How do you endure great sufferings? You endure them by faith. That’s what we see in Hebrews 11:35-38, from the middle of verse 35 down through verse 38. Once again, we have a list. We have a list of things that were accomplished through faith, but now the list is not one of miraculous deliverances, now this is a list of the suffering and the trials and the problems that God’s people face.
Once again, Cockerill is very helpful. He shows that this list now is almost a mirror image of the previous list, but showing us the reverse circumstances. So instead of military exploits, you see severe punishment. Look at verse 35. “Some were tortured, refusing to accept release so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonments.”
Then, instead of deliverance from death, you see cruel, agonizing experiences of death. “They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with a sword.” This is probably a reference to some of the Old Testament prophets. Jewish tradition tells us that Isaiah the prophet was sawn in two by the evil King Manasseh.
There’s perhaps in these verses also a reference to the Maccabean martyrs who, in more recent Jewish history, between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New, the Maccabean martyrs were men who suffered for their faith in the God of Israel. And the original audience, of course, would have recognized these stories.
Instead of experiencing political success, Cockerill points out that they experienced exclusion from society. Look in the middle of verse 37. “They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, and mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering about in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth.” These are people who are living as exiles. They’re living as pilgrims. They are living without the security of living within normal human society.
This, of course, would have spoken really personally to these Jewish Christians, some of whom have already suffered the plundering of their property, some of whom have already been to prison, and many of whom are facing these kinds of circumstances in their lives.
All of this is showing us the enduring quality of faith, faith’s endurance through suffering and death. Brothers and sisters, this is also the experience of many of God’s people in the world today. We know the stories of the missionaries and the martyrs who have suffered for the name of Jesus.
Have you heard the story before of John and Betty Stam? These were twentieth-century missionaries. They met in the late 1920s while students at Moody Bible Institute, and then were married several years later in 1933. They became missionaries to China with the China Inland Mission, and on December 6, 1934, they were kidnapped and held for ransom by the communists.
On that occasion, John Stam sent a letter to the mission authority stating how he and Betty had been captured, and he quoted Philippians 1:20: “May Christ be glorified whether by life or death.”
The next day, they were marched twelve miles on foot to the city of Miaoshou. Then the next day they were marched down the streets of that city to be executed. Curious onlookers line both sides of the street. A Chinese shopkeeper stopped the procession, stepped out of the crowd, talked to the communists, trying to persuade them not to kill the missionaries. The soldiers ordered the man back into the crowd; he wouldn’t step back. And when the soldiers invaded his house, they found a Chinese copy of the Bible and a hymn book. So he was also joined with the Stams to be executed. They marched a little further down the street. John Stam was ordered to kneel and was beheaded in front of his wife. Betty shuddered, but did not scream, and then she also died by the sword, and the Christian shopkeeper as well.
There was no deliverance, but there was faith. There was faith to the very end, and their gravestones today now read, “John Cornelius Stam, January 18, 1907 [his birth date],” with this quotation, “That Christ may be glorified whether by life or death, Philippians 1:20.” And, “Elizabeth Scott Stam, February 22, 1906,” with this quotation: “For me to live as Christ and to die is gain, Philippians 1:21.”
The story of the Stams and the countless other believers who have suffered for Christ illustrate for us the enduring, persevering quality of genuine faith. What I want us to see this morning is that both the triumphs and the deliverances that we experience and the endurance, being faithful through suffering and death, they are both expressions of faith. And all of us in the course of our lives will probably experience a little bit of both. Such stories should prompt us, then, to ask some questions about our own faith and endurance.
Ask yourself, does my faith hold up under pressure? Am I faithful to Christ when I am tempted to compromise? When I encounter suffering, does my faith grow stronger or weaker? Have I set my hopes on God himself or just on the blessings that God gives? Would I still serve God if he withdrew his blessings and did not answer certain prayers?
You might ask, “How can we develop that kind of faith, the kind of faith that endures even in the face of suffering?”
We’ll see the fuller answer to that next week, when we look into Hebrews 12, which is really the application of all of the illustrations given to us in Hebrews 11. But we get a hint, I think, in the third point, faith’s perfection in Jesus and the new covenant.
3. Faith’s Perfection in Jesus and the New Covenant
We’ve seen that faith triumphs through exploits and through miracles, we’ve seen that faith endures through suffering and death; and now, verses 39-40, faith is perfected in Jesus and in the new covenant.
These are interesting verses that round out this chapter. It says, “And all these, though commended through their faith [referring back to Hebrews 11:2, ‘For by faith the people of old received their commendation’], did not receive what was promised.” Why did they not receive what was promised? Here’s the answer, verse 40. “Since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.”
