Faith and Promise

Hebrews 11:39-40 (KJV)
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.

Wait...why would the faithful not receive the promise?
Does it mean these people are lost？
The promise is actually that of salvation in Christ Jesus. It is a fact that it was only in the “last days” that full plan, the mystery, was revealed (c.f. Heb 1:2; Rom 16:25,etc)
All the ancients had was a localized promise (Heb 11:13).
Yet all the same, faith enable them to be in contact of Christ’s blood, which although was yet to be physically manifested, yet saved by “reaching back” in time, but still yet really because the Lamb was already slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8).
The last bit sounds really awkward with the double negative, and almost sounds as if the faithful in the past had to depend on us to be made perfect! But really the “us” refers to the better “provision” that the writer had been talking about for the last few chapters.
So basically is the writer continuing to reassure the reader that hey, even those who have not heard of the mystery of the gospel have secured their promises, why are you, whom the mystery had been directly revealed upon fretting and still being insecure such as to desire to hang on to the old law? Don’t you realize that even they needed the same promises as us, to be made perfect, to finally lay hold to the heavenly promise which they knew nothing about?

And so it remains for us today to fully appreciate all that God had laid down for us - Christ’s sacrifice, the Word and even the cloud of witnesses (Heb 12:1) and to look to Jesus, our author and finisher of our faith (Heb 12:2), and carry on in our race to eternal glory!