By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.

By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land, but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.

Hebrews 11:23-31 ESV

When Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in AD 406, shock and amazement spread throughout the world. Although Rome had ceased to be the capital of the Western Roman Empire many years before, it was nevertheless the cultural center of the world and a city unconquered for a thousand years. Even though its capture did not mean the collapse of the Empire, shockwaves still rippled throughout the world. Since Christianity had replaced paganism as the official religion of Rome, many pagans saw Rome’s fall as a judgment for abandoning the old, Roman gods. In answer to those charges, the great theologian Augustine took up his pen and wrote the massive book, The City of God, in which he argues that all of history is a about a great war between two cities, the City of Man and the City of God. Even though Rome officially converted to Christianity, that did not prevent its passing away, for all earthly kingdoms belong to the City of Man and only God’s spiritual kingdom, the City of God, will remain forever.

Of course, Augustine was simply attempting to express the dichotomy that Scripture presents in many, many ways. Blessed or wicked, wise or foolish, faithful or faithless, the kingdom of God or the domain of darkness, the narrow way or the broad path and many more. In fact, in Revelation, John is given a vision of two cities: Babylon, which represents the kingdoms of the earth (Augustine’s City of Man) and the New Jerusalem, which is the God’s kingdom, the City of God.

Whichever picture we use, the Bible is clear that we live amid an embattled cosmos, a universe where “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12) set themselves against us day and night, where the kingdoms of the earth are under their sway, and even our own hearts long to go astray. Although we have already seen glimpses of this spiritual war in the lives of Abel and Noah, it permeates each of the seven “by faith” statements within our present text, five of which are from Exodus and two are from Joshua. Verses 23 and 31 bookend our text with two examples of faithful disobedience to wicked, worldly powers, particularly from women whom God uses to deceive the offspring of the serpent. Verses 24-27 present necessity of rejecting the treasures and promises of the world, and verses 28-30 are three examples of God rescuing His people while destroying the wicked, which, like the great flood, are foretastes of Christ’s return to judge the living and the dead.

FAITHFUL DISOBEDIENCE // VERSE 23

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.

Although like Abraham last week, Moses’ example of faith dominates the passage that we are studying, from the very beginning we see that Moses’ faith was not in a vacuum. Only by the faith of Moses’ parents was Moses rescued from being killed as Pharaoh had commanded to be done with all Hebrew boys. The author notes that they hid Moses for two reasons. First, because they saw that the child was beautiful. While every parent finds his or her child beautiful, I agree with Dennis Johnson that Moses’ parents saw something more in Moses:

In view of our author’s description of faith as focused on “things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), which reappears explicitly in the Moses section (v. 27), the reference to the infant Moses’ “beauty” refers to more than physical appearance. His parents “saw” that there was something special about this child.[1]

By faith, they caught a glimpse of Moses as the one who would deliver Israel out of slavery in Egypt. As with others in this chapter, that is likely the only sight they had, for they were likely dead by the time the eighty-year-old Moses brought God’s message to Pharaoh.

Second, they were not afraid of the king’s edict. While Exodus does not explicitly say that any who disobeyed Pharaoh’s command would be executed, it did not need to be said explicitly. Any king’s ability to command the sword of execution is what makes him so fearful to his subjects. Thus, for Moses’ parents to disobey Pharaoh’s edict was a fearful matter, yet we are told that they did not fear it. As with Moses in verse 27, we should not take this to mean that they did not experience fear of Pharaoh at all. Indeed, while verse 27 says that Moses was not afraid of the king’s anger as he fled from Egypt, Exodus 2:14 tells us quite plainly: “Then Moses was afraid…”

And it was perfectly reasonable that Moses and his parents would feel fear when going against the king of Egypt, but how then can the author of Hebrews say that they were not afraid? Again, he is not saying that they felt no fear whatsoever, only that they were not afraid of Pharaoh. Or maybe we could say, they were not ultimately afraid of Pharaoh. Though the king’s earthly power was visibly frightening, they possessed a greater fear that cast out all lesser fears. Their fear of Him who can destroy both body and soul overcame their fear of Pharaoh, who could only destroy the body. And by their faith in God, they were bold enough to disobey the wicked king who ruled over them.

Especially as we consider Pharaoh’s edict as an outright act of war upon God’s people, we ought to always remember that such faithful disobedience may also be required of us. Of course, our default demeanor toward civil authorities should be obedience and honor, yet when the kingdoms of earth blatantly rebel against God’s law, we must gladly give our obedience to God rather than men. For case studies on how to do this well, consider Elijah, Daniel, the apostles, or even Rahab.

HE LEFT EGYPT // VERSES 24-27

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.

After showing the faithful disobedience of Moses’ parents that preserved his life to be the deliverer of Israel, we now find in these two examples of Moses’ faith the necessity of rejecting the wealth of this world in order to walk in faith with God.

