God Provided Something Better for Us - Hebrews 11:32-40 - November 1, 2026 - Brad Smith
/Wrapping up six weeks in Hebrews 11, Brad Smith opens with a vivid image from a haunted house — a spinning tunnel where your eyes and your inner ear are in total conflict, leaving you frozen and staggering. That, Brad argues, is exactly the condition faith is designed to address. True, Biblical faith is not a blind leap contrary to all evidence, as many assume. Rather, it is a clear-eyed, data-driven step forward — like Abraham who was "looking forward to a city whose designer and builder is God" (Hebrews 11:10), or Sarah who "considered him faithful who had promised" (Hebrews 11:11). These saints saw into a deeper, firmer reality, and instead of freezing, they moved and obeyed.
Brad is equally honest, however, that faith does not guarantee a life of mountaintop victories. Hebrews 11:35-38 makes an abrupt and uncomfortable shift from conquering kingdoms and stopping the mouths of lions to torture, imprisonment, stoning, and destitution. Far from undermining the case for faith, Brad argues this is essential to understanding it. The same God who worked through Gideon's fear, Samson's failures, and David's adultery — crooked sticks, every one of them — was drawing a straight line to Jesus, who grades his people not on a curve but on a cross. The prize at the bottom of the box is not miraculous intervention or a comfortable life; it is Christ himself, the perfecter of faith, and the resurrection that awaits on the other side of suffering.
Transcript
God Provided Something Better For Us Hebrews 11:32-40
• Don’t judge me for this if you’re opposed to them, Christian liberty and all, feel free to debate me later, but I took my family to a haunted house the other week. In one of the sections, we turned a corner & I saw a sight I dread because I’ve done it before.
• A long passage where you’re entering a spinning tunnel. And there are lines of light in the tube you’re entering to further reinforce that everything is spinning & rotating very fast.
• And there’s a suspended walkway, a little bridge with handrails for you to hold on to, as you make your way through this tunnel. But As you grip those handrails & try to walk across that bridge, what your eyes experience & what your inner ear senses are in total conflict. Your brain goes haywire. I stumble & stagger like a drunk man trying to walk the 20 feet across that bridge.
• Everyone in line, as soon as you step foot on that bridge, initially freezes. So the employees & other people in line start yelling, Keep moving! Close your eyes if you have to! Go forward.
• After fighting every natural instinct you have, bit by bit, slowly but surely, you make it to the other side. But in the middle, standing on that bridge, there’s a war between what you FEEL & SEE & what you KNOW is real. That’s why the employees yell, Move! Keep going! Close your eyes if you have to!
• As we’ve gone through Hebrews 11, have you picked up all the references to seeing past the temporary to eternal realities & moving - taking action? Vs. 1 – Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
• Vs. 3 – What is seen was not made out of things that are visible. Vs. 5 – Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death. Vs. 6 – Without faith it’s impossible to please God, for whoever would draw near to God – move/act – must believe He exists & that He rewards those who seek Him.
• Vs. 7 – By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen…constructed an ark. Vs. 8 – By faith Abraham obeyed and he went out, not knowing where he was going – Vs 10 – He was looking forward to a city whose designer & builder is God.
• Vs. 13 – These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them & greeted them from afar.
• Vs. 26 – Moses considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.
• In all these seemingly impossible situations, when everything around them is spinning, shaken, by faith these saints saw a deeper reality and obeyed. They moved when it was easier to freeze & doubt.
• That’s what faith is. Think of James 1 where James says, Count it joy…when you meet trials of various kinds, for…the testing of your faith produces steadfastness – stability, firm foundation.
• James says, If you lack wisdom – if you don’t know what to do, if you can’t see with spiritual eyes, if you’re frozen – ask God – but ask in FAITH, with no doubting. For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven & tossed. He’s double-minded, unstable in all his ways.
• Think of what that means, double-minded/unstable. Like me in that tunnel, as everything is spinning &
I’m gripping those handrails, frozen & staggering, trying not to throw up. I’m caught between two conflicting realities. What I SEE & what I KNOW.
• Have you ever heard someone talk about a leap of faith? Søren Kierkegaard fleshed out what would become that concept of a leap of faith in the 1800’s.
