Faith has also given God's people victory by helping them to escape certain death (11:33-35a). Faith "shut the mouths of lions" when there was no way out for Daniel (v. 33). Faith "quenched the fury of the flames" when there was no way out for Daniel's friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (v, 34a).

The rest of verse 34 recalls heroes who escaped death by trusting God to fight their battles for them. There are multiplied Old Testament examples, but my personal favorite is in 2 Chronicles 20 where Jehoshaphat confidently declares, "The battle belongs to the Lord." Jehoshaphat went out to war and placed his musicians at the front of the line. "We're not going to fight; we're going to sing them to death." The army of Judah started singing and God came down and routed the enemy. Verse 35 reminds us that faith reversed the finality of death itself when Elijah and Elisha gave two sons back to their grieving mothers.

We need to clarify something here. The writer credits the heroes of faith with these accomplishments, but what made the difference was not their faith; it was the God in whom they placed their faith. Hebrews 11 is not an "if you can believe it, you can achieve it" pep talk. John Goldingay has rightly observed that "the great thing about our hopes in God is that their fulfillment is not too dependent on the depth of our conviction. Their fulfillment is dependent on the depth of God's capacity to fulfill our hopes."1 It's not the size of our faith; it's the size of our God.

Now, I know that faith is believing what you can't see but I struggle with this text because I haven't seen God shut the mouths of lions or bring dead people back to life. But, Hebrews 11 isn't just a history lesson reciting God's great acts for others in the distant past; it is also an exhortation that stirs us to remember the victories that God has won for us in the recent past and to keep trusting him in the present (cf. 10:35-36). A student shared in one of our classes this week, "I want to praise God because we've been praying for my sister's drug problem and she called me yesterday to tell me that she had invited Christ into her life." Faith-won victories in the past give us confidence to keep trusting God in the present.

Marilyn Laslzo served as a single missionary in Papua New Guinea. She and some new converts from her village were returning home on the river with supplies when the outboard motor on their boat sputtered and died. They had forgotten the gasoline. Those new converts starting praying for God to start the motor, and Marilyn was praying for their faith not to be crushed when it didn't. They cranked the motor, it ran for 45 minutes, and they made it all the way back home. Faith is seeing the invisible, believing the improbable, asking for the unthinkable, and then celebrating when God turns the impossible into reality.