The eleventh chapter of Hebrews has many lessons for us, and surely among them is that God finds people of faith in places where we wouldn't look. We see an instance of this in Hebrews 11:23. Here, the writer refers to a familiar story, the story of the birth of Moses. Typically, our children learn that Moses’ parents hid him and eventually put him in the basket in the bulrushes before they turn five.

However, the Hebrews writer adds a spiritual dimension to this account. He notes that the parents of Moses acted as they did out of faith. They spared their son because they saw that he was beautiful and they did not fear the king’s edict.

This is an awfully bold stance for a couple of slaves to take! Typically, slaves fear the edicts of kings greatly, especially when they already know that the king has no love for them or for their people. It doesn't seem like the beauty of a baby should weigh heavily in the balance against royal wrath.

To understand this, we must start with Genesis 9:5-7. This snippet contains a pair of theological opposites. On the one hand, people were not to shed the blood of other people, and God would require their blood if they did. Instead, they were supposed to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. God wants humans to seek life, not death.

The parents of Moses can't have known very much about God, but this is one of the few things that they could have known, and it offers the best explanation for their conduct. Their child was beautiful to them, and in part he was beautiful as an expression of the divine will for humankind. They did right in having children, regardless of what the law said.

Similarly, they did not fear the king's edict because the king was not the highest authority in their lives. His tyranny could and would be checked by God, and ultimately, God's will would stand, not his. Even slaves don't have to fear the king if they have God on their side!

In the moment, this is only obvious to the eyes of faith, but it becomes clearer in history. Throughout the Bible and throughout the millennia that have passed since its writing, powerful forces often have arrayed themselves against the righteous. In the end, though, earthly powers are cast down, and the word of God continues along with those who follow it.

Today, parents and prospective parents have many reasons to fear. The days seem to be growing more evil, Opponents of Christianity are getting more vocal and more influential all the time, and overt persecution may be on the horizon. It's easy to despair of raising godly children or even having children at all.

Nonetheless, we must be fearless. We must do what is necessary to train our children in the ways of the Lord, regardless of what opposition we face. The parents of Moses had no idea that one day their son would bring Pharaoh to his knees, and we have no idea what the future holds either. However, this much is certain: When the people of God trust Him, no power in heaven, on earth, or in hell can overcome them.

We often remark how reassuring it is that the great men and women of faith in the Bible are so obviously flawed. However, at some point, these flaws stop being reassuring and start becoming cringey! For me, this is the case in the narrative of Genesis 27.

It’s one of the many places in Scripture where we see the dysfunction of a godly family on full display. Isaac and Rebekah have two sons, and Isaac prefers the elder while Rebekah prefers the younger. Rebekah takes advantage of Isaac's blindness to procure the blessing for her favorite, Jacob, even though Isaac is clearly mistrustful and suspects that something funny is going on. In the end, he is forced to give his favorite, Esau, an inferior blessing.

Admittedly, Rebekah did know that God had predicted that Esau would serve Jacob. However, rather than being straightforward and trusting God to fulfill His promise, she takes matters into her own hands. Sadly, this is nothing unusual. Indeed, from Genesis 12 on, nearly every member of Abraham's family (everybody except Benjamin) engages in subterfuge and deceit to pursue their goals. This reminds us of the antics of a clan of rednecks out in a trailer someplace, except the stories are of tent-dwelling nomads from 4000 years ago.

However, the bad behavior that sets our teeth on edge is a vital theme of the story. As God says a few hundred years later in Deuteronomy 9:5, He does not give the Israelites the land because of their righteousness or integrity. Instead, it is entirely because of the promise made to the fathers.

Similarly, the promise is not made to the fathers because of their righteousness or integrity either. It is because they had faith, and their faith was reckoned to them as righteousness. Whenever we start questioning our salvation because we think we're not good enough, we should remember that the heroes of faith definitely weren't good enough!