• Now, first off, Kierkegaard never said those actual words “leap of faith”, and many scholars say most modern representations of his arguments misrepresent what he said. But he did talk about a qualitative leap. Meaning, there’s an end to how far data & information can take you. You can be so obsessed with data & arguments & definitive proof that you never stop to appreciate the mountains of evidence you already have, and you fail to take the leap, you freeze, refusing to move into faith.
• But many people think Christianity is ignoring evidence & taking a BLIND leap of faith, hoping it works out. That’s not what Christian faith is.
• If you’re a mature, spiritual Christian, then you’ve surely seen the Indiana Jones movies, just like Star Wars. Do you remember in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, where he’s looking for the Holy Grail, at the end, he has to face three trials to get to it.
• In the final trial, he comes to a huge chasm, with no bridge, no visible way to cross, and he checks his journal & all his notes & he says, It’s a leap of faith. And he’s nervous, thinking he’ll fall, but he puts his hand over his heart, lifts his leg & basically falls forward & he’s shocked & relieved to find a camouflaged bridge he couldn’t previously see, holding him up, letting him get to the other side.
• That’s NOT the faith pictured here in Hebrews 11. This isn’t blind faith. These Saints in the Hall of Faith SAW. They looked & found a deeper, firmer reality. A better, heavenly country w/foundations.
• They weren’t blindly leaping into thin air, contrary to all the evidence. Vs. 10 says Abraham was looking – seeking – a city that has FOUNDATIONS. It’s solid. Vs. 11 says Sarah considered Him faithful who had promised.
• She saw & considered all that God had done – evidence – and she had faith in Him. True faith is NOT blind, it’s not leaping into thin air in SPITE of evidence. We know & practice this every day.
• You got in your car this morning & expected it to start, why? Cars start. You’ve seen it time & time again. You’re shocked & puzzled when it DOESN’T
start, not when it does. You didn’t KNOW it would start, but you had every expectation it would.
• Then you came in here & sat down on one of these chairs. Did you KNOW, with 100% certainty it would hold you up? We’ve all seen chairs break before, right? But how did you know to trust this one & put all your weight on it? Not blind faith. Evidence.
• And it’s not just in our everyday actions & decisions that we have faith. Think about the core values of our society, our world – our ethics.
• We’ve got neighbors around the corner from us & they have one of those yard signs that say, Love wins. We believe in human rights. Science is real. Diversity is strength. People, not profits. Lives matter. Kindness is everything. Justice for all.
• You’ve seen those, right? The insinuation is, we’re not like those crazy religious people with their nonsense beliefs & blind faith. We trust reality!
• And it’s the wildest thing to me. Each of the things on that sign, they’re Christian ideas. Valuing love, not power. Human rights, individual liberty, pursuit of justice, valuing diversity, scientific discovery…
• All these ideas that we now treat as FACT, these are not things the ancient world believed or valued. They’re also exclusive truth statements – this is right, that’s wrong – in a world that claims to hate exclusive truth statements. Live your truth, follow your heart – but only when it matches up to what my sign says, you close-minded bigot.
• And everything on that sign is a statement of faith. What do you find in biology & matter & molecules that would ever lead you to conclude that the strong shouldn’t dominate the weak? That love & consciousness are even real? That justice is a concept we should value? That people have rights?
• That women have value? That you shouldn’t be judged by the color of your skin but by the content of your character? How does science prove science? Where do we find grounding for any of it?
• Those moral concepts didn’t just evolve; we don’t find them in nature & biology. Richard Dawkins wrote a whole book about it, The Selfish Gene. A cold, cruel world, driven by a random evolution of chaos & pitiless indifference, means NONE of the moral, faith, value statements on that sign are real.
• Dawkins admitted that & wrote: In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
• Yet the same people who believe that put signs up in their yards w/faith statements that contradict that.
• THAT’S double-minded. THAT’S unstable. THAT’S a blind leap of faith. That’s not the kind of faith Hebrews 11 pictures. This is a solid faith with a firm foundation. It SEES something, it isn’t blind. It moves, it acts, because it’s backed by evidence.
