The Long Obedience of Dying Saints Text: Hebrews 11:20-22
Introduction: Faith with a Future
The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is God's great hall of faith. It is a muster roll of the saints, a recounting of those who lived and died with their eyes fixed on the promises of God. But we must be careful not to read this chapter with the sentimental piety of a modern evangelical. This is not a collection of inspirational stories about people who had warm feelings about Jesus in their hearts. This is a record of hard-nosed, history-altering, long-term faith. This is faith that builds civilizations and buries empires. This is faith that operates with a time horizon that stretches out for centuries, even millennia. It is the substance of things hoped for, and the things these men hoped for were not a disembodied floaty experience in the sweet by-and-by. They hoped for the fulfillment of God's covenant promises on earth, as it is in heaven.
Our modern age is pathologically short-sighted. We are consumed with the tyranny of the urgent, the next news cycle, the next quarter's profits, the next election. Our vision of the future rarely extends beyond our own lifespan, and so our faith becomes a small, privatized affair, concerned mostly with our personal tranquility and a ticket to heaven when we die. But the faith described here is of an entirely different quality. It is robust, public, and generational. It is a faith that plants trees under whose shade it knows it will never sit. It is a faith that lays the foundation for a cathedral it will not live to see completed.
In our text today, we have three snapshots of this kind of rugged, forward-looking faith. We see three patriarchs at the very end of their lives, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. And what is the final, crowning testimony of their faith? It is how they faced death. At the very threshold of eternity, when all earthly ambitions fade, their faith was most potent. They were not looking back at their accomplishments; they were looking forward, speaking prophetically into the future, worshipping in their weakness, and making arrangements for their bones. Their dying breaths were filled with the unshakable confidence that God keeps His promises, and that the covenant He made with Abraham was not a flimsy personal guarantee but the blueprint for the history of the world.
These three vignettes are not just historical curiosities. They are a profound rebuke to our shrunken, self-centered faith. They teach us what it means to live and die as part of a covenant, as links in a chain that God has been forging since the beginning of time. They show us that true faith is not about escaping the world, but about claiming it for Christ, generation after generation, until He comes again.
The Text
By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau, even regarding things to come.
By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.
By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel, and gave commands concerning his bones.
(Hebrews 11:20-22 LSB)
Faith That Binds the Future (v. 20)
We begin with Isaac, a man whose life was often marked by passivity and failure, yet who is memorialized here for one crucial act of faith.
"By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau, even regarding things to come." (Hebrews 11:20)
Now, if you know the story in Genesis 27, your first reaction might be to scratch your head. Where is the faith? The whole affair is a mess of carnal maneuvering. Isaac, in his old age, wants to give the blessing to his favorite, Esau, contrary to the prophecy given to Rebekah that the older would serve the younger. Rebekah and Jacob then conspire in a low-comedy deception involving goatskins and savory stew to steal the blessing. When Esau returns and the trick is revealed, Isaac trembles violently. This does not look like a serene portrait of faith.
But that is precisely where the faith shines. The faith was not in Isaac's original intention, which was to subvert God's will. The faith was in his reaction when his sin was exposed and God's sovereign will was accomplished despite him. When Esau begs him to reverse the blessing, Isaac says, "I have blessed him; and indeed, he shall be blessed" (Gen. 27:33). In that moment, Isaac surrendered. He stopped fighting God. He recognized that his spoken, prophetic blessing, extracted from him by deceit, was nevertheless the unalterable will of God. His personal preferences were shattered, but his faith in the God who works all things, even our foolish sins, according to the counsel of His will, took over. He submitted.
And what was this blessing about? It was "regarding things to come." This was not a simple "have a nice life" wish. This was a covenantal, prophetic act that would shape the destiny of nations for centuries. He spoke of dominion, of nations bowing down, of being lord over his brothers. He was conferring the Abrahamic blessing, the promise of the seed through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Isaac, by faith, looked down the long corridors of time and, submitting to God's choice, bound the future to the covenant. He understood that his words, as a patriarch, had weight in the real world. This is what we have lost. We treat words as cheap things, but the patriarchs understood that a blessing or a curse was a real, history-shaping force under God.
Isaac's faith, then, was his final, trembling submission to God's sovereign, covenantal purpose, a purpose that would move forward regardless of his own flawed plans. He believed God's word more than he believed his own desires.
Faith That Worships in Weakness (v. 21)
Next, we see Jacob, another man whose life was a tapestry of striving, wrestling, and deceit, but who ends his days in a posture of faithful worship.
"By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff." (Hebrews 11:21)
Here again, Jacob is acting as a patriarch, speaking prophetically about the future. He adopts Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, as his own, elevating them to the status of tribal heads. And in a move that echoes his own story, he deliberately crosses his hands, giving the greater blessing to the younger son, Ephraim. This is not the act of a sentimental old man. This is a conscious, faith-filled declaration that God's electing grace is not bound by human customs of primogeniture. God will choose whom He will choose, and Jacob, who lived his whole life by that truth, affirms it one last time.
