The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Well, it happened again. I got stung by a wasp — the week after my daughter got stung by a wasp. Second time for me this summer. And as you know, it’s a little creature. According to my research, this nasty little creature actually provides a rather valuable ecological function. They do, in fact, pollinate from one plant to another. They also, by the way, eat a lot of those tiny little pests that crawl around your house and home. And they also have a function in what they technically call parasitism — they actually have yeast in their stomachs, and when they hibernate in the winter and come back in the spring, they pass on that yeast, which allows the new wasp to digest food. That’s what they do. They’re actually supposed to be good little creatures — except for the fact that if you’re on the stinger end of the creature, it can hurt quite a bit.
Now that’s the nature of how nature works in this world. Pain and pleasure is a fundamental principle of creation. Pain’s been a part of this world since Genesis chapter 3, verses 17 and 18. There God said: “Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. And it will produce thorns and thistles” — which equally can be painful as well. Painful toil, thorns and thistles, come right along with the beauty and the wonder of God’s creation. And God not only spoke a death sentence upon sin and our sinful selves, He made sure that during this life we would endure our share of pain. No one — Christ included — has been given a pain-and-sorrow-free life, because pain is the result of sin and God’s judgment upon sin.
And as you know, pain comes in different forms. There’s physical pain. There’s emotional, psychological pain. There’s spiritual pain. There’s also degrees of pain — from minimal pain to unbearably excruciating. It’s that moderate way, that very scientific way of determining your pain level, with the happy face and the frowny face and the different colors on the little chart in the doctor’s office. See, because pain is in some sense somewhat relative. Some human beings have a very high tolerance for pain; others are very sensitive. What really bothers one person a lot may not bother another one very much.
And the Epistle lesson this morning offers something more than just three examples of pain and sorrow. It offers, if not a remedy for it, a way of understanding and managing pain and sorrow in light of God’s existence and in light of God’s work.
Hebrews chapter 11 was written to be a counterpoint to the very end of Hebrews chapter 10. Hebrews 10:26-39 talks about those who have departed from the faith through willful sin or neglect, and thus shall receive a judgment upon their faithless lives. Verse 38: “My righteous one will live by faith, and if he shrinks back, My soul shall have no pleasure in him.” Hebrews 11, on the other hand, is referred to as the chapter that contains the hall of faith. It’s about those saints of the Old Testament who endured until the end, who kept the faith and held firmly to it to the day they departed from this realm.
The writer begins his evidentiary process with Father Abraham. God made a promise to Abraham: Abraham would become the father of many nations. The first step in fulfilling that promise — to be the father of many nations — was the birth of just one son, who they named Isaac: Abraham and Sarah’s only son. Now imagine the struggle, the pain, and the conflict Abraham had to deal with when God came to him and ordered him to sacrifice his son Isaac. It was a hard decision to make about what to do with God’s command. And that command seemed to be the polar opposite of what God had promised Abraham to do.
Yet Abraham believed, and he had faith that God would return Isaac, post-sacrifice, back into the line of the promised Messiah. Verse 11:19 of our reading: “He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead, from which he also received him back as a type” — as a type of Christ. There’s a Greek word used there about the resurrection of Isaac from the dead. It’s a Greek word from which we get the word “logical” in English. It can be translated “consider,” which is what our translation does. It can be translated “reason.” So Abraham considered what God could do. He reasoned through what God could do. He took an accounting of what God could do. He was thinking about and concluding what God could do. All of those are words that could be rightly translated from the original. Abraham took into consideration his decision to sacrifice Isaac in light of the fact that God, by definition, can raise dead people back to life. And Abraham believed it.
Thus Isaac’s deliverance from death became a type of Christ’s resurrection. Trusting God’s promise, Abraham began his ascent up the mountain, telling his servants: “Stay here with the donkey. I and the boy will go over there and worship, and will come again to you.” The writer of Hebrews attests, in essence, that God did return Isaac from the dead when He stopped Abraham from plunging the knife into his son as he laid him on the altar. Though it was without a doubt one of the most painful tests a saint could be subject to.