• In vs. 32, the Preacher of Hebrews starts to wrap up with, What more shall I say? It’s good evidence that this book was originally a sermon, because this is a very Preacher thing to do.
• He’s gone chronologically from Genesis to Joshua, from Abel to Rahab, reminding us of specific circumstances in their lives of faith, and he realizes, holy smokes, I could go on forever, but we don’t have time. So he goes into rapid fire mode & crams the rest of the OT in a quick summary section because he’s got to bring it to a close.
• After 5 weeks covering this amazing chapter, let’s do the same thing & wrap up this chapter & dive into what he covers here in the close.
1) Crooked Sticks, Straight Lines
• Have you noticed that almost every single OT Saint listed here in Hebrews 11 went through major periods of doubt & disobedience, not faith? Abraham, the guy who doubted God’s promises & took Hagar & had Ishmael because he was tired of waiting on God’s promises?
• We’re STILL paying the price for that one. War in Iran, the Middle East, Islamic terrorism, having to take off your belt & shoes at the airport? Thanks a lot, Abraham. And Sarah begged him to do that, then she laughed at God’s promise, didn’t she? Jacob, the deceiver? Moses, the murderer who lived in exile for 40 years, then disobeyed & couldn’t go into the Promised Land?
• The Children of Israel who had faith at the Red Sea? As soon as they’re on the other side they start complaining & wanting to go back, then weeks later they’re dancing naked before a golden calf.
• What about the folks listed here in vs. 32? Gideon? The guy who hid out of fear, then kept asking for another sign, then made an idol that led Israel astray at the end? Barak? The guy who refused to go to war unless Deborah went? Samson? Really?
• Jephthah, who made a rash vow that cost him his daughter? David? The Goliath thing was great, the murder & adultery & ruining almost his entire family, not so much. Samuel was solid, but he raised bad sons. Most of these don’t seem like good illustrations for folks who had amazing faith.
• But God doesn’t hide any of it from us. There’s no white-washing, God shows us all the blemishes. No other religion does this. All throughout the Bible it’s big and bold: murderers, adulterers, liars, outcasts, manipulators, rejects, doubters, & disobedient men & women – God uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines.
• We see it again in vs. 32-34, God says, What faith! Conquering kingdoms, enforcing justice, obtaining promises, stopping the mouths of lions, quenching fire, escaping the sword, mighty in war, foreign armies put to flight, receiving back their dead by resurrection…wow! They nailed it, right? No.
• I skipped the key phrase in vs. 34. Did you catch it? Made strong out of weakness. That’s the key in this backwards, upside-down Kingdom of God, where we die to live, serve to lead, give to gain. The weak don’t become strong. They’re MADE strong.
• And how does that happen? God isn’t simply skipping past their failures to grade these Saints on a curve & say, Eh, they’re good enough. God doesn’t grade on a curve. He grades on a CROSS. The better Abraham, the true David, the ultimate Moses, the one these imperfect heroes & saints were pointing to, Jesus – He obeys perfectly. He passes the test we failed & makes the weak strong.
• In Colossians 2 Paul says, ALL of us, who were dead in our trespasses and sins – weak - God made us alive together with Christ – strong – How? Having forgiven all our trespasses, cancelling the record of debt that stood against us w/its legal demand that WE die & WE pay the price for being crooked sticks – Jesus nailed our judgment, death sentence, to His cross & disarmed our accuser, putting him to shame, triumphing over him.
• These saints are crooked sticks, but their story writes a straight line to Jesus. Vs. 13 tells us: these all died IN FAITH – not having received the promise, but they saw the promises & greeted them from afar and acknowledged they were strangers & pilgrims. They desired a better, heavenly country.
• Therefore, God is NOT ashamed to be called their God. He doesn’t look at them & see their failure & decide to grade on a curve. He sees the perfect, righteous work of His Son, that these saints in faith looked to & trusted, and grades on the Cross.
• The same faith that saved them in their crookedness is the same faith that can save you in yours. Then the Holy Spirit will transform you, from one degree of glory to the next, conforming you to the image of God’s Son – through testing, trials, through difficult circumstances, just like these saints experienced, while enabling you to draw the same straight lines of testimony & praise to Jesus.
