looking stedfastly on Jesus the leader and completer of faith who, in view of the joy lying before him, endured [the] cross, having despised [the] shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
The verse closes a long roll-call of believing men and women. It turns the runner's eye away from all of them to one Person. Two questions decide how we read it. What does it mean to call Jesus the "founder and perfecter of faith"? And what was the joy that carried Him through the cross?
The word translated "looking" is unusual. One writer explains what it asks of us, and why no one in the previous chapter could fill the place.
This word for "looking" appears only here in the Greek Scriptures. It means turning the eyes away from other things and fixing them on one. The testimonies of Hebrews 11 give faith much encouragement, but not one of those witnesses could be the object the eye of faith rests on. There is only One who could take that place, and He must have it exclusively.
Older translations put the word "our" before "faith." One writer argues that this shifts the sense.
"Our" faith misleads, especially alongside "author and finisher." It sounds as if the Holy Spirit were presenting Him as the One who begins faith in our souls and carries it on to the end — its source and its sustainer. Not so. He is the leader and perfecter of the race of faith as a whole.
Commentators differ here. Others hold that the title, while true of His own course, also reaches to ours.
He is also the Perfecter of faith — the One who has brought it to full completion. He has run His course and finished it with joy. He has gone on high, and just as surely as He is there, we will finish our course too.
Hebrews 11 lists many who believed, yet this verse gives the title to none of them.
There is only One who is here called the Leader and Perfecter of faith. No Old Testament saint could claim this title. Not one of the great believers of the past fits it — not the father of the faithful, not the friend of God, not the meekest man on all the earth, not the man after God's own heart. It is said of no child of Adam born in sin. The name belongs to One only: the second Man, the Lord Jesus Christ. He ran the whole course of faith here without wavering and without the least turning aside.
One writer points to a psalm that shows what that joy was.
In Psalm 16 we get the joy that was set before Him, and there we get Him treading the whole path of faith. I have no doubt that Psalm is in the mind of the writer in chapter 12. He began that path saying, "Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge." The closing words of that Psalm show the goal set before Him: "In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore."
Yet the joy ahead of Him was not the reason He went.
Love, yes the Father's glory, was His motive, however much the future joy cheered Him along the way. Even for us it is the same thing in principle... Reward, however glorious, is never the motive; yet it is most encouraging in the face of danger and trial.
The verse uses two different verbs. One writer stops at the difference between them.
Does it say that the Lord Jesus endured the shame? No, He despised the shame. It does not say that He despised the cross. We know that was an awful reality — He could not despise that. But the shame, the reproach, the disgrace, He did not think of for a moment, in comparison with the joy of having us with Him there.
Where He now sits is the finish line. That speaks to a runner who has slowed down.
And where is He now? At the right hand of the throne of God! He has reached the goal, and that goal is in glory. This is a huge incentive for everyone still running the race. It is a greater one for those who should be running but have given up, or who have grown discouraged and now run half-heartedly.
That seat also settles a public dispute over Him.
In Hebrews 12:2 Jesus sits at the right hand of the throne. That seat is the witness that God is against the world and for the One the world threw out. He is the Captain of faith — not only the sacrifice or the Priest, but the perfect pattern of faith as a man here on earth. Now as such He was a sufferer. The more faith, the greater the suffering.
- Look off. The word means turning your eyes away from everything else. The witnesses of chapter 11 encourage faith, but none of them can be what it rests on.
- Leader. He began and completed the whole course of faith Himself, without wavering — a title no believer of old could carry.
- Joy. What lay before Him was the Father's presence and fullness of joy. But love and the Father's glory, not reward, moved Him to go.
- Endured. He endured the cross, which could not be despised, and thought nothing of the shame men heaped on Him.
- Seated. He has reached the goal. The throne declares that God is for the One the world threw out. Nothing encourages a half-hearted runner more.
For consider well him who endured so great contradiction from sinners against himself, that ye be not weary, fainting in your minds.
Hebrews 12 has just pointed the reader to Jesus, who ran the whole race of faith before us. Verse 3 turns that into a cure. It asks for one deliberate act of thought, aimed at one danger: giving way inside under constant opposition.
The command here is not a vague call to think about Jesus.
In Hebrews 12:3 the word is analogisasthe. It occurs only in this place in the entire New Testament. It expresses the idea of comparison or analogy.
That kind of comparison takes time.
The writer seems to say, "Consider Christ. Add up His sufferings point by point, going over them again and again. Not the sufferings on the cross only, but all that led up to it."
The commentators use the older word "contradiction" where the ESV has "hostility." Some old copies read "sinners against themselves" instead of "against Himself." That one word changes the weight of the verse. One writer allows the other reading, then shows why the usual one goes deeper.
They were sinners against themselves, certainly, as the Sinaitic and Clermont manuscripts read. But the far more solemn fact is that they were "the sinners against Himself," who endured it all in love to win them to God. Who ever met with a people — His own people! — so rebellious? Disciples so fearful and cowardly? Betrayed by one, denied by another, deserted by all the most trusted! How little His people have to weary them in comparison! And why faint in soul, when they see Him on high — their sacrifice and priest, their life, righteousness, and glory?
What makes His example so striking is not that He had no way out. He had every way out, and He used none of them.
He had almighty power, which we do not have. He could command the winds and the waves, and they obeyed Him. He cast out demons by His word, and they could not stir a step without His permission. Then men were to Him as creatures that can be crushed as easily as a moth. Yet He held all this almighty power, and still He endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself. He endured it. How valuable the record of His life on earth becomes to us!
This letter has already dealt at length with the cross as the sacrifice for sin. Verse 3 points to another side of it.
