They saw the promises afar off, dimly, on the horizon of their mental vision; as one looks into the distance and cannot tell whether what he sees be cloud or mountain.  And until they could make up their minds that there was some substance in the vision, they did not embrace it.  They were not credulous.  Neither were they carelessly or heedlessly sure that there was and could be nothing in the vision but mist and fancy.  They recognized that on their decision of the question hung the life of which they meant to make the very most.  They looked again and again, and kept thinking about it.  Thus they became and were “persuaded of them.”  And most people stop here with a merely intellectual faith in their heads, and very little in their hearts and lives.  Not so these old heroes; they were not so purely and coldly intellectual that they could not do anything.  They “embraced them.”  They said, that is exactly what I want and need, and I’ll have it, if it costs me my life.

Now a promise is always conditional; if you want one thing, you must give up something else.  It involves a choice between alternatives; you can have either one freely, you cannot have both.  It was to them as to Christ on the “exceeding high mountain,” God or the world; God with the cross, or the world with Satan thrown in.  And the same alternative confronts us.

Moses could be a good Jew or a good Egyptian.  Most of us, while resolved to be excellent Jews at heart, would have said nothing about it, but remained sons of Pharaoh’s daughter in order to benefit the Jews by our influence in our lofty station.  We should have become miserable hybrids with all the vices and weaknesses of both races, but with none of the virtues of either.  And for all that we should ever have done the Jews might have rotted in Egyptian bondage.  Enlargement and deliverance would have arisen to the Jews from some other place; but we and our father’s house would have been destroyed.  By faith Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the children of God, etc.  And certainly he did suffer for it.

They embraced the promises with their whole hearts.  They were stoned and sawn asunder rather than give them up.  And what was the effect on their characters?  Having counted the cost, and being perfectly willing to accept any loss or pain for the sake of these promises, and hence inspired by them, they became sublime heroes.  Through faith they “subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.  And others had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:  they wandered about in sheepskins and in goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented.  Of whom the world was not worthy.”  That is a faith worth having, and it is as sound philosophy as it is scripture.