Looking Ahead To His Reward
Hebrews 11:22-28
Key Verse 11:26
“He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.”
There is faith and then there is faith. There is the faith by which you conduct yourself as you live by faith and rely on faith in all your circumstances, and you do so in order to honor and glorify God. For example, the word of God tell you to “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33) whereby your faith compels you to put God and his interests first above you’re your own interests, believing that God would provide you with all that you need, as you engage yourself in his own interests first. Or there’s the faith to forgive your brother who wronged you simply because you yourself know that you’re forgiven by God. All this may be behavioral faith. Then there’s another kind of faith— the faith that looks forward to the kingdom of God where your reward is for entrusting God with your life and future. You never doubt that your life here is but a pilgrimage towards the other, and you live by faith in that truth. And because of that you also have faith to endure suffering and hardship and persecution. You live as if your life isn’t in this world but somewhere else kept safely for you in God. This faith may well be called inheritance faith because it’s “being sure of what [you] hope for and certain of what [you] do not see” or have (11:1) And that’s what the author of Hebrews hoped to convey to his Hebrew Christians. When he talks about Abraham or Joseph, although they lived by faith in every way, the author focuses on the faith which relates them to the Kingdom of God. I say this because while Joseph’s and Moses’ lives had been mostly lives of faith, the author emphasizes their faith in relation to the future Kingdom. Remember what he said about them earlier: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country— a heavenly one.” (13-16) And that’s the faith the author wanted to convey to his readers. So this will be our focus today as we review their lives.
Let’s start with the faith of Joseph. Read verse 22. “By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions about his bones.” What the author is talking