Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Hebrews · About this commentary
Looking to Jesus
Hebrews 12:1-3
1 Therefore let’s also, seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let’s run with perseverance the race that is set before us, · WEB
The catalogue becomes a stadium, and the runners are told where to put their eyes.
Therefore let's also, seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let's run with perseverance the race that is set before us.
The chapter of names turns out to have been a grandstand. The witnesses are the people just catalogued — witnesses in the sense the chapter established, people who received testimony — and now the readers are on the track with the commended dead banked around them. Whether they watch or only testify, the writer does not say; their function is the same either way. Nobody runs alone in front of that crowd.
Two things get laid aside, and the distinction is practical. Every weight — not sin, just mass: things innocent in themselves that cost seconds. A runner strips what a walker may keep. And the sin which so easily entangles — the image is of robes around the legs, whatever repeatedly brings this particular runner down.
The race is set before us — assigned, not chosen — and the required pace is the letter's one prescription: perseverance, the word from the diagnosis Hebrews 10:36.
Then the sightline, which is the sentence the paragraph exists for: looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith.
The grammar means looking away to him — eyes off the crowd, off the track, off the runner's own form. And the two titles bracket the whole catalogue: he is faith's author, ahead of Abel at the start, and its perfecter, the completion word Hebrews 2:10 Hebrews 5:9, beyond the finish. Chapter 11's heroes are witnesses; none of them is the object of the looking. The runners watch the one who ran first and finished.
His own race is then given in the chapter's terms: who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame. The same phrase — set before him — makes his course parallel to theirs, and the accounting is Moses' arithmetic at full scale Hebrews 11:26: joy weighed against cross, shame not denied but despised, rated beneath notice. And the outcome is the letter's seated posture one final time: has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God Hebrews 10:12.
Verse 3 turns it into medicine: consider him who has endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, that you don't grow weary, fainting in your souls. The remedy for fainting is a comparison — his opposition against theirs — and the next verse will make the comparison explicit.
settled What this mark means