Hebrews is a sustained sermon to a community of Jewish Christians under pressure to retreat into older safer forms. The author wants them to see that faith has always been the engine of God's people — that to abandon faith now is to abandon everyone from Abel to Jesus. Chapter 11 is the cloud of witnesses, and verses 1-3 give the definition that frames the whole list.

From the writers we read together

John Polkinghorne

physicist and Anglican priest

Polkinghorne pushed back his whole career against the false dichotomy that faith means belief without evidence. Hebrews 11 says the opposite: faith is conviction about realities that are not yet visible — not because there is no evidence, but because the evidence has not yet finished arriving.

Verse 3 is the chapter's first claim, and it is a cosmological one: by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God. That is not a feeling. It is an interpretive commitment about how the universe works. Every other person mentioned in the chapter — Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Sarah, Moses — lived inside that interpretation. So do you, when you live by faith.