The author begins by calling our attention to Moses’ rejection of his place in Pharaoh’s palace and family. Indeed, for the first forty years of his life, Moses lived in the great house of Pharaoh, which was essentially its own miniature city. Yet probably because his own mother nursed him, Moses knew that he was a Hebrew who had been adopted by one of Pharaoh’s daughters. When he was forty years old (as Stephen tells us in Acts 7), Exodus 2:11 says, “One day, when Moses was grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.” Thus, within that single verse, we see exactly what the author of Hebrews is pointing out: Moses did not consider himself Egyptian but a Hebrew, gladly identifying himself with a nation of slaves. Richard Phillips reminds us:

Consider all that Moses left by siding with the people of God. First, he left worldly honor and power behind. He “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter” (Heb. 11:24). According to some traditions, Pharaoh had no sons of his own, and so Moses stood in line to ascend the throne. This is possible but not certain. What is certain is that he was aligned with the royal house in an age when royalty stood next to divinity. Phenomenal power and exaltation were his if he would retain his position in Pharaoh’s house. Second, he turned his back on the pleasures of sin, which are always available to such a high person, and which it seems were part and parcel of life in Pharaoh’s court. Third, he turned his back on “the treasures of Egypt,” which we know were vast beyond human reckoning.[2]

Notice that by identifying himself with the suffering Israelites the author of Hebrews says that Moses was associating himself with the reproach of Christ. This is a subtle replay of the author’s point in 10:32-35 about not being ashamed to be associated with God’s people. To be mistreated with God’s people is to be bear the reproach of Christ, to share in His suffering by taking up our cross to follow Him. Indeed, Moses looked upon that affliction as a greater wealth than all the treasuries of Egypt. Of course, Moses was not rejoicing in the reproach directly, for he was looking to the reward. No one enjoys suffering, especially being scorned and mistreated, and God does not expect us to enjoy. As Spurgeon notes:

Pleasures are certainly better than afflictions, according to any ordinary judgment. But Moses came to this conclusion: although affliction might be God’s worst, it was better than the pleasures of sin, which is evil’s best. Moses counted reproach to be better than the treasures of Egypt. God’s fast is better Egypt’s feast. We should view life as Moses did, in connection with the reward, and commence a life for God and holiness.[3]

Indeed, God calls us to look, by faith, through our momentary afflictions to our eternal joy in Him. As the author will say in 12:2, that is precisely what Jesus did during His crucifixion: “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” As Jesus did, so did Moses and the other great heroes of the faith. They endured earthly suffering in hope of an everlasting reward to come.

That refusal of Egypt was sealed whenever he left Egypt. Like Abraham in Canaan and Daniel in Babylon, Moses was already spiritually separated from Egypt before he physically left Egypt, but then he did actually flee Egypt, spending forty years in the wilderness of Midian. While we are all called to be spiritually separated from the world, there are certainly times when we are must also physically separate as well. This looks less like monasticism and more like simply avoiding moments of temptation. In Matthew 5:29-30, Jesus says:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

While Jesus is not commanding body mutilation, He is calling us to radically separate from whatever might be causing us to sin. If social media causes you to sin, delete it and walk away. For it is better that you miss out on what’s going on in the world than to be thrown into hell. If your smartphone causes you to sin, throw it away and downgrade to a dumbphone. For it is better to lose having the world at your fingertips than to be thrown into hell. We say the same about video games and televisions and much more.

SALVATION THROUGH JUDGMENT // VERSES 28-30

By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land, but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days.

These three verses each present examples of God’s salvation and judgment. The night of the Passover is when God finally broke Pharaoh into casting the Israelites out of Egypt loaded down with Egyptian treasure. After nine plagues that virtually ruined Egypt, the tenth plague brought death upon every firstborn, human and animal, in all of Egypt. The Israelites were only spared this judgment because God commanded them to slaughter lambs and sprinkle their blood upon the doorposts of their homes. Thus, when death was delivered that night, the LORD passed over the houses which were marked by blood.

After Israel left Egypt, Yahweh stirred up Pharaoh’s heart once more, and he gathered his chariots to reconquer the Israelites. God brought the Israelites before the sea with Pharaoh’s army quickly approaching them from behind. Yet Yahweh placed His people in that place of no escape precisely so that He could display His glory by making an escape for them. He split the sea, and the people of Israel walked across the sea on dry land. Then Pharaoh, in the stupor that comes to those who are given over to their sin, drove his army into the midst of the sea, blind to God’s glory until the waters crushed his head.

After that generation of Israelites died in the wilderness because of their constant grumbling against the LORD, the next generation, led by Joshua, entered Canaan, ready to take the land that God promised to their ancestor Abraham more than four hundred years earlier. After crossing the Jordan River, the great walled city of Jericho was the first target of their conquest.

