“A Cloud of Witnesses” FBC Morning Light (10/30/2023)

Well, good Monday morning to you. I hope you had a good weekend this past weekend, good day yesterday with God's people, learning something from God's Word, especially being encouraged to grow in grace and knowledge of Christ.

I hope the Lord spoke to you through his Word yesterday and that you just really enjoyed the time of fellowship and worship with God's people. Well, today we're reading in our Bible reading Ezekiel chapters 3 and 4 and Hebrews chapter 12.

The Cloud of Witnesses in Hebrews 12

I want to focus on that first verse in Hebrews 12, which begins in this way. It says, therefore, we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and then he goes on. He talks about this great cloud of witnesses.

He's referring, of course, to the people that he mentioned back in chapter 11. If you're following along in this Bible reading plan, you would have read Hebrews 11 last Friday. In Hebrews 11, the writer enumerates a bunch of different individuals who were people of faith, who lived by faith.

Let's just kind of rehearse through that list of who those people were. You had Abel and then Enoch and then Noah, then Abraham and Sarah, then Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, and then Moses. He doesn't refer to Joshua by name, but he talks about, by faith, the walls of Jericho came down.

He speaks of Rahab, the harlot. Then in verses 32 through 38, he's like, I've run out of ink. I've got to go quickly here. He just summarizes. He says in verse 32, what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and of David and Samuel and the prophets.

Then when he comes to the prophets, he has a bunch of prophets in mind. He says, who through faith, they subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

Women received their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trials of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonments.

They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were slain with a sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world, he says, was not worthy.

He discusses the faith of all these individuals and the fact that their faith made an impact on their lives. It affected how they lived. Then he comes to chapter 12 and he opens up that chapter with this verse, seeing that we have this great cloud of witnesses, we're surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses.

What the “Cloud of Witnesses” Does Not Mean

Now let me pause here and explain what that does not mean. What that does not mean is that all of these people who died in faith looking for the city to come, they're not all up in heaven looking around the banisters of heaven down on your life and watching everything you do.

Some have given that impression when they preach or interpret and teach this passage, that all these people who've died before us in faith, they're up in heaven, they're looking at our lives, they're watching our lives and watching to see how we're going to do, cheering us on, though we can't hear them, or lamenting when we stumble and fall.

That's not what's going on here, that's not what the writer of Hebrews is intending to communicate. What he's communicating is that all of these people that he just wrote about, they are witnesses to a life of faith, a life lived by faith.

He refers to the difference that their faith made in their lives. What did their faith do? When you go back to Hebrews 11, you see, by faith so and so did thus and so, and so on through the entire chapter.

What he's doing now in chapter 12, he's applying that to you and to me. He says, we have these testimonies of lives lived by faith. Let those testimonies motivate you and me to live accordingly. He goes on, he says, therefore, because we have this great cloud of witnesses, because we're surrounded by these witnesses that testify to a life lived by faith, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

Running the Race by Faith, Looking to Jesus

How? On what basis? On the basis of faith. He says in verse 2, looking unto Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, and looking at Jesus as an example that you cannot physically see. You can't physically see what Jesus did.

You can't physically see that Jesus, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross and despised the shame. How do we look to Jesus then? We look to him by faith. We read of what Jesus did, what Jesus endured in the Gospel accounts, and we look to Jesus, who is the author and the finisher of our faith, and all that Jesus has promised to accomplish for us by that death on the cross, and we look to him.

But we're looking by faith. So what the writer of Hebrews is saying, just as the Old Testament saints, the patriarchs, and so forth, just as they lived by faith, looking to the future, looking for a city that they didn't possess, and looking for the fulfillment of God's promises off yet into the future, that faith where they were looking to the future motivated them to live in a certain way now, and so should our faith.

So should we, by faith, be looking to Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, and so looking, that should impact how we live right now, how we run the race that is set before us, laying aside the sin that besets us and moving forward, running faithfully the race that is before us, all the while looking by faith to Jesus.

Let's do that. So Father and our God, we thank you for the great cloud of witnesses. We thank you for the thousands of years of history and the records of those who lived by faith, and it changed their lives.

May our faith in looking to Jesus also change our lives and affect how we run our race, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, well listen, you have a great Monday, and hope your week gets off to a good start.

Lord bless.