The Echo in My Head: What Hebrews 11 Actually Says About Fear

Sometimes when we hear Scripture, our first instinct is to run it through our own personal filter. When we do, what we hear reflects where we are, not where God is moving us according to his will.

The other day I was sitting in church listening to a sermon on Hebrews 11, the hall of faith. All I could concentrate on was an obnoxious voice in my head, nagging at me like a worm in my ear: “They had faith and they weren’t afraid!” “Why don’t you have more faith?” “Why are you afraid?” It got so loud that I got up and left the room.

My friend saw me and said, “Hey, are you okay?”

“Not really,” I said. “All I can hear echoing in my head is that the people who made it into Hebrews 11 had faith and no fear. But my faith is in short supply, and I’m afraid!”

We shared a knowing chuckle, and I went on my way, those words still crashing against my skull like unrelenting waves on the shoreline.

When I got home, I had to investigate, because I kept thinking, surely this isn’t the takeaway. It wasn’t!

The Words I Kept Repeating

The words I kept repeating aren’t a refrain in the passage. “Not afraid” appears only twice, in Hebrews 11:23 and 11:27, and both times it’s about Moses and his family. I had taken two verses about one household and turned them into a verdict on everyone, and a life sentence for myself. Twisted Scripture is a dangerous thing, and Satan is the author of it. The passage was never saying that to have faith one must not experience fear or that fear itself shows an absence of faith. Never once was this implied!

Hebrews 11 records obedience, endurance, and trust, and almost never feelings. It is the recounting of lives already lived, the story of believers who finished well. But when we go back into each of their stories, we get a clearer picture of how they walked it out in the moment, and a great many of them were afraid. Of course they were! Sanctification happens in the presence of human emotion; faith is not a mute button for feelings. It’s action despite them.

What Their Own Stories Record

• Moses asked not to go: “Please send someone else” (Ex 4:13). He also fled Egypt out of fear (Ex 2:14).

• Sarah laughed at God’s promise, then denied it because she was afraid (Gen 18:12-15). Yet Hebrews says she “considered him faithful who had promised” (Heb 11:11).

• Abraham told Sarah to say she was his sister because he feared being killed (Gen 12:11-13; 20:11). Gross!

• Isaac did the same with Rebekah, afraid the men of Gerar would kill him (Gen 26:7). Also, gross!

• Jacob was “greatly afraid and distressed” before meeting Esau (Gen 32:7). He prayed, then wrestled until morning.

• Rahab admitted her heart had melted from terror (Josh 2:9-11), and she acted on it.

• Gideon called himself the least in his family, asked for sign after sign (the fleece), and tore down the altar at night because he was too afraid to do it by day (Judges 6:15, 27, 36-40).

• Barak wouldn’t go to battle unless Deborah went with him (Judges 4:8).

• David was “greatly afraid” of Achish and pretended to be insane to escape (1 Sam 21:12-13). Psalm 56:3 is tied to that episode: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”

• Samuel, as a boy, was afraid to tell Eli what he had seen (1 Sam 3:15).

• Moses’ parents hid the baby as long as they could, then set him in the Nile (Ex 2:2-3). The text implies fear but doesn’t name it.

Where the text is silent or doesn’t name fear:

• Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Joseph have no recorded fear. Noah’s only mentioned fear is the “reverent fear” in Hebrews 11:7.

• Jephthah made a rash vow (Judges 11:30-31), and Samson repeatedly compromised (Judges 16), but neither account names fear.

My Filter Got the Text Very Wrong

The success stories in this chapter don’t sit apart from human suffering. The passage isn’t an art gallery meant to put beautiful people on display. It’s an argument, an urgent cry from the heart of its author for ordinary believers not to shrink back because of their circumstances. Faith is a long obedience that endures, not in the absence of hardship, but because of hope. It is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1).

Sometimes we are less afraid than at other times. Occasionally our faith is strong, but often it wavers. That is precisely why this chapter was written. We know from Hebrews 10 that the audience had already suffered much, and the author is reminding them not to shrink back: “We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls” (Heb 10:39).

Jacob wrestled with God for a blessing that left him limping. Barak made his obedience conditional, and it cost him the full honor of the victory, though the victory still came (Judges 4:9). Rahab found that her sheer terror was the occasion for her faith.

Tear-Streaked Faith

We aren’t going to do it perfectly. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Much of the time we will have to do what God has asked of us with tear-streaked faces while our hands shake in terror. Most of the time we won’t understand much, if anything, of what he is requiring of us, but we show up anyway. Sometimes, the faith he asks for is the faith to move away from something and toward a new calling. Much of the time we won’t understand the timing or the plan, but we do it anyway. Other times he puts us right in the middle of a mess and simply asks us to stand there faithfully until he moves.

Maybe we will never see that move, but we stand anyway. Sometimes our fear becomes the occasion for our faith, sometimes we have faith despite our fear. All the time we keep our eyes on Jesus who did all of this in the face of great fear, pain, agony and every human emotion known to man (Heb 12:2). It is true, as CS Lewis so aptly spoke, “He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time.” He never shrunk back! And so, we follow, but never in his absence and never without his great understanding and always with great purpose.

The hall of faith wasn’t written so that we could read those names and feel that accomplishing what our brothers and sisters did is impossible. It’s a battle cry not to shrink back from hardship, and an invitation to stand on the shoulders of the great cloud that has gone before us (Heb 12:1). After all, they were just people too, but people in pursuit of something so much bigger than their own comforts and desires.

May we not shrink back from anything God has called us to today, even though our minds wander, our hands shake, and our emotions rage. God is faithful, and because of Jesus, our faith can remain!