Faith Amid Crisis
Hebrews 11:23–28 – Jesus Is Better
Pentecost Sunday – May 24th, 2026 (am)
Enroll
A few years ago, we had a family with us at Grace Church of DuPage who have now moved down to Texas to pursue further education
They had the claim to fame of living closest to the church – just down on West Street
And one summer afternoon, they had someone come by to reseal their driveway
As the worker was preparing the driveway by using a blow torch to remove any weeds that had found their way up through the asphalt, he got a little too close to a row of bushes set against the house, and with it being a very dry summer, the bushes quickly ignited which then sent flames up the south side of their family home.
Thankfully and somewhat miraculously, the husband of this family jumped into action and was able to put the fire out with the garden hose before the fire department arrived – and they were so impressed they offered him a job as a firefighter on the spot
But the long term impact was that the family had to move out of their home for many weeks as it was treated for smoke damage and then repaired.
Now, as you can imagine, word of this family’s crisis spread quickly among our church family and as we live in the second closest home to the church – I was able to run over to check on them.
As I stood in the driveway with the husband and a few others who had arrived by then and looked upon the now charred remains of the side of their home
Someone in the group spoke up and said, “. . . all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28 paraphrase)
And in that moment, in the midst of one family’s personal crisis, faith entered the scene
In that moment, there was more to see than a smoke damaged home, more to see than the crisis itself, but it took faith to see it
This morning, we find ourselves in the portion of Hebrews 11 that is dedicated to the life of Moses.
One thing we see in Moses is that he lived a life defined by one crisis after another.
Birth – Moses’ arrival on this earth created a crisis for his parents
o Where many parents look forward to the day when they get to learn if they are having a boy or a girl – Moses’ parents, along with the rest of the Jews in Egypt must have dreaded it
o For the King, Pharaoh, had made an edict that commanded every Egyptian to be on the lookout for baby Jewish boys – and should they come across one, commanded them to take it – and I don’t imagine they were asking very nicely but rather forcefully removing it – from the parents in order to throw it into the Nile river where it would drown
o So you can imagine that as Jewish mothers approached the day of their birth they must have prayed to God that they would have a girl – and if they had a boy, they were immediately thrust into a crisis – as Moses’s parents were at his birth
o And yet, because of his parents faith, Moses was delivered from harm and ended up being raised in the royal house of Egypt by Pharaoh’s daughter
But having grown up as a Hebrew boy in Pharoah’s courts, a day came when Moses faced another crisis
o We’re told in Exodus 2:11 that “. . . when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.”
o It is clear from this verse that though Moses had grown up in a royal Egyptian household, he was very much aware of his heritage – he knew he was not an Egyptian and he knew that the Hebrew slaves were really his people
o And while he may have been pondering the implications of this reality for many years, it was on this day, as he went out and looked on their burdens, and saw an Egyptian beating one of his people, that all his pondering came to a head as Moses faced a crisis of identity
Would he identify with his adopted Egyptian family and ignore what was happening?
Or would he identify with his ethnic Hebrew people and do something to stop it?
o And in that moment, he chose his ethnic people by killing the Egyptian, whom he then buried in the sand. (Exod. 2:11)
Almost immediately after this, Moses was thrust into yet another crisis
o For the very next day, we read in Exodus 2, he sought to resolve a conflict between two Hebrews, and in the course of the conversation one of the Hebrews said, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”
o And Moses realized that what he thought was a covert operation against a lone Egyptian was now known – and not only was it known, but it hadn’t won him any favor with the Hebrew people – who likely saw him as an outsider as he grew up in luxury while they suffered in slavery.
o And as word spread, Pharaoh eventually heard about it, and sought to kill Moses for it, leading Moses into yet another crisis point in his life. (Exod. 2:13-15)
He knew his own people were not favorable towards him . . .
So should he renounce his former decision to side with the Hebrew people and go back to Pharoah and claim his mother’s influence as he pleads his case and seeks to be remain in the royal household
Or should he leave Egypt, leave everything He’s ever known, and seek a life somewhere else?
We’re told that he chose to leave Egypt and go to Midian – where he married the daughter of a tribal priest, started a family, and settled down to a quiet life as a shepherd . . . that is, until the next crisis
o Which was when God met Moses in the burning bush and told him He was sending Moses back to Egypt to deliver God’s people
o And thus began Moses’s quest to deliver God’s people from slavery
o A quest that culminated in the tenth plague and the Passover, after which the Hebrews were led by Moses out of Egypt.
Now there is much to Moses’ life than these four events, but we call them to mind here because they are the four events that serve as the backdrop to our passage this morning.
And the Author of Hebrews lays them before us as examples of Moses’ genuine faith
He wants us to see what true faith looks like
And I might add that in Moses, what we see, is what it looks like to have faith when facing a crises.
