Hebrews 11: 39 – 40: And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.
Hebrews 11 is famously known as the faith chapter of the Bible in which is a record of great men and women in the Old Testament who took God at His Word and experienced wondrous supernatural in their lives. Paul praises these Old Testament saints very highly and said that they and many others not written of are a great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12: 1) who went before us, and yet when we examine the lives of these individuals in the Old Testament, we quickly discover that they had all kinds of blemishes, flaws and sin. Abraham told lies, Sarah lied, Isaac lied, Jacob deceived, Moses murdered, Gideon went into idolatry, Samson committed adultery, David committed adultery and murdered etcetera. But when we read of these wonderful characters in the New Testament, none of their sin is recorded of because it cannot pass through Jesus’ cleansing blood in the middle of the Bible. Such is the power of the blood that it erases our fallen history from the mind of God so that He continually sees us as His sinless, spotless, virtuous Bride in whom He is well pleased.
These precious Old Testament saints along with seven ages of New Testament saints died in the faith, not having received the promise of a Rapture whilst they were living, and Paul says that they without us could not come to perfection or completion, because it would take the full revelation of the Word in the last days to produce a finished product of a mature Bride in Her perfection, and to bring the sleeping saints out of the grave and to Rapture the Bride of all ages into Glory. It is the living saints of the last days who receive the promise of not enduring death, but of bypassing the grave and meeting Her Kinsman Redeemer on the other side as living saints. The sleeping saints are waiting on us for that, and we are coming to full maturity by the revelation of the Word, for this is what will bring about the redemption of our bodies to a glorified state.