The writer of Hebrews tells us: “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, his son, who had received what was promised to him.”
Isaac’s next in the list. He grew to adulthood, and he too was made to suffer for the faith that he had been entrusted with — a faith that he had since he was a child. First we see the manifestation of that faith when he goes up the mountain with his father Abraham. He was old enough to understand, ultimately, what his father was about to do to him. It would have been obvious to him as soon as his hands and feet were bound and he was laid on the altar. In the biblical text, there’s no sign of Isaac’s resistance, no mention of it at all. Isaac simply trusted his father and his father’s God.
Once grown into adulthood, Isaac inherited a large family left behind by Abraham — that is, the household and the servants, and a large family business, which Isaac managed well. He was, by the biblical record, a wise, faithful, and kind man, who managed to live in a very violent world rather peacefully with his neighbors. But in the most important things that the Lord God gave Isaac to do, Isaac struggled to do it. The custom of the day, you see, was to pass on the estate to the oldest son. But God had instructed him to pass on his estate to Jacob, the younger of the two, not Esau. In this, Isaac stumbled. If not for some trickery by Rebekah and Jacob to put Jacob back into the messianic line, back on track, Esau would have been the family heir, and the messianic line derailed. Yet still the writer of Hebrews wrote: “By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau.” Even in this moment of stumbling, faith was still present in the heart and the mind of the father.
Jacob too had to endure sin and hardship. As you can imagine, stealing the blessing from Esau put Esau in a bad mood. In fact, he was in such a bad mood he was looking for a way to murder his brother. So Jacob had to run for his life. In fact, he did that twice. Later in life, Esau would show up with an army of 400 men to wipe out Jacob and his kids. Family life for Jacob was a bit complicated too — I mean, it was the Leah-Rachel problem, wasn’t it? Two wives, sisters, and then two female servants who also served as surrogates for sons for Jacob. It seemed like things weren’t going to go particularly well in those relationships. And in fact, by the time Rachel had her second child, it was a deadly experience: she died giving birth to the second son. Later on, the son that Jacob most loved was reported by his brothers to be killed by a wild animal. That sent Jacob into a state of depression that lasted for an estimated 20 years.
Yet despite all of that trouble and all of that heartache and all of that complication and all of that sin, the Scripture says: “By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each one of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.” He died in faith. That’s what he did.
Then there’s Joseph, next in line. Ambushed by his brothers, thrown into a pit, sold into slavery — you know the story well. Lied about and framed for a crime he didn’t commit by Potiphar’s wife, thrown into prison and forgotten there for years. Yet he never wavered in his faith. In the great and horrible events of Joseph’s life, the writer of Hebrews highlights the abiding nature of Joseph’s faith: “By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel, and gave orders concerning his bones.”
Next, 400-plus years later: Moses. And the list provided by the writer of Hebrews is rather extensive, though not exhaustive. It’s more complete than the works and deeds and challenges mentioned of the other saints. Verse 23: “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents.” Born to a mother and father — Hebrews themselves, held captive in Egypt — mother and father who believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, hid and protected their baby Moses from Pharaoh’s purge of the firstborn of every male son in the Hebrew nation.
It was by faith Moses’s mother put him in a basket and hid him in the reeds along the Nile River. Adopted by one of Pharaoh’s daughters, when he had grown up, Moses rejected his adoption as Egyptian royalty, and he rejected the royal life that came with it. He murdered an Egyptian and fled out into the wilderness, and there he married and settled into a happy and normal life — until he saw that bush that did not burn with fire, and then he heard the Word of God spoken to him: “I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.”
“By faith Moses chose to endure the ill-treatment of the people of God rather than enjoy the temporary pleasure of sin.” In other words, it was unpleasant being a pastor for 40 years in that wilderness, with those people constantly arguing and complaining and plotting against the one that God had sent to deliver them. Those 40 years of the wilderness were not a picnic for Moses, or anyone else for that matter. They weren’t supposed to be. It was a just judgment against their unbelief and their idol-making. The children of God often make it miserable for faithful pastors to do their work. Yet Moses did so, only by true faith.