So what exactly is a crisis? Where have they shown up in our lives?
A few sources on Crisis Management and Crisis Intervention[1] define a crisis as:
o An event that leads someone to feel stressed, confused, vulnerable, anxious, afraid, angry, guilty, hopeless and helpless.
o They are the experiences in life that make life feel chaotic and out of control
o And often times, they highlight a situation that cannot be prolonged anymore, they show us where something has to change.
These are the moments in life that force us to choose what we are really living for.
o Are we living for God or are we living for something or someone else?
And from Moses’s life we see four lessons on how to have faith and how to choose God, amid such moments in life.
1. Faith Recognizes Beauty and Resists Evil Authorities
This is the lesson from Moses’ birth where we’re told it was by faith that Moses’ parents did not fear the king’s edict but instead hid their newborn son for three months – because they saw that the child was beautiful.
Now we might wonder – how does that work? If they weren’t afraid, then why did they hide him?
o But what I think the author is saying here is not that they weren’t afraid for Moses – but that they weren’t afraid for themselves.
o They were willing to risk their own lives and whatever harm they may incur from the Egyptians or Pharaoh himself in order to protect their son.
So we see from Moses’s parents, that one aspect of true faith is that it resists evil authorities
o Faith looks beyond those who might to do us harm to something else
o And in that way, faith is able to overcome fear
And, according to Hebrews, as well as Exodus, the thing that sparked this expression of faith for Moses’ parents was when they looked at their newborn baby and saw that he was beautiful.
o Now I’ve not met a parent who hasn’t felt that way about their newborn child – so it may not seem that special
o But what Hebrews seems to be indicating is not just that they thought their baby boy was adorable, but that they perceived he was no ordinary child (as the NIV translates it)
o They perceived that God had something special planned for this child – and so they resolved in that moment to put their own lives on the line in order to keep Him safe.
So how does the faith of Moses’ parent help us in our own faith?
Their lives speak to the moments when a crisis is thrust upon us by the decisions of others, and in particular, by the decisions of those who have authority over us.
We live in a world of authority structures some of whom are good and others of whom are evil.
And in the day when those who are in authority over us tell us that we must do something that we believe to be wrong, to be against God’s will – it will take faith to persevere through that day, and not shrink back from what we say we believe. It will take faith to overcome the fear of what such authorities might do to us and to follow God.
And what I believe we can expect from God is that, in such moments, He will put before us things that have the ability to spark our faith.
It may be a glorious sunrise outside the hospital window
Or a text message from a friend offering you a word of encouragement
Or it may be seeing the faith of someone else who is in the situation with you
A few weeks ago, the youth ministry met up at Cantera Movie theater to see “The Story of Everything” – a film that highlights how the world around us points to a pre-existent Creator rather than an evolutionary process.
And one piece of evidence that points us to this Creator is something called “the problem of gratuitous beauty.”
The observation is that this world is saturated with beauty far beyond what is required for survival
And this creates a problem for those who would argue that our world simply evolved out of a system that supports the survival of the fittest.
For if everything is the way it is for the sake of its survival – how do you explain the gratuitous amounts of beauty that make no contribution to a species survival rate?
The problem of gratuitous beauty leads the filmmakers to conclude that it is through beauty that we often times see truth.
For the Christian, the beauty of Creation is not a problem, but rather a signpost
It is there to point us to the truth there is more to this world than our eyes can see – that this world in which we live was made by a pre-existent, divine Creator
And that this Creator is all about pointing us back to Himself – so that we might put our faith in Him
So the next time we find ourselves in a crisis
Look for the beautiful things the Lord is putting before you to point you back to Him
Look for the things that remind you that He is bigger than your problems and believe that He can lead you through the most terrifying of circumstances
2. Faith Chooses Hardship with God over Pleasure with Sin
While verses 24-26 don’t mention an exact moment when Moses “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter” and “chose rather to be mistreated with the people of God” – the scene that seems to make the most sense is when Moses killed the Egyptian after seeing him beating his Hebrew kinsman.
As we noted earlier – moments of crisis are often moments when we realize life can’t continue on as it once did.
And it was when he saw the Egyptian beating the Hebrew that Moses made a choice that would change his life moving forward.
o He made the choice to identify with his people and the people of God.
Now in choosing God’s people, Moses had much to lose
He lost all the status and privileges and pleasures that came with being known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter
And as Egypt was one of the greatest civilizations of his day, what Moses lost, in human terms, would have been great.
But what our passage shows us is that though Moses’ loss may have been staggering in terms of wealth and status and influence and luxuries – what all of this truly amounted to was “the fleeting pleasures of sin.”
