IDEA: The readers or hearers of the Hebrew letter were under pressure to give up their faith.

TEXT: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1).

PURPOSE: To help listeners realize that it has never been easy to believe.

Someone has said that reading the Bible resembles reading someone else's mail. If you were going to read letters written by John Adams who lived in the new United States at the end of the 18th century, you'd want to know something about him and you'd also want to know something about the people to whom he was writing. What was his situation?

When we come to the letter to the Hebrews, we don't know who the writer is. But we have a good idea of the people to whom the letter was written.

I. We know that the majority of the people hearing the letter were Jewish.

All of the images used about the temple, the holy of holies, the priesthood, and the sacrifices would have been very familiar to a Jewish audience that knew about those things.

Suppose you are a Protestant or you're not religious at all and you read a letter written with devout Roman Catholics in mind. You might have trouble understanding some of the ideas in the letter.

II. The recipients of the letter were Christians in a Jewish community.

They probably were being persecuted as Jews.

And they probably were also being persecuted by other Jews within the community because they were Christians (11:32-34, 12:4-5).

III. They had been Christians a long time, but they felt like quitting (2:1) and going back to Jewish temple worship.

The temple worship must have seemed more "real" than the message of the gospel.

The issue was that they were on the brink of losing their faith. The writer did not want them to move to something less real that they thought was more real.