“By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood” — as a foreshadow to the New Testament of Christ’s blood in the giving of the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday. “By faith they passed through the Red Sea as though on dry land” — and a foreshadow to the sacrament of Holy Baptism.
Hebrews tells us why Moses kept the faith and did all these things: “Moses considered” — he thought about, he reasoned through — “the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.” That’s verse 26. Moses measured all that he had to endure against the person and the work and the glory to come in Jesus Christ.
Moses and the other saints, you see, they did not have a general hope and a generic god. But rather, they had a specific faith and hope in the specific God: Yahweh Elohim, the one who had revealed and spoke and promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob — the God who would send them the promised Messiah, the Christ.
In verses 29 through 38, we have a long list of other people, other saints in the Old Testament, all of which had to endure war and hunger, distress, brokenness — all who had to live by faith in the promised Messiah. Hebrew Christians, who themselves suffered for faith in Christ Jesus — before Christ Jesus was born — look at the whole list of these faithful men and women and what they went through, the pain they suffered. Some were stoned, sawn in two, scourged, in prison, mocked, left destitute, wearing the skins of goats, living in caves, tortured. That’s the life of the Old Testament saints.
All were able to endure to the end because they took the long view. They reasoned and thought and dwelled on that which God had done and could do and promised to do for them and for their descendants. So the writer of Hebrews says: “We have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. Let us rid ourselves of every obstacle and the sin that so easily entangles us. Let us run the race with endurance that is set before us, looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross” — that is, His life too was filled with pain and suffering and loss — “despising the shame, He sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Him, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
We’ve been given the biblical text, the Word of God, the example of these saints — all who suffered and struggled more mightily than we do these days — a great cloud of witnesses. Look to the promise of the Messiah, of Christ, and most heavily to their heavenly home. They knew and understood that pain is temporary, and all things in the Christian’s life are redeemed in Jesus Christ. They knew the truth of what St. Paul wrote in Romans chapter 8: “We are heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. For I consider the present sufferings of this time nothing to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
The way Christians make it through painful times and suffering in this life is to consider, to think, to see their pain, their suffering, and their loss in the light of the person and the work of Jesus Christ, centered in the crucifixion of Good Friday.
Of all the people listed in Hebrews 11, every one of them has at least three things in common with us. They weren’t all saints. Their faith and moral character failed, one after another, time after time — just as we are sinners and often fail. Our faith wavers. We stumble and fall. The Lord gave them the promise of the Messiah and the promises of a perfect life for the world to come. So He has given us, to say the very same, in the very same person: the promised Messiah, Christ Jesus. And they were given the gift of faith and held fast to true Christian faith, no matter what mood, emotion, or circumstance befell them.
We have something, though, that they did not have. We have the fulfillment of the promised Messiah in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. We hear His voice in the Gospels. We see what He’s done for us and for our salvation. They looked forward to the coming of Christ. We can look back to the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Know what the prophet Isaiah would write, and did write, Isaiah 53: “However, it was our sickness that He Himself bore, our pains that He carried. We ourselves assumed that He had been afflicted, struck down by God, and humiliated. But He was pierced for our offenses. He was crushed for our wrongdoings. The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.”
The entire body of evidence given to us in Hebrews chapter 11 points us to the author and perfecter of our faith, so that we are people who live by faith, even in the midst of our deepest pain and strife. Christ is proof of our eternal destination and our hope. He who endured physical pain, psychological pain, emotional pain, and worst of all, spiritual pain — in the forsaking of His heavenly Father — in His life, our life is redeemed. In His pain, our pain is redeemed. And in His suffering, our suffering is redeemed — redeemed so that we will go on to live a life, an everlasting life, with no sin, therefore no pain, no sorrow. Our sins are forgiven, and one day your pain will end. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.