But notice the posture of this faith. He "worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff." The staff is significant. This was the staff that had been with him on his journey. It was a symbol of his pilgrimage, his sojourning. It was a reminder of his weakness. He had leaned on that staff ever since God had touched his hip at Peniel, crippling him and changing his name from Jacob the "supplanter" to Israel the "one who strives with God." That limp was a permanent reminder that his strength was not in himself, but in God. His greatest victory came through his most profound weakness.
And so, at the end of his life, old, weak, and dying, he leans on this symbol of his entire journey of faith and he worships. This is not the worship of a health-and-wealth televangelist. This is the worship of a battered saint who has learned that God's power is made perfect in weakness. He is not shaking his fist at God for his frailty; he is leaning on the evidence of God's faithfulness through all his years of striving and is bowing in adoration. His body is failing, but his faith is at its peak. He is looking back at a lifetime of God's perplexing providence and looking forward to the promises being fulfilled in his grandsons, and the only proper response is worship.
Faith That Banks on the Exodus (v. 22)
Finally, we come to Joseph, the most righteous of the patriarchs, whose faith is demonstrated in a peculiar command about his remains.
"By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel, and gave commands concerning his bones." (Hebrews 11:22)
Think of Joseph's position. He was, for all practical purposes, the prime minister of Egypt, the greatest superpower on earth. He had wealth, power, and prestige. His family was safe and prospering in Goshen. It would have been very easy to conclude that Egypt was the new promised land, that God's plan had culminated in this glorious success story. He could have been embalmed and buried with all the pomp of a pharaoh in a grand Egyptian tomb.
But Joseph refused to be an Egyptian. By faith, he knew that Egypt, for all its glory, was a temporary refuge. It was not the inheritance. The promise was tied to the land of Canaan. And so, on his deathbed, he does two things. First, he makes mention of the exodus. He prophesies, "God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here" (Gen. 50:25). He was looking centuries into the future, past the comfort and security of his present circumstances, to a day of deliverance that was not yet visible. He believed God's promise of the land more than he believed the evidence of his senses.
Second, he "gave commands concerning his bones." This was not a sentimental request. It was a sermon in a coffin. For the next several hundred years, as Israel's fortunes in Egypt turned from favor to bitter slavery, the mummy of Joseph was a silent, powerful witness. It was a tangible anchor to the promise. It was a constant reminder that Egypt was not home. It was a down payment on the future inheritance. Every time a despairing Hebrew looked at that coffin, he was reminded: "We are not staying here. God has promised us a future, and our great leader Joseph banked his very bones on it."
This is a profoundly physical, earthy faith. It is not about escaping the body, but about the body's future. Joseph's command was an act of audacious, postmillennial optimism. He was so confident in God's future victory that he arranged for his remains to be part of the eventual triumphal procession into the promised land. He was planting a flag, staking a claim on a future he would not see with his own eyes, but which he knew was as certain as the God who had promised it.
Conclusion: Dying Well
What do these three dying saints teach us? They teach us that faith is not a short-term crisis management tool. It is a long-term, world-shaping, covenant-keeping orientation to all of reality. They teach us that the end of our life is not a time for winding down, but for our most potent acts of faith.
Isaac teaches us to submit to God's sovereign plan, even when it wrecks our own, and to speak prophetically into the next generation. Jacob teaches us to worship God in our weakness, leaning on the staff of His lifelong faithfulness, and to pass the blessing on. Joseph teaches us to reject the golden handcuffs of the world's empires and to stake our entire hope, even our physical remains, on the future triumph of God's kingdom.
All three men died in faith, not having received the fullness of the promises, but they saw them afar off, were persuaded of them, and embraced them. They knew they were part of a story that was much bigger than their own lives. They were laying the groundwork for the coming of the Messiah, the true seed of Abraham. Their faith was a bridge to the future.
We now live on this side of the cross. We have seen the great exodus from sin and death that Joseph only prophesied. We have seen the blessing of Abraham extended to all the nations through Jesus Christ. We have a better country, a heavenly city, that they only glimpsed. How then should we live? We are to live with the same forward-looking, history-shaping faith. We are to raise our children in the covenant, blessing them and speaking of the things to come, the future triumphs of Christ's kingdom. We are to worship God in our weakness, knowing that the story does not end with us. And we are to live as though this present world is not our final home, investing everything not in the Egypt of this age, but in the promised land of the new heavens and the new earth. We must learn to die well, and the way to die well is to live every day with our eyes fixed on the long, glorious, and certain future that God has promised to His people.