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By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going (Hebrews 11:8, ESV).
I love a good BLT. For years, my blueprint for the perfect sandwich was crispy bacon, fresh lettuce, juicy tomatoes, and a generous layer of mayonnaise. That was the foundation. That was the rule—the way my mother made the sandwich when I was young.
Then I got married.
One afternoon, my wife watched me prep my classic sandwich and casually offered a suggestion: “It’s much better if you add peanut butter.”
I immediately told her she was wrong. Peanut butter and mayonnaise? It sounded like a culinary disaster, an offense to a proven classic. But choosing to avoid marital discord over sandwich tradition, I agreed to a bite, and I hated to admit it, but she was right. It was incredible. By stepping outside my past “BLT” boundaries, I discovered something genuinely better.
It’s a pleasant story about growth, right?
We love narratives like this. We celebrate the gentle, voluntary pivots that lead us to deeper insights and better outcomes. But what happens when the shift isn’t a gentle suggestion? What happens when we don’t choose to step outside the walls of our comfort zone, but the walls themselves are torn down around us?
That is the agonizing emotional landscape of the Book of Hebrews.
Historically, we know the recipients of this letter were facing brutal reality checks. They were Jewish Christians living under the heavy boot of Roman persecution and social exile. They weren’t looking for a new spiritual recipe; they were content with the “mayo” of their heritage. They loved the Temple’s physical majesty, the predictable rhythms of the priesthood, and the safety of their religious community.
Then, the storm hit. Hebrews 10:34 explicitly notes that they watched the “plundering of [their] property.” They were being systematically evicted from the spiritual and physical houses they had spent their lifetimes building.
For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised (Hebrews 10:34-36).
Many commentaries frame Hebrews as a dense, theological defense of Christianity over Judaism. But look closer, and it reads less like a courtroom brief and more like a survival guide for the displaced. The idea of this book doesn’t stem from the difficulty of the path ahead, but from the exhausting frustration of having to take the journey in the first place.
No one wants to be a holy nomad.
The disappointment these early believers faced didn’t come from a lack of faith; it came from the grief of being forced to uproot. They were being dragged “outside the camp” (Hebrews 13:13), forced to leave the only foundations they had ever known.
If you have ever lost a home—whether a physical house, a career, a marriage, or the institutional walls of a church community you trusted—you know this same exhaustion. You liked the old house and the shelter it provided, but now you must change to something totally unexpected.
The Book of Hebrews is God’s response to that specific, heavy grief. It doesn’t offer a way to rebuild the old structure. Instead, it gently lifts our eyes to a different kind of stability: a “city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).
We are on an unwanted journey, yes. But as we step out into the wilderness together, we might just find that the unshakable kingdom ahead is far better than the fragile houses we left behind.