• Speaking of trials & difficulty, let’s keep moving further into vs. 35-38. After talking about these amazing things, conquering kingdoms, enforcing justice, stopping mouths of lions, winning battles, receiving resurrection, there’s an abrupt shift.
• The Preacher of Hebrews says, Faith isn’t all mountain top experiences. Sometimes you get amazing moments of victory, but others were tortured. Some suffered chains & imprisonment.
• Some were stoned or sawn in two or killed with the sword. They wandered, destitute, afflicted, mistreated. Talk about a downer. Why mention these awful things if you’re building a case for faith? The Preacher is making it clear: Faith doesn’t guarantee you won’t suffer. It guarantees you WILL
• We forget that if we want to hold a Crown of Life it requires us to pick up a Cross of Suffering. That’s why when we experience suffering & setbacks & difficulties, we feel betrayed. We’ve forgotten what Jesus was crystal clear about. In Matt. 16 Jesus said, If anyone wants to follow Me, you’ve got to deny yourself & pick up a cross. We want resurrection w/o death, but it doesn’t work that way.
• The modern mind looks at what’s described here – torture, imprisonment, mocking, flogging, stoning, sawn in two, poverty, rejection – and we’d say, They lost. Hebrews 11 says if your understanding of faith only runs from vs. 32-34 – conquering kingdoms, enforcing justice, obtaining promises, stopping lions, quenching fire, mighty in war – then you don’t have a full picture of what faith is.
• Faith includes testing, sorrow, suffering, picking up a cross and embracing death. We don’t have time to go through all these stories that are described, but Hebrews 11 is also clear that for those who experienced these tragic circumstances, this isn’t the final chapter to their story.
• They embraced death because they saw past it to a resurrection. They died in faith, not having received the things promised, but they SAW them and greeted them from afar, & they fully acknowledged they were strangers & exiles on the earth.
• This was not their home! They weren’t living for this life only; they were seeking a homeland! A better country, a heavenly city with firm foundations that cannot be shaken! Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God and He prepared for them that city they were seeking! This world wasn’t worthy enough to be their everything & in Christ, this world was not worthy of them, vs. 38 says.
• So we’ve got a choice to make reading vs. 35-38. As you read these awful things, what do you see?
• A while ago I watched a great discussion between Peter J. Williams and Tom Holland. Peter J. Williams teaches at Cambridge, a great Christian scholar & author. Tom Holland is not a Christian – yet, I hope, because he’s open to it more & more – but he’s a great historian on the ancient world.
• And they talked about the Bible & how Christianity has changed the world. Tom Holland talked about how all the things western culture claims to love: justice, equality, science, liberty. He said all sorts of people talk about these things as if they just plucked them out of thin air & they don’t realize they’re the products of thousands of years of Biblical weathering. These are Christian ideas.
• And after all this back & forth, the moderator, Justin Brierley, made the point, we can talk about these things & appreciate all these things, while still dancing around with a foot in both camps, valuing everything that Christianity gave us, while refusing to actually BELIEVE Christianity & have faith. That qualitative leap, like Kierkegaard talked about.
• So he asked, You seem to be open, to be on a journey, Tom. Where are you? And Tom Holland said, I don’t want to be dancing in or out. It’s all or nothing for me. And he said something that’s stuck with me for weeks. For everyone it’s either a…
2) Nietzschean abyss or Marian visitation
• What does that mean? Again, philosophical ideas we don’t have a lot of time for, but Friedrich Nietzsche, the atheist philosopher who declared “God is dead”, said there’s no meaning, all our morality is made up. He lamented that Christianity made mercy, humility, forgiveness, justice for the weak, the ascendant values & virtues of our culture.
• He said Christianity is a sham, and like that Richard Dawkins quote, this universe is cold, pitiless, cruel & indifferent. So if you’re searching for meaning, for salvation, for a firm foundation, there isn’t one. There’s just a never-ending abyss w/no bottom.
• Guess who agrees with Nietzsche, that if Christianity isn’t true, there’s just an abyss? Paul. He said in I Cor. 15: If there’s no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ was raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain and your faith is in vain & futile, we’re still in our sins, those who have died have perished, they’re dead & gone – and if we have hope in this life only, we’re delusional! We are of all people most to be pitied.
