Stress Test Devotional May 18
May 18, 2024
HEBREWS 11:35-40 | Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.
Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.
This poetic catalogue of personal suffering concludes the great catalogue of those who demonstrated trusting faith. Even more than the general tide of history, personal reverses can undermine trust. In these verses, we vividly identify with parents losing loved ones, with victims of torture, with those unjustly mocked and mistreated and imprisoned, with those driven into survival mode without home or shelter, and with those killed. Yet they trusted in God despite all this suffering, and they did so before the advent of the suffering servant. Jesus too knew loss, torture, imprisonment, and cruel death. In him, we see that God cannot only rectify and reverse suffering but that he is willing to undergo it to demonstrate his concern for us.
Has your suffering hurt or helped your faith?
Find a figure in this chapter I did not discuss and explore his or her trusting faith.
