Lesson 26 – Our great cloud of witnesses
Read Hebrews 11 - www.bible.com/bible/59/heb.11.esv

In the last 8 verses of Hebrews 11 we have many others listed who were of great faith in God. Those names we can read about in the Old Testament books, and even those who are not named here are people we recognize from other places in the Bible.

Look at the list of things they had faith in God for:
* Conquering kingdoms
* Enforced Justice
* Obtained promises
* Stopped the mouths of lions
* Quenched the power of fire
* Escaped the edge of the sword
* Made strong out of their weakness
* Became mighty in war
* Put foreign armies to flight
* Received back their dead in resurrection

All these things in the above list are happy endings. Do we believe, in the middle of a battle with evil, that we can emerge on the victorious side? God can win the battle just as surely as He calmed the storm and the seas.


But God doesn’t always promise us a happy ending to every battle we are in. Please keep on reading, for the list also has negative things:
* Suffered mocking and flogging
* Subjected to chains and imprisonment
* Stoned to death
* Sawn in two
* Killed with the sword
* Destitute, afflicted, and mistreated
* Wandered about the deserts and mountains, living in caves and dens

How many times do we put our faith in God on the condition that He must make things turn out well for us? First, when do we know what victory looks like? When is it just around the corner and we have given up a moment too soon?

Faith in God must never be conditional on our part. We must always take the position that we trust Him to take care of us no matter what happens. Even the people in this last list, those who ended up dying for their faith, have a much better promise waiting for them than the richest person in the world who has everything money can buy.

As we noted in an earlier lesson, this earth is God’s school for us to learn how to have faith in Him. We are on our way to a new, eternal home with Him that we cannot even imagine. We will have to trust Him, have faith in Him there to be able to enjoy that life. We practice here with things we can see and sometimes even understand. We learn with things our senses can tell us.

 Look again at verse 39 – all these, even the successful ones from the first list, never quite understood and certainly did not see the wonderful salvation God had promised to them. He promised Jesus, and He painted pictures of Jesus in many ways. Yet, they never really understood. We have seen the beginning of the picture of Jesus, the part where He came to be our sacrifice for our sins. Can we trust God to complete that picture when Jesus returns for us – and until that moment we trust Him by faith?