It is easy to overlook the presence of faith in the story of Genesis 27, but it's there too. After all, the blessing that Rebekah and Jacob schemed to obtain for him wasn't anything as tangible as a herd of camels or a flock of sheep. Instead, it was a promise that the descendants of one man would grow into a mighty nation, and that the people who didn't own any more property than the family cemetery would inherit the entire land. Both Rebekah and Jacob would die centuries before the promise was fulfilled, but it mattered deeply to them anyway.

 The same is true for Isaac. He played favorites with his sons and tried to pass his wife off as his sister, but he was a man of faith too. As Hebrews 11:20 shows, the very act of giving a blessing at all is an act of faith. He had no reason to believe that anything he said was more than spit in the wind except that God had promised him otherwise. Absent faith, this story of petty behavior simply doesn't happen.

This should hearten every Christian whose family life is not picture-perfect. Yes, it would be good if everyone in all of our families behaved uprightly, but we don't inherit the blessing because of our good works. What matters is our untiring faith in God. If we spend our lives seeking Him, no matter how imperfectly, it will be well with us.

We know from the story of the anointing of David that God does not see as man sees. In the case of David, God saw potential where no one else did. However, God is equally likely to judge more harshly than we do.

We see an instance of this in Genesis 25:27-34. It’s one of a frustrating series of stories in this portion of the book featuring Jacob the trickster and Esau the sucker. Repeatedly, Jacob uses his cleverness either to get something valuable belonging to Esau or to protect himself from Esau's very reasonable indignation.

In this case, Jacob swindles Esau out of his birthright, the double portion of the inheritance from Isaac that was due to the firstborn. Esau has returned from hunting, unsuccessful and starving. A decent brother would have fed him out of kindness, but Jacob demands the birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew. Esau takes the deal and loses the double portion.

In this story, Jacob is the villain, right? He schemes to take advantage of his own flesh and blood in a moment of need. However, that is not how the story is treated in the New Testament. In Hebrews 12:16, we are not warned against imitating Jacob. We are warned against imitating Esau!

For all of his questionable morality, Jacob possesses one vital attribute that Esau does not. Jacob looks to the future and does what he must now to receive good things later. Though he is not commended explicitly by the writer here, he falls into the same category as some other sketchy characters who are commended, like Rahab the harlot and the unrighteous steward of Luke 16. We are not to imitate them in sharp practice, lying, or embezzling, but we are to imitate them in looking to the future and acting accordingly.

Esau, by contrast, is so focused on his immediate desires that he forgets what fulfilling them will cost him. For this reason, the Hebrews writer condemns him as immoral and irreverent. This may seem harsh to us, but Esau has failed to keep his eyes on the prize, the very thing that everyone who hopes to inherit eternal life must do.

Certainly, Esau's foolishness was exploited by a trickster, but every one of us is the target of a deceiver who makes Jacob look naive by comparison. Constantly, the devil takes advantage of our moments of weakness to try to get us to give away our birthrights as children of the King. We shake our heads at the short-sightedness of the man who traded away his inheritance for a bowl of lentils, but everyone who surrenders their soul in exchange for earthly pleasure is making a far worse bargain!

When we are tempted, then, we should remember Esau. No matter what delights the evil one is dangling in front of us, they don't amount to a hill of beans next to what we would surrender. Only a Jacob-like focus on our ultimate reward will keep us safe.

The wisdom and subtlety of God truly are beyond our comprehension. Sometimes, though, we are privileged to get a glimpse of it in the Scriptures. This is the case with the story of Abraham and his descendants in Genesis, which only makes sense in the light of its New-Testament explanation.

For instance, why did the promise come through Isaac, not Ishmael? God doesn't really explain this in Genesis, but He does decree that it is through Isaac that Abraham’s descendants will be named.

Similarly, when Rebekah is still pregnant with twin boys, God informs her that the older of them will serve the younger. Again, why? As Paul points out in Romans 9, it's not like either of them had done anything good or bad. When they do start making decisions, Jacob comes across as a trickster and Esau as more of a stand-up guy, but according to the divine decree, the promise descends through Jacob.

