NOTES for Heb 11:15-16

Continuing the discussion of faithfulness and trust in God, the author of the letter says of the righteous of antiquity that they died without receiving what was promised. This, however, did not drive them to despair and did not make them betray promises once given or the covenant-union once made with God: they did not abandon hope for the Kingdom whose coming they awaited (vv. 13-14). And this hope and faithfulness were expressed above all in the fact that none of them ever thought about the possibility of turning back and returning to the former life they had left when they believed the God who had revealed Himself to them and followed Him (vv. 15-16). The author of the letter gives numerous examples of such faithfulness, well known to every reader of the Old Testament books (vv. 17-31).

These reminders, of course, were not accidental: the righteous of antiquity were to become examples of faithfulness and hope for the Kingdom for the author's contemporaries, many of whom apparently possessed such qualities to a far lesser degree than their great spiritual predecessors. The crisis experienced by the church communities after the catastrophe of AD 70 was first of all a spiritual crisis: many of those who had expected the imminent triumph of the Kingdom were disappointed in their expectations, and along with that, in messianism as such, turning, perhaps, to the traditional Jewish way of life as a kind of religious refuge in which they could live through an inner crisis and the collapse of hopes that had not come true. Certain signs of such a crisis had appeared already during Paul's lifetime, when representatives of the first generation of Christians began to die, people who, like their fellow believers, were certain that the Savior would return and the Kingdom would triumph during their own lifetime. But after AD 70, one may think, it intensified sharply. And the author of the letter gives examples of those who believed in the coming of the Kingdom even when centuries still remained before its coming; they believed while knowing with complete certainty that they themselves would not have to see it, and they hoped that they too would not be left out of its triumph, even though they had no exact ideas about the resurrection of the dead, just as they had none about their own fate after death, and therefore had no guarantees that they themselves would become participants in this triumph. And if, despite all this, the ancient righteous did not despair, how could those to whom the Kingdom had not only been promised, but who had already been joined to it, lose hope merely because the triumph promised by the Savior turned out not to be as near as it had seemed to those who were waiting?

In today's reading the apostle Paul offers a very interesting interpretation of Abraham's behavior. For us, who grew up in Christian culture, it may be completely obvious that if we believe in God, then we also believe in the resurrection of the dead. Yet even in Paul's time this was by no means obvious. It was still less obvious in Abraham's time. Strictly speaking, Abraham had no special grounds for believing in resurrection. For a person of that time and culture, immortality was found precisely in children; Abraham could not imagine any other continuation of life. But Paul says that Abraham trusted God, who had promised that Isaac would be the father of a great nation, so completely that he did not doubt for a second that the promise would be fulfilled, even if Isaac were offered as a sacrifice. How can this be? Does the how really matter? Abraham does not think about how it will happen. He simply accepts as fact that God's words cannot contradict one another, and therefore they will somehow fit together... And this trust is credited as righteousness.

How impoverished our concept of faith has become. We call someone a believer if they declare that they belong to a particular religion or simply believe that God exists. In many passages of Scripture, faith is spoken of in an entirely different way. Faith is our openness to God, a channel of communion with Him through which we receive His revelation. What is beyond comprehension becomes known to us with certainty. Paul calls this “the assurance of things not seen.” More than that, through this connection God's active power can pour into this world, and then things happen in it that we could only dream of. The Apostle says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Thus, faith is a living connection with God through which we come to know Him, while He acts in us and in the world.