This connects us back to the theme of this letter again, that Jesus is better. There’s something better that they were waiting for. That something better is fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Gareth Cockerill in his commentary says,
“This something better can be nothing less than the cleansing from sin and restoration to God that are the present possession of the people of God through the work of Christ, the better covenant and the better hope through which we draw near to God because Christ’s better sacrifice has removed our sins.”
It’s through this better work of Jesus Christ that the Old Testament saints were perfected. Notice how it says in verse 40, “Since God has provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.” It’s another one of the key words in Hebrews, this word “perfect”, the theme of perfection.
You might remember in Hebrews that we have already learned that the laws and the sacrifices of the Old Testament were unable to make the people perfect (Hebrews 7 and 9). Instead, they needed a perfect priest, Jesus Christ, the one who in his incarnation became perfect through suffering and through obedience in order to bring us salvation (Hebrews 2:10, 5:9); the one who, through his singular sacrifice on the cross, has now perfected once and for all those who are being sanctified (Hebrews 10:14). And Hebrews 11 is showing us that the faith of those who suffered before was really only perfected now that the work of Jesus Christ has been accomplished in the new covenant. And we, as believers in Jesus Christ, are brought in and are part of the same people of God.
You might think of an illustration. Think of a great work of art that in its beginning stages is not seen in its completion, in its perfection, in its beauty. But over time, the picture emerges. Think of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. It took him four years to do that. Can’t you imagine that in the early days, when there was just paint and some odd shapes on the ceiling, people would look up, and they wouldn’t know what he was doing. They wouldn’t understand the grandeur of the picture he was putting together. But after four years, when it was finally complete, then they could see.
In the same way, the Old Testament saints, they couldn’t see the full picture. And in a real sense, you and I, brothers and sisters, we don’t see the fullness and the reality of all this yet either. We see the fullness of what Jesus Christ has done, but we also are still waiting for the consummation of our salvation, when Jesus comes again and we are raised from the dead and we experience the fullness of what God has promised to his people. But the call for us today is the call that was for the people then. It’s the same call, and it’s expressed for us in Hebrews 12:1-2. Again, we’ll look at this in more detail next week, but just notice this exhortation.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Now here, what we see is that Jesus himself is the supreme example of the pattern of faithful living—Jesus, the one who also experienced suffering, suffering all the way to the death of the cross; but Jesus who has now entered into resurrection life and is exalted to the right hand of the throne of God. Jesus is the pattern. He experienced suffering and he entered into life, and that same pattern of suffering and glory will be worked out in our lives as well as we look to Jesus, as we trust in Jesus, walk with Jesus by faith, even through the trials, the persecution, and the suffering that we may face for his sake in this world.
So we’ve seen three things this morning. We’ve seen faith’s triumph through exploits and miracles, faith’s endurance through suffering and death, faith’s perfection in Jesus in the new covenant. And the call for us today is to look to Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith; to trust in him, trust in him for deliverance, and oftentimes he will deliver; but trust in him also for endurance. When he doesn’t deliver, he will give you the grace you need to endure and to be faithful in trial and trust in him for everything you need. He’s the perfecter of our faith. He’s the one who brings it to completion. And our great need is to trust in Jesus.
If you’ve never done that, if you’ve never put your faith and your trust and your hope in Jesus Christ, crucified for your sins and risen from the dead to give you the hope of reconciliation with God, the assurance of your sins forgiven and the hope of eternal life, I encourage you to do so today.
Let’s all of us who believe in Jesus continue to walk by faith in him. Let’s pray together.
Our gracious, merciful God, we thank you this morning for your word and we thank you for the great examples of the faithful in your word. May they inspire us to imitate their faith and, like them, to be people who live trusting in your word, trusting in your promise, and trusting you even when there’s not an immediate deliverance, trusting you when the call is to endure and to be faithful in the face of suffering and even of death itself. Lord, we cannot do that on our own. We can’t accomplish that on our own. We can only do that as we look to Jesus. He is the one who gives us faith, he is the one who perfects and completes our faith. So this morning, we do look to Jesus together.
We express right now our deep trust in him and what he has done for us as our Savior, as our substitute, as our representative, and as the great example that we are to follow.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, would you help us to come with our eyes on Christ, on what he has done for us? May we see in the emblems of the table the broken body and the shed blood of our Savior Jesus Christ, and may we trust in him with all of our hearts. We ask you, Lord, to draw near to us now in these moments and be glorified in our continuing worship together, and strengthen our faith. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