The cross, or more exactly "crucifixion," which He endured is not here what He suffered from God for sin. We had no part in that, and "despising the shame" could not be said of it. It is what He had to meet at the close of His life from man's hand, from the sinners of verse 3. It was the contradiction and opposition of every principle of man and his world against Him. Under it His perfection only shone out the brighter.
Weariness comes first; fainting follows. The verse names that order, and gives the cure before the collapse.
If we take the path of faith to run the race set before us, we will surely find we have to meet the perversity of men on every hand. We will meet the contradiction of sinners against Christ. We will even meet the opposition of God's people to sharing His reproach. Continual opposition is very wearying, and when we are wearied, the tendency is to faint and give way. So let us "consider Him," so that we do not faint. Whatever we have to meet, from opposing sinners or failing believers, He has already met it in full measure.
The comparison has a levelling effect.
Are you sometimes tempted and discouraged? Do you feel as if your cup of bitterness is a little fuller than your brother's, and your trials a little harder to bear? Look away from your brother's cup to the cup the Lord drank. Are we not ashamed, then, to talk about our little bit of suffering and reproach compared with His?
- Consider — the verb means compare. Set your case beside His, point by point, and the proportion changes.
- Contradiction — it was aimed at Him. His own people rebelled, His disciples were afraid, one betrayed Him, one denied Him, and in the end all left Him.
- Control — He held almighty power the whole time. Men were as fragile as a moth before Him, and still He endured.
- Cross — here it is what He met from man's hand, not what He bore from God for sin; His perfection only shone brighter under it.
- Cure — weariness comes first, fainting follows. Take the cure early: whatever you face, from hostile sinners or failing believers, He has already met in full.
Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, wrestling against sin.
Chapter 12 has just fixed the runner's eyes on Jesus, who endured the cross. Now the writer measures his readers' sufferings against that standard. Their trial is real, but it has not yet reached the limit Christ went to. So what sin were they struggling against, and how is such a word meant to comfort them?
The struggle here is not a believer's inward fight against his own desires. It is not the fight against spiritual powers either. One writer sets the three side by side:
The struggle against sin here is not the personal struggle of Romans 7. That is the individual fighting to free himself from sinful thoughts and feelings. In that case he must learn not to fight, but to submit to the power and grace of the Lord Jesus, applying the cross of Christ to all that he is in the flesh. Nor is it here the conflict of Ephesians 6, against evil spiritual powers in the heavenly places... Here it is standing firm against men's persecuting efforts to trap our souls in the same sin they prefer to serve. It is a battle, but faith is the principle that overcomes.
For these readers one sin waited at the end of the pressure: giving Christ up to make it stop. That is why the verse names a limit, and sets it so far out:
"In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood." There is the limit... do not set any other limit. Do not say, I will wait a month, a year, and if this persecution continues, I will have to do something to make it stop... "The sin" here is the one the Hebrews were in special danger of — the one that overshadows every other. It is the sin of denying or giving up Christ.
Another writer reads the warning the same way, adding that death was the point their refusal to fall away had to be carried to:
Instead of promising them relief from their present toil, he shows them how far short they still were of what they might be called on to endure... In a more special sense, it was against the danger of their own apostasy that they had to carry their resistance to the death.
The word "yet" measures their history honestly. They had lost property for Christ. Others in their circle had lost their lives:
The Hebrews, who received this letter, had suffered much. They had gladly accepted the seizing of their goods. But they had not yet been called to die for their faith in Jesus. Stephen had died as a martyr, and so had James the brother of John. Those who received this letter were still alive, and the writer encourages them to look to Jesus as the example for their path of faith.
The previous verse tells the readers to consider Jesus. One writer explains what that word asks of them:
The word "consider" in this Scripture is a most striking one. It means to draw an analogy, or to make a comparison, between Christ and yourselves. Your sufferings and persecutions may press you almost beyond measure. But compare your circumstances with His. Follow Him in His course, and see Him at last dying as a martyr for righteousness' sake. (That is the aspect of His death presented here.) So take courage and strength from His example: learn from Him to endure, and to be faithful even to death.
Christ's death has two sides, and we can share only one of them. One writer marks the line:
Christ went on to death, and His followers must be prepared to do as He did, suffering with Him as far as men are concerned. He has endured the suffering from God, the suffering that made the Cross what it was for Him. There is no cup of that kind for us at all — no forsaking of God, but the very opposite.
The comparison differs in one more place: the sin each one faced.
The cross, in one aspect, was martyrdom. Jesus was as much a martyr at the hand of man as He was a victim at the hand of God. It is as a martyr we see Him here — and as such we are put in company with Him... It was sin in the Pharisees, sin in the crowd, sin in the chief priests, that carried the Lord Jesus to the cross. But He never had a bit of sin in Himself to strive against. It was sin in others.
Having measured their suffering, the writer turns from persecution to training. The same trials now get a second explanation:
At this point we are reminded that we, even all Christians, are at school... They had not yet resisted to the point of shedding their blood in the struggle against sin. Stephen and others had done that. But not one of them had. And they had forgotten the appeal that reasoned with them not as children but as sons... It reminded the Hebrews how they stood in relation to God, and why He disciplines them — the love of His heart.
- Measure. The verse is a comparison: put your cup beside Christ's and your suffering shrinks to its true size.
- Battle. The fight here is not inward temptation or unseen powers. It is the pressure of men trying to drag you into their sin.
- Limit. Christ set the only limit at His own blood. No believer may fix an earlier one and quit when persecution outlasts his patience.
- Line. We may follow Him into martyrdom. We can never follow Him into the suffering that made the cross what it was — God never forsakes us.
- Purpose. The same pressure that tests faith is also a Father's schooling of sons, moved by the love of His heart.