Need of endurance

13 August 2022

“For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For ‘yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.’ But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls” (Hebrews 10:36-39 ESV).

Here we see the relationship between living by faith and endurance – there is no turning back and no shrinking back if we seek the pleasure of our Master. We live in times of peculiar spiritual danger. Never perhaps were there more traps and pitfalls in the way to heaven; never certainly were those traps so skillfully baited, and those pitfalls so ingeniously made.
This is a reminder of intense spiritual warfare in the last days -we must take heed to the paths of our ‘feet’ lest we come to eternal grief and ruin our own souls. The enemy knows his time is limited and he has gathered all his forces and minions to stage a sustained warfare against God’s people. Let us not forget that we live in times that are desperately dangerous.

Hence the call for endurance and perseverance. It is not a call to a perseverance that ‘speaks’ of self-sufficient, self-glorifying pride, the ‘heroism’ of stoicism which sees it beneath human dignity to give waly to feelings of sorrow, pain, grief, or any kind of hurt.
No – it is the obedient, dependent ‘heroism’ of Jesus, the perfect Man, who ‘”learned obedience” – that is, learned both the practice and the cost of it – “through what He suffered” (Heb. 5:8). He was shamed, scourged, and He died on the cross, in an agony that felt like agony every moment until the ordeal was over.

Holy endurance of this Christlike sort is an expression not of pride, but of humility; not of defiant self-reliance, but of ready obedience; not of the fatalism in a bleak, uncaring universe, but of resolute, though often pained and aching, submission to a loving Lord, of whom it has been truly said that Christ leads us through no darker rooms and suffering than He went through before.

Take note that a glorious ultimate victory was secured at the cross; the enemy did not expect it nor anticipate it – but it was through ‘weakness’ that true strength was demonstrated; it was through ‘dying’ that eternal life was secured; it was through ‘suffering’ that glory was achieved. And Jesus declared that all those who follow Him must deny themselves (‘death’ to self), and take up their cross daily (imply suffering and ‘crucifixion’).
Our battles and warfare are in dependence on the triune God; the enemy is not afraid of your human defiance and confrontation; the war is fought in God’s ways and in the power of His Spirit – there is no room for human heroism and apparent wisdom in fighting the wrong battles – victory in the Lord may be in the way of ‘apparent weakness’ and through sufferings and pain (demonstrated in the perfect Man), doing the will of God at all costs. It is to put on the whole armour of God and to stand at the end of the battle.