HEB. xii. 1-14
The Epistle approaches its close. The Writer has much yet to say to the disciples upon many things, all connected with that main interest of their lives, a resolute fidelity to the Lord, to the Gospel, and to one another. But he has not yet quite done with that side of their "exceeding need" to which the antidote is _the faith_ which can deal with the future as the present, with the unseen as the seen. Upon this theme, from one aspect or another, is spent the passage now before us.
First, the appeal is to the recollection that the combat, the race, the victory of faith, as it was for the Hebrew believers, "the contest set before _us_" (ver. 1), not only had been fought and won before them by the saints of the old time, but that those saints were now, from their blessed rest, as "spirits of the just made perfect" (ver. 23), watchers and witnesses of their successors' course. "We have, lying around us, so great a cloud of witnesses" (ver. 1). "We" are running, like the competitors in the Hellenic stadium, in the public view of a mighty concourse, so vast, so aggregated, so placed aloft, that no word less great than "cloud" occurs as its designation: that "long cloud" as it is finely called in Isaac Watts' noble hymn, "Give me the wings of faith." True, the multitudinous watchers are unseen, but this only gives faith another opportunity of exercise; we are to treat the Blessed as seen, for we know that they are there, living to God, one with us, fellows of our life and love. So let us address ourselves afresh to the spiritual race, the course of faith. Let us, as athletes of the soul, strip all encumbrance off, "every weight" of allowed wrong, all guilty links with the world of rebellion and self-love; "the sin which doth so easily beset us," clinging so soon around the feet, like a net of fine but stubborn meshes, till the runner gives up the hopeless effort and is lost.[N]
[N] I cannot think possible the alternative (marginal) rendering of [Greek: euperistaton] in the Revised Version--"_admired by many_." There is example for the meaning in classical Greek, but the _idea_ is totally out of keeping with the spirit of this passage.
I thus explain the "witnesses" to mean spectators, watchers, not testifiers. The context seems to me to decide somewhat positively for this explanation. It is an altogether pictorial context; the imagery of the foot-race comes suddenly up, and in a moment raises before us the vision of the stadium and its surroundings. The reader cannot see the course with his inner eyes without also seeing those hosts of eager lookers-on which made, on every such occasion, in the old world as now, the life of the hour. In such a context nothing but explicit and positive reasons to the contrary could give to the word "witnesses," and to the word "cloud" in connexion with it, any other allusion. True, these watchers are all, as a fact, evidential "witnesses" also, testifiers to the infinite benefit and success of the race of faith. But that thought lies almost hidden behind the other. It is as loving, sympathetic, inspiring lookers-on that the old saints, from Abel onwards, are here seen gathered, thronging and intent, around us as we run.
The conception runs off of course into mystery, as every possible conception about the unseen does, even when Scripture is most explicit about unseen facts. We ask, and ask in vain, what is the medium through which these observers watch us, the air and light, as it were, in which their vision acts; what is their proximity to us all the while; to what extent they are able to know the entire conditions of our race. But all this leaves faith in peaceful possession of a fact of unspeakable animation. It tells the discouraged or tired Christian, tempted to think of the unseen as a dark void, that it is rather a bright and populous world, in mysterious touch and continuity with this, and that our forerunners, from those of the remotest past down to the last-called beloved one who has passed out of our sight, know enough about us to mark our advance and to prepare their welcome at the goal.