And what is being implied in our passage is that this assessment – the one that all Egypt had to offer was fleeting, temporary, passing away, and ultimately sinful (not necessarily meaning Moses was caught up in sinful behavior, but that to choose it would result in the sin of choosing earthly comfort over God’s people)
The implication is that this assessment is being made not just by the Author of Hebrews, but by Moses himself.
o So Moses, when he saw the Egyptian beating his Hebrew kinsman, knew that his intervention would cost him greatly, but he did it anyways
o And the reason He did it was because he had faith.
As verse 26 goes on to explain, he did it because “He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking forward to the reward.”
o Now what is the author of Hebrews saying here?
What he’s saying is that by choosing God’s people, by choosing to be mistreated with God’s people, what he was really choosing, in its seed form you might say, was the reproach that comes with following Christ.
o And I believe he says it this way because that is exactly what he is encouraging his readers to do
The recipients of the book of Hebrews knew well what it meant to suffer reproach for the name of Christ. Listen to what our author says to them just one chapter earlier:
Heb. 10:32-33 But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, 33 sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated.
So now he tells them – look at Moses!
You think you have something to lose for following Christ!?!
Moses had all the treasures of Egypt to lose, and he still chose to be mistreated with God’s people, he chose the reproach of Christ
o And then he explains how Moses did it.
He did it not by looking around at everything that was to be lost, but by looking forward to the rewards that come with following God and by considering, regarding, calculating, that those rewards would be far better than anything Egypt had to offer.
Now, if we’re to have faith like Moses, we must make a similar calculation. You might even say that it is impossible to have true faith until we’ve made a similar calculation.
Jesus invites us to do this when he says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?” (Mark 8:34-37)
And the apostle Paul, tells us, in Philippians 3, that he has made this calculation when he says, “. . . I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” (Phil. 3:8)
It is no secret that if you are going to choose God then there are things that are tied to his life and to this world that will be lost.
It is for good reason that Jesus says, “the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many [while] the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matt. 7:13-14)
But what faith is able to see is that the cost of following Jesus,
o even if it amounts to the riches of Egypt in its heyday as it did for Moses,
o even if it amounts to the plundering of one’s possessions and being thrown in prison as it did for the audience of Hebrews,
o even if it amounts to risking one’s own earthly life as it did for Moses’ parents
The cost of following Jesus is worth it when compared with what is to be gained. For what is offerd to us in Christ is beyond anything this temporary world can offer us. For Jesus has extended to us the gift of eternal life with Him.
Such a reward helps us to have the faith to choose, as Moses did, hardship with God over the fleeting pleasures of sin every single time.
3. Faith Forsakes Present Visible Rewards for the Invisible God who Promises Future Rewards
There is some debate about which event in Moses’ life verse 27 is referring to.
Is it his flight to Midian just after Pharaoh learned he’d killed an Egyptian, or is it when he leaves Egypt with the Israelites in tow?
Seeing how these examples of faith come in sequential order and, seeing how the next example of faith is about the Passover, which comes before the Exodus, I think it must be referring to his flight to Midian.
And while Moses was said to be afraid when he realized people knew what he’d done and while Pharaoh’s desire to kill Moses seemed to be the deciding factor in his departure from Egypt, what we read in Hebrews is that it was by faith that Moses left Egypt and not because he was afraid of the king.
Here we must understand that the Author of Hebrews is not contradicting the Exodus story, but rather he is interpreting it for us.[2]
What he sees in this story is that, while Moses was afraid when he learned his secret was out, and while the king’s murderous anger forced him to leave Egypt, it wasn’t ultimately for those reasons that he left.
The reason the author of Hebrews sees for why Moses left Egypt is that he was faithfully “enduring as seeing him who is invisible”
The word “enduring” means that Moses was “persevering” or “continuing without wavering”[3] in the direction he was already headed.
Now what Moses was continuing in, I believe, was the same decision he’d made when decided to defend his Hebrew kinsman from the Egyptian. It was a decision that had implications, but those implications didn’t come upon him until he learned that others knew what he had done.
And so, while defending his kinsman from the Egyptian was the moment Moses chose to be mistreated with the people of God, it was the murderous intentions of the king that caused him to forsake, once and for all, everything Egypt had to offer him.
Now what enabled him to leave the treasures of Egypt, was that he had fixed his eyes on the invisible God of the Hebrews.
That is what it means when it says “he endured as seeing him who is invisible.”
So the third example of faith we see from Moses’ life is that, when faced with the decision to side with the God of Israel or seek Pharoah’s forgiveness and return to Egypt, Moses forsook the present, visible rewards of Egypt and fixed his eyes on the invisible God of his people.
One of the challenges we must all overcome if we’re to be people of faith is the sense that God has asked us to just believe in something we can’t really see. And this can be especially challenging in moments of crisis. We might ask:
How are we to believe that God will work all things for our good when our lives are going so badly?
How are we to believe that our God will provide for us when it seems we’ve lost everything we held dear?
