Running with Our Eyes Fixed on Jesus
How would you respond if one day you turned on the news and the coverage was about your church? The story was not about any scandal or sin but in fact amounted to a public shaming simply because your church held to the teachings of Scripture. How would you respond if some of your fellow church members were in prison simply for confessing faith in Christ? How would you respond if you had lost your home and many of your possessions for the same reason?
This is what happened to the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews: “Ye were made a gazingstock both by reproaches and afflictions. … Ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods” (Heb. 10:33–34).
These people had endured much, and they had responded well. They responded to the theft of their property with joy. And yet there existed the real danger that some of these people would cave under the pressure and abandon the faith. So Hebrews exhorts them, “Cast not away therefore your confidence” (Heb. 10:35).
This is the context for the famous Hall of Faith chapter. Hebrews 10:33–35 launches a section of exhortation that extends though 12:24. The core teaching of this section is an exhortation to endurance with the goal of receiving the promised reward (10:35–36). Hebrews 10:37–39 teaches that a life of faith is needed to endure unto the reward. Hebrews 11 provides a host of examples from the Old Testament and intertestamental period of people who endured by faith and who will receive the reward. Hebrews 12:1 then draws the conclusion from the examples recited in Hebrews 11: “Wherefore . . . let us run with patience,” or endurance.
Run with Endurance
This is the heart of Hebrews 12:1: run with endurance. Before the recitation of the witnesses the author urged his readers not to cast away their confidence but to endure (10:35). Now after the recitation of testimony about those who live by faith, we are once again called to endurance.
But this call comes with the background of what it means to live by faith in the promises of God. How are we to lay aside weights and run with endurance? We do this by faith in God’s Word. We trust that promises from God that we hope for are indeed more real than what allures us or threatens us, and we take God’s Word by faith as the proof of the future reality of the yet unseen rewards (11:1). Faith is the foundation for endurance.
Three Ways We Run
Surrounding the command to run with endurance are three phrases which tell us how we ought to run. We run having a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, we run laying aside every weight and sin, and we run looking unto Jesus.
Run Having a Cloud of Witnesses. Because of the athletic imagery later in the verse, people often read this verse as though the saints in heaven are looking down as spectators of our race and cheering us on from their vantage point. However, the Greek word translated “witnesses” doesn’t refer to spectators at an event. Another Greek word is used to describe spectators or onlookers. The Greek word used here refers someone who gives testimony about something he has seen or heard.1 The witnesses are those whose lives are recounted or alluded to in chapter 11. We are to run knowing the testimonies of those who have already run their race by faith and finished their course.
This is no minor matter. The author stresses the great number of these witnesses.2 Hebrews 11 is a lengthy chapter, and in 11:32 the author says that time would fail him to tell of all the people who lived by faith. This gives us a sense of the innumerable witnesses who can testify that by faith in God’s Word they endured the running of their race. Given the witnesses presented in Hebrews 11, let us now run with endurance.
Run, Laying Aside Every Weight and Sin. Second, we are to lay aside every weight and sin as we run. Because the author says the Christian runner is to lay aside “every weight,” it seems that these weights include things that are not inherently sinful. The Christian walks a fine line here. The Christian cannot call God’s good creation evil. That is a doctrine of demons (1 Tim. 4:1). Yet Romans 1 is clear that it is possible to love the creation and not the Creator, the gift and not the Giver. When this temptation presents itself to the Christian, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow his Savior.
If the Christian denies himself even good parts of God’s creation because they have become encumbrances to his race, then how much more must he turn from sin? To cling to sin is an evidence of lack of faith. It is a statement that the person believes that God is less desirable than the pleasures of sin. To run with endurance, sin must be lain aside.
Run, Looking unto Jesus. The final way of running with endurance is to run looking to Jesus. Jesus is the final and climatic example of enduring by faith.3 He is the climatic example of running with an eye on the promised reward. Though the Christian runner runs with an awareness of the cloud of witnesses, he runs with his eyes focused on Jesus. He has turned away from everything else. His gaze is fixed like that of a runner focused on the finish line, undistracted by what is occurring in the stands or elsewhere on the track.
Who Is This Jesus?
Because we are to look to Jesus as we run, the author of Hebrews expands on who Jesus is in 12:2–3. He directs our gaze to several specific aspects of who Jesus is which will enable us to endure in our race.
