NOTES for Heb 11:32-40
Speaking about people of faith and the works of faith, the author of the letter states that they too reached "perfection," but, in his words, "not without us." By "us" he undoubtedly means Christians, the Church as the body of Christ.
Of course, statements of this kind are often understood to mean that Christianity is the final and most correct religion, containing in itself the whole fullness of Revelation and therefore the whole fullness of truth. In that case, everything true that existed in the history of Revelation before Christ belongs to Christianity, because there is no other truth in the world. It must be recalled, however, that representatives of some other religions have asserted something similar, each having in mind, of course, his own tradition. And if Christianity really were a religion, there would be enormous room here for arguments, discussions, and rivalry.
But Christianity is not a religion, but life with Christ in His Kingdom. And in speaking of "perfection," the author of the letter clearly has in mind the fullness of the Kingdom, not the fullness of some religious tradition. In that case it turns out that all people of faith in all times were seeking one thing: the Kingdom and its fullness. And now they too have been joined to this fullness, together with Christians.
Of course, if one absolutizes the time of the fallen world, one has to imagine approximately the following picture: all the righteous who died before Christ found themselves in the world of shadows, which the Old Testament books call sheol in Hebrew and the New Testament books call hades in Greek. There they wait until the Messiah comes and frees them, bringing them into the Kingdom. But the picture looks like this only when one perceives it through the prism of the reality of the fallen world. Here time is one-dimensional and absolute, directing the unfolding of all the cause-and-effect chains that determine the existence of this world.
In the Kingdom, however, everything is somewhat different. There is no one-dimensional time there, and cause-and-effect chains exist there differently from the form familiar to us. Therefore the sequence of events there turns out to be different. In the Kingdom there is no "first" and "then" to which we are accustomed. The reality of the Kingdom can appear at any point of the space and time within which our world exists. And the measure of a particular person's involvement in the life of the Kingdom is determined only by the quality of his existence, by what determines this existence: fallen nature or God's breath of life.
It is no surprise that people who strove to build their lives so that only the breath of life would determine them receive the Kingdom and its life insofar as they can reach the goal they have set. But they reach it only with the coming of Christ, when sin loses all power over them. For them this is not a story of staying in the world of shadows, as their life may appear to us, but a path into the Kingdom, completed by meeting Christ. For us such a meeting often turns out to be the first step; for them it is the final one, after which the life of the Kingdom opens to them in all its fullness.