By faith they passed through the Red sea as
by dry land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned. (Heb 11:29)
Hebrews 11
is a death-blow to many of the various theologies of justification we find
within Protestantism, such as teaching that Abraham had “saving faith,” not at
Gen 15:6, but at Gen 12. On this and related topics, see:
Hebrews 11:29
The Faith of Israel
Since most of the examples mentioned in
Hebrews 11 are of individual people who we know led exemplary lives of faith
and obedience, we might assume that all the instances mentioned in Hebrews 11
fall in the same category. This is not the case. There is at least one instance
of faith in Hb 11:29 regarding a group of people who as we know from later Old
Testament accounts and New Testament commentaries, did not continue in faith.
The verse reads, “By faith, the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land;
but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned.” Here it is clear that
“the people,” not just Moses, had faith in God and thus were able to cross the
Red Sea. Accounts in Exodus and Numbers tell us that close to or over a million
Jews crossed the Red sea. (Numbers 1:46 gives the total amount of men at
603,550. This does not include women and children, who would bring the total
population well over one million.)
Although Paul, by picking a particular cross
section of the entire forty years that Israel was in the wilderness, can speak
in glowing terms about one incident of faith on a mass scale, Paul gives a
further commentary on these same Israelites that is not so flattering. In 1Co 10:1-5
Paul writes:
For I
do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were
all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the
cloud and in the
sea. They
all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they
drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless,
God was not pleased with most of them; their
bodies were scattered over the desert.
We
understand that Paul, by specifying, “they all passed through the sea,” is
beginning his analysis from the crossing of the Red Sea. Once in the desert,
however, the Jews began to rebel. Forty years later, virtually none of the
original one million people who crossed the Red Sea entered the promise land.
Only two of the one million, Joshua and Caleb, along with all the children
twenty years old and younger, were worthy enough in God’s eyes to enter. (Cf. Nm 14:20-45; Hb 3:18.) Hence Paul, when he says above “God was not
pleased with most of them,” refers to everyone except two
people out of a million or more. It is significant, then, that Paul uses this
account to warn the Corinthians that though they have started out well in the
faith, this does not mean that they will continue in the faith. Their good
start does not mean a battle already won. Paul specifies this in vrs. 11-12:
“These things happened to them [the Old Testament Jews] as examples and were
written down as warnings for us...So, if you think you are standing firm, be
careful that you don’t fall.”
In
other places also Paul shows us that most of the people who crossed the Red Sea
ended up in unbelief and judgment. In Hb 3:16-18 he writes:
Who
were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of
Egypt? And
with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose
bodies fell in the desert? And to whom did God swear that they would never
enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of unbelief.
The
importance for the present discussion of this apparent anomaly between Hb 11:29
and Hb 3:16-18 is to show that an individual or group can at one moment have a
very genuine faith and be pleasing to God, yet at the next moment can fall from
faith and end up unjustified. Since Paul is assuring us that the faith of all
the people and groups he mentions was faith that “pleased God” (Hb 11:6), it is
clear that the subsequent unbelief of the same people does not mean that they
never had genuine faith from the beginning. It can only mean that they lost the
sincere faith they once enjoyed and subsequently lost their justification. This
again is clear evidence that faith alone cannot save. Through disobedience, and
despite their sincere faith, the Hebrews of the Exodus lost their salvation.
Moreover, this example shows that the faith that justifies comes not in a
moment of imputation but in a process that must be as strong at the end as it
was at the beginning. (Robert A. Sungenis, Not By
Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence for the Catholic Doctrine of Justification [2d
ed.; Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2009], 247-49, italics in original)