How are we to live by faith when our lives are in chaos?
Moses’s example teaches us that we do so by fixing our eyes on something we can’t physically see, and in our crises – there is much we can’t see.
We can’t see how it going to turn out for our good. We can’t see why God has allowed this to happen to us, at this point in our lives. We can’t see what God intends to accomplish through it.
But that doesn’t mean we are blind. As we’ve acknowledged in the past few sermons – this is not a call to “blind faith” – for there is much that, with the eyes of faith, we can see.
What we can see is that there are many men and women of faith who have gone before us – people like Moses - and have survived their own moments of crisis by fixing their eyes on God.
So perhaps we need to be reminded that invisible doesn’t mean imperceptible
o Though we can’t see God, we can perceive through these examples that He is there, and that He is works on behalf of His people
And perhaps we need to be reminded that though God is often times invisible to us, we can still fix our eyes on Him, as Moses did
o We can look to Him and, with faith, believe that He is greater than our circumstances.
o And by doing so, we can leave behind old patterns, old ways of living, old fears, and old anxieties as we faithfully go forward after God.
4. Faith Trusts Obedience to God Will Deliver From Unseen Danger
Our final example of faith this morning is the faith displayed when Moses kept the Passover by putting blood on his doorposts and instructing all Israel to do the same in order to keep the destroying angel from taking the lives of their firstborn sons.
This faith was the faith of obedience
It was the faith to institute a strange ritual, to do something no Israelite had ever done before, simply because God commanded them to do it and because they believed God when he told them it would save them from coming danger
And from this last example we might take away a lesson we’ve already learned from the life of Abraham – that true faith obeys God. But what Moses’ example adds to this lesson is that obedience to God is able to deliver you from harm’s way, and sometimes it is a harm you couldn’t have seen coming.
When crises come into our lives and things go sideways, it can be tempting to take matters into our own hands.
We can start to think that a little lie here or fudging the numbers there or giving someone a taste of their own medicine is justified.
We can even begin to tell ourselves that God himself understands why we need to do the very things His Word tells us not to do.
But in doing so – we forget that God says, “this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.” (Isa. 66:2) Or that He says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Rom. 12:19)
True faith never takes matters into one’s own hands, but rather keeps the Word of God, even when doing doesn’t seem to make any sense.
True faith trusts that obedience to God is always the best choice, and that it will deliver from future unseen dangers.
Conclusion
Now the purpose of this chapter of Hebrews is to help us see that, if we are Christians, then we are part of an ongoing story, and it is the story of the people of God.
And as the people of God, we belong to a spiritual lineage of people, normal people, people just like us, whose faith enabled them
o to resist evil edicts
o to choose mistreatment with God’s people
o to forsake the treasures of Egypt
o and to obey God’s instructions
Their faith enabled them to
o See an invisible God
o And chase after His rewards
o And endure through the various trials and crises of their lives
And so our take away this morning must be that the faith that existed in these righteous saints of old, like Moses, this faith can be ours as well.
And that if we’re to live a life of faith, especially amid crisis, then we ought to look to Moses and Moses’ parents and follow in their examples.
But even as we do – we must acknowledge that there is an even a greater example of faith amid crisis – and that is found in Christ.
Christ
Like Moses, Jesus’s birth created a crisis – not just for his parents, but for a nation, as King Herod ruthlessly killed the baby boys in Bethlehem in an attempt to eliminate the prophesied messiah.
Like Moses, Jesus chose to be mistreated with the people of God rather than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. Forsaking all that was in this world, as He perfectly followed His Heavenly Father.
But when it came to celebrating the Passover – an observance that had been kept since Moses first instituted it – Jesus didn’t just observe it, he fulfilled it.
Rather than that of a lamb, Jesus offered his own body and blood as the ultimate sacrifice by which those who trust in him are delivered from the Destroyer, once and for all.
It is this act that we remember when we take the Lord’s Supper. And we take the Lord’s Supper every week, as a reminder of what Christ has won for us – so that our faith might continue to endure until the day when He returns and welcomes us into our Heavenly rewards.
Pray
________________________
Works Consulted
Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Hebrews (NICNT). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids, 1990.
Ellingworth, Paul. The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids, 1993.
Erdman, Charles R. The Epistle to the Hebrews. The Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1934.
Guthrie, George. H. The NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1998.
McGrath, Alister & J.I. Packer (Eds.). Hebrews: John Owen. Crossway Publishers: Wheaton, 1998.
[1] https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/document-media/CrisisIntervention.pdf & Definition of Crisis by Vener Garayev from the Encyclopedia of Crisis Management. https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/encyclopedia-of-crisis-management/chpt/crisis-definition#_
[2] Bruce, 313.
[3] BDAG, karterew
NEXT SUNDAY: Hebrews 11:29–40