Author and Finisher of Our Faith. By “author of our faith,” Hebrews may be saying that Jesus is the One who bestows faith upon us and works it in us. Philippians 1:29 says that faith is something that is bestowed on us by God. It is for this reason that the disciples pray to Christ for faith in Luke 17:5. Since the point of these verses is endurance in faith, it is right for us to have our eyes fixed on the only One who can give us the faith that we need to endure.
Jesus is also the finisher of our faith. He continues His work of strengthening faith and all its effects in our lives. He grants us more faith as we call out to Him. So we look to Jesus as we run with endurance, because He is the source of our continued faith. We run in dependence upon Him.
The One Who Also Endured. The second description of Jesus reveals that He endured suffering and shame for the sake of the promised reward. In this Jesus is our example. We too ought to endure suffering and shame for the sake of the reward. In the context we are told what Jesus’ reward was: enthronement at the right hand of God. We know from Philippians 2:9–11 that this exaltation of Christ ultimately culminates in “the glory of God the Father.” In all of this Jesus is shown to be our perfect example. His and our ultimate joy is the glory of God the Father. As Jonathan Edwards demonstrated through painstaking study of Scripture, bringing glory to God is The End for Which God Created the World.
For Jesus the reward was an enthronement that will bring glory to God. Our reward is different. Hebrews 11 teaches that the reward Christians look forward to is our resurrection bodies and the new creation (11:16–19). Hebrews has encouraged us to endure suffering with these future joys and rewards serving as motivations. And these joys too will ultimately eventuate in glory for God the Father.
The joy, however, is not achieved without suffering and shame. Here again is the theme of endurance with Jesus as the preeminent example of endurance. Just as He endured the suffering of the cross, so we must endure in our race. We must not cast away our confidence even in the face of something like the cross.
Jesus also despised the shame. The culture Jesus lived in was similar to many non-Western cultures today in that the ultimate evil to be avoided was to bring shame on oneself and one’s family. To be shamed was far more significant than we would think in our western mindset. And there was nothing more shameful than hanging exposed on a Roman cross. It was considered so degrading that no Roman citizen could be crucified. But Jesus despised present shame for the sake of the reward to come.
The One Enthroned at God’s Right Hand. The reign of Christ is a theme throughout the book of Hebrews beginning in 1:3 and carrying on right to the end. The reign of Christ is a proclamation that Jesus really is better. It confronts readers with the reality that Jesus should not be abandoned for an easier way. But in this context it is a reminder that Jesus received the reward after enduring His race.
Christians in the present may be in the midst of suffering and shame. But when they look to Jesus they see not only that He endured through the same kind of trials but that He also received the promised reward. The resurrection and ascension testify to God’s power to bring about ultimate victory over all opposition.
Conclusion
American Christians know little of suffering and shame for the sake of Christ. But if we are called to suffer for Christ’s sake, it would be easy to encounter that trial by sight alone. The trial is the painful reality, and the promises of God seem illusive and insubstantial. This passage challenges us to realize that it is the life lived by sight alone that is deceptive. Life lived by faith in the promises of God is the life that sees reality as it really is. This faith enables Christians to accept the theft of their property for Christ’s sake with joy because our eyes are on a greater reward. As John Newton reminds us, “Fading are the worldlings’ pleasures, all their boasted pomp and show; solid joys and lasting treasures none but Zion’s children know.”
(Originally published in FrontLine • January/February 2016. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)
Brian Collins (PhD, Bob Jones University) is an elder at Mount Calvary Baptist Church and a Bible Integration Specialist at BJU Press.
Photo by Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash
- William L. Lane, “Hebrews 9–13,” Word Biblical Commentary, ed. David A. Hubbard (Dallas: Word, 1991), 408. [↩]
- In Greek authors such as Herodotus and Homer, “a cloud was a common metaphor for a great throng of people” (Peter T. O’Brien, The Letter to the Hebrews, Pillar New Testament Commentary, ed. D. A. Carson [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010], 450). [↩]
- In certain liberal theologies Jesus is made out to be nothing more than an example. These theologies deny that Jesus’ death was a death in our place in which he bore the Father’s wrath for our sin. Such theologies offer no hope of redemption. But their false assertion that Jesus was nothing more than an example does not negate the truth that in many ways Jesus is our example. [↩]