Having been nomads in the desert for the past forty years and a nation of slaves before that, the Israelites were not armed with mighty weapons for grinding Jericho’s walls into dust. At best, they would have needed to lay siege to the city by cutting off as best they could its food and water supply, which would often take years to capture a city, if the siege was even successful. Yet God intended to show His might to Israel just as He had shown to their father’s generation. Rather than laying siege to the city, Yahweh ordered them to march around its walls silently for six days. On the seventh day, they marched around Jericho seven times and then broke their silence with loud shouts of victory. As they shouted, the walls came tumbling down, and Israel put to death all the people of Jericho. 

The three events described in these verses are both salvation and judgment. For Israel, they were salvation. Israel was brought out of Egypt, watched Pharaoh die, and began their conquest of Canaan with a victory that resounded throughout the rest of the land. For the Egyptians and the Canaanites, however, it was judgment. The deaths of Egypt’s firstborn and then of Pharaoh and all his chariots were a direct consequence of the Egyptian king’s hard-hearted refusal even to allow the Israelites to go into the wilderness to worship God. As we noted in our study in Exodus, God promised a full exodus of His people but only demanded a temporary exodus from Pharaoh in order to highlight his rebellion against Yahweh.

Likewise, the LORD used Israel as instruments of His judgment upon the Canaanites for their various wicked practices. Yet if we shirk away from God’s commanding Israel to put whole cities to the slaughter, we should remember that the LORD was not hasty in pronouncing such a judgment. In Genesis 15, God specifically told Abraham that he would not take possession of the land because the sins of the people were not yet complete. They were not yet ripe for judgment. Yet even with Jericho, we still see the patience of God. As Thomas Watson notes, “How slow is God to anger. He was longer in destroying Jericho than in making the world. He made the world in six days, but he was seven days in demolishing the walls of Jericho.”

So it shall be with the Day of Judgment as well. Christ’s return will be “to save those who eagerly wait for him” (9:28). Yet for those who reject Him, it will be a day of utter horror. And we should remember the words of 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” God’s judgment is a sure as God Himself is patient. It will come at the exact hour that God has decreed from eternity past. Let us, therefore, repent as we wait.

RAHAB THE PROSTITUTE // VERSE 31

We have an example of God’s patience with the repentant in our final verse:

By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.

Like Moses’ parents, Rahab is another example of faithful disobedience, that is, faithfulness to God through being disobedient to wicked authorities. She hid the Israelite spies and blatantly lied to Jericho’s soldiers while she hid the Israelites upon her roof. Yet like so many women in the Old Testament, she is commended for her deception of the wicked because of her faith in Yahweh.

And we should indeed marvel at Rahab’s faith. Even though she was a prostitute, her household alone was spared during the slaughter of Jericho. As she let the Israelites down the wall to escape by a scarlet cord, they commanded her to tie the same cord on the outside of her house so that they would know which house to spare. If any in her family did not remain in the house, their blood would be upon their own head. We are meant to see this as a replay of Passover night. The same faith that separated the Israelites from the Egyptians whenever the firstborn were put to death is the same faith that separated Rahab from the other inhabitants of Jericho. By her faith, she was not only spared destruction, but she also became an Israelite and even became a part of the lineage of Jesus.

We should read this and rejoice because, while few of us have come from sins as shameful as prostitution, we are all nevertheless spared from God’s judgment by pure grace. Is that not what Paul describes in his great explanation of the gospel in Ephesians 2?

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

Ephesians 2:1-3

Notice those descriptions. You once actively and gladly walked in your trespasses and sins, being a disciple of both the world and of Satan. Is that too strong? Did Jesus not equate following Him with being His disciple? If we once followed the world and the devil, then we were by nature, that is, in our very essence and being disciples of Satanic worldliness. Just as Rahab was a citizen of Jericho, we were citizens not of the City of God but of the City of Man. We did not belong to God’s kingdom but to the domain of darkness.

What changed? God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14). Or, as Paul also wrote in Ephesians 2:4-9:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Surely, Rahab was considered defiled and reproachable by even the other inhabitants of Jericho. Yet she was delivered, while they were destroyed. She was saved by grace through faith. So are we. Christian, rejoice that you belong to the people of God, but do not swell with pride at that thought but rather hang your head in humble thankfulness. 1 Corinthians 1:26–31 is as true of us as it was of the Corinthians:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

As we come to the Table of our King, may this simple bread and cup testify to us of the great sacrifice that Christ made of Himself to rescue us from our sin. By the bread, let us rejoice that we belong to the body of Christ, the communion and fellowship of all God’s saints, and by the cup, let us rejoice in the blood of Christ that has been sprinkled upon our hearts to restore us to communion with God our Father. As we eat and drink, let us taste and see the goodness of our God who “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14).

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[1] ESV Expository Commentary Vol 12, 174-175.

[2] Richard Phillips, Hebrews, 495.

[3] The Spurgeon Study Bible, 1656.