We may never know all the reasons why God does this, but Paul gives us one of them in Romans 9:6-13. Here, Paul is dealing with what I like to think of as the problem of Israel. The Israelites have been God's chosen people for 1500 years, yet Christ, the final fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises, is rejected by almost all of them. Instead, the newly established churches across the Mediterranean are largely filled with Gentiles, descendants of those whom God did not choose.

What's going on here? Did God's plan fail? Even more strongly, aren't the fleshly descendants of Abraham entitled to a place in the kingdom of God? Doesn't the fact they have ended up on the outside mean that God has cheated them?

To answer these questions, Paul returns to the stories of those early ancestors of the Jews. Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn. He should have inherited. However, he did not, nor was Abraham’s line of descent reckoned through him. God's blessing came not according to the rules of the flesh but according to the promise that God made.

The same is true with Jacob and Esau. Esau was the firstborn. Once again, he should have received the blessing and the birthright, but he ended up with neither. Instead, Jacob claimed both. Once again, he received them not because of the flesh, but because of the promise that God made to his mother.

This is a brilliant argument. If the Jews deny that God's blessing should come according to the promise, they also are denying that their own ancestors should have been blessed. By that logic, they shouldn't be God's chosen people at all!

If, on the other hand, the Jews accept that God's blessing ought to be according to the promise, then they are left without any grounds for complaining that Abraham’s fleshly descendants have been excluded. They have no less right than the Gentiles to become children of God, but they no longer have any more right either.

The argument is brilliant, but the brilliance is not Paul's, but God’s. God knew before the foundation of the world that the problem of Israel would arise. 2000 years before it came, he arranged the family affairs of an obscure clan of nomads so that His chosen apostle would be able to demolish the objections of the descendants of those same nomads.

I'm thankful that a God like that is for me rather than against me!

In Genesis 23, we find a description of the death of Sarah and the fallout from it. Most of the chapter is occupied with a long-winded and somewhat comical account of Abraham haggling with the inhabitants of the land for a burial place for his wife. Eventually, he ends up as the owner of the cave of Machpelah, where in time he, his son, and his grandson also will rest.

This marks a somewhat ironic end for Sarah. Hebrews 11 identifies her as a woman of faith. Specifically, she considered God faithful in His promise that she would bear a son. More generally, though, she is part of the “these all” of Hebrews 11:13 who died in faith without having received the promises.

These promises can only be the promises that God had made to her husband. So far as we know, she was not a party to the conversations in which God told Abraham that the land of Canaan would belong to him, that his descendants would become a mighty nation, or that in his seed, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Nonetheless, it appears that she knew about them, presumably because Abraham told her, and they shaped the course of the rest of her life.

She lived as a sojourner in the land of promise, and she died as a sojourner in the land of promise. In the end, she was buried in the only part of that land that belonged to her family. What a fizzle!

Of course, we know what Sarah did not live long enough to see. In time, Canaan did come into the possession of her descendants. They did become a mighty nation, and all nations were and are blessed through her grandson many times over, Jesus. Her death did not keep the promises from being fulfilled.

I find this heartening, for in many ways, I identify with Sarah. She heard only one of God's promises directly, but I've directly heard none of them. Instead, as she had to rely on Abraham, I must rely on the Bible.

I also anticipate that I will die without receiving the promises. I suspect that most Christians do not look for the Lord to return in their lifetimes, but if He wants to return while I am still alive, He's running out of time pretty quickly! Most likely, I will face the challenge of dying in faith.

Sarah’s example, though, shows that such a death is possible and even reasonable. Like her, I, and indeed all of us, can see and greet the promises from a distance. I am a foreigner and a temporary resident on the earth, as everyone is whether they believe the promises or not. However, I can look forward to a permanent dwelling, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

Sarah died, but her death did not hinder the fulfillment of the promises. Even if I die, my death will not hinder the fulfillment of the promises either. God is much too powerful for that!