“ Those who hold on in faith , as Jesus himself had promised , will gain their lives .”
not delay .’ One might suppose that a time-lag of several hundred years would count as a ‘ delay ’; but the point here in Hebrews 10.37 is that , with the coming of the Messiah , the devastating judgment on the one hand , and the rescue from it on the other , are not far off . If ( as may well have been the case ) the writer lived to see the awful war between the Jews and the Romans , from AD 66 to 70 , culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem itself , I think he would have said , ‘ Yes : that ’ s what I was talking about ? The judgment on Jerusalem ( the centre from which persecution had come against those Jews , such as the readers of this letter , who had hailed Jesus as Messiah ), could not but be seen as deliverance by those who had undergone the trials spoken of in verses 32-34 . of the church ( Galatians 1.13 and elsewhere ), and that was in the very early days ; he himself was then persecuted by his own fellow Jews , as he describes graphically in 2 Corinthians 11 . We don ’ t have to look too far , alas , to see contemporary examples of the same thing . Wherever a regime exists which claims absolute power and regards Christian faith and witness as a threat , Christians will come under attack , as we saw with Eastern European Communism in the cold war years , and have seen again with the situation in China and in many Muslim countries . Many Christian readers today know exactly what it ’ s like to suffer public ridicule and physical abuse , to stand alongside those who suffer it , and to find their property being looted and the authorities looking on and doing nothing .
“ Those who hold on in faith , as Jesus himself had promised , will gain their lives .”
These verses , in fact , give us a clearer indication than almost anywhere else in the letter of the situation which the readers were confronting . Right from the start they had faced terrible times , just like the Christians in Acts 8 or 1 Thessalonians 2 . Indeed , the readers of this letter may include some of those very people , or others who had become Christians at the same time ; after all , Paul tells us that he had himself been a persecutor
The writer insists , though , that such horrible and frightening moments are to be seen - and , he says , were seen by those early Christians - as themselves a sign of hope . The outrageous lawlessness of plundering other peoples property with apparent sanction from the authorities is a pointer to the fact that , though we still live in the evil present age , there is coming a new age in which God will give his people a ‘ better possession ’ ( another use of “ better ’, which as we saw is one of Hebrews ’ favourite words ). This steers us towards the great picture of the next chapter , in which the writer will draw our attention to the way in which the heroes of Old Testament faith were
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