becoming so. Spiritually speaking, they were tired, sick at heart and ready to give up the unequal struggle. What was the cause of their trouble? The same ‘hostility from sinners’ that the Lord himself endured during his time on earth. Earlier in the epistle we learned that they had ‘endured a great struggle with suffering’, being made ‘a spectacle both by reproaches and tribulations’ and suffering ‘the plundering of [their] goods’ (10:32–34). They had been treated shamefully by the society in which