• That’s why Tom Holland, not even a Christian, said, there’s no room to be a soggy centrist – living your life by Christian values, yet never putting your faith in Jesus Christ & becoming a Christian. It’s one or the other. A Nietzschean abyss or the glory of Marian visitation. What’s Marian visitation?
• God stepping into our world. Gabriel showing up to Mary and declaring Fear not! You’ve found favor with God. You’ll bear a son and call His name Jesus. That name means Yahweh is salvation!
• All the promises are true! It’s all been leading up to this moment! God keeps His promises! A final, once for all, sacrifice is being offered! Resurrection is coming! It’s either all true or it isn’t! You don’t get to pick & choose from the fruit of Christianity – these values that changed the world – while taking an axe to the ROOT of Christianity & rejecting the Savior that came to turn our world right-side up.
• There’s either a never-ending abyss of meaningless nothingness & we have no hope, or there’s a Sovereign God controlling all of history & saving us for Himself! It’s one or the other.
• You must make a choice & this is also the bridge between vs. 32-34 & 35-38. Either Gideon, Barak,
Samson, Jephthah, David & Samuel all got lucky & those that experienced torture & imprisonment & death got the shaft, or God is at work in ALL of it!
• In many of our minds, vs. 32-34 is what we think we’re owed for faith – conquering, winning battles, miraculous intervention. When we experience vs. 35-38, we feel betrayed. That’s because we don’t understand what faith ultimately gets us. What is…
3) The Prize at the Bottom
• Did you ever have a box of Cracker Jacks when you were a kid? I used to love those. I had a Sunday School teacher who used to give us those as prizes. And what was in every box?
• Not just caramel covered popcorn & peanuts. There was a prize. Maybe you were more patient than me, but I couldn’t wait. I’d shuffle the box, I’d reach my grubby mitts in there & feel around way in the bottom, digging for that prize.
• It was always something hokey like a plastic ring or a sticker. My favorite was those temporary tattoos. For this little Baptist boy, I felt like a rebel, licking that tattoo, rolling up my sleeve, and holding it there on my arm. I was just missing the leather jacket & a motorcycle after that.
• Hebrews 11 makes it clear, as great as these stories are, as great as their faith was, Moses & Abraham & Gideon & Samson & David are not the true heroes of this story. At best, they’re crooked sticks, drawing a straight line to the ultimate prize.
• Vs. 39 – though they are commended through their faith, they didn’t receive what was promised. God provided something BETTER for us – JESUS. They looked FORWARD, believing promises about a Savior they had yet to see. We look BACK and we KNOW what they were looking for. We can SEE.
• In a few weeks, we’ll get into chapter 12 where it calls us to lay aside every weight, and the sin that clings so closely, running with endurance, when we experience the twists & turns of vs. 35-38. And what does it call us to do? LOOK to Jesus, the founder – the beginning – and the perfecter – the ultimate PRIZE of our faith. The culmination of everything we ever needed and hoped for.
• So here’s the question – and be brutally honest with yourself. What’s the prize you’re pursuing in your faith? Tim Keller asked this question: Do you truly have faith in God or do you merely have faith in your AGENDA for God? Do you want HIM or do you merely want what you think He can give you?
• I once witnessed to someone & they asked to pray & this was their prayer. God, if you’ll fix all my problems, I promise I’ll give my life to you. Is that saving faith? Hebrews 11 says no. That’s putting faith in your AGENDA for God, not God Himself.
• How many of us live our Christian lives that way, functionally? When I’m living in vs. 32-34, we’re golden. Boy, my faith is strong.
• But take me into vs. 35-38 and I say, God, what are You DOING?!? This isn’t what I asked for! This isn’t what I expected You to do! This isn’t what I want!
• What’s the prize at the bottom for us? God? Or just His gifts? Suffering reveals the quality & the foundation of our faith. True faith is not, Jesus loves me so surely I’ll never have to carry a cross. True faith picks up the cross & says, Jesus loves me, so I’ll surely get a RESURRECTION.