(Genesis 22:15-19; Hebrews 6:9-20)
Note: the title for this sermon was taken from Michael Card’s album on the book of Hebrews.
All of us, Isaiah declares, have gone astray, wandering away from God and off the path he set before us like a bunch of silly sheep who can’t see past the grass just beyond their reach; which means that all of us, frequently, need correction. We need our good shepherd to reach out with his crook, gently hook it around our neck, and pull us back the way we should be going. Which he does, by various means—one of those being, as we noted briefly a couple weeks ago, each other, and particularly through those whom he has called and empowered to lead the church. Correcting those who have wandered off the path before they can get into major trouble, not in order to inflict pain or make them feel bad but in order to help them get back where they need to be, is one of our responsibilities as Christians, and one which rests especially on Christian leaders; and it’s one which the Bible models for us extensively, because it’s the purpose for which a great chunk of the New Testament, including Hebrews, was written.
It’s a tricky thing, though, because we human beings are both resistant to correction, and prone to overreact, and thus to overcorrect—and overcorrecting can be just as bad as not correcting ourselves, and sometimes even worse. One good example of this comes from the aftermath of the Battle of Midway—when Admiral Kurita spotted a patrolling American submarine, he ordered an emergency simultaneous turn, 45° to starboard; one of his cruisers, the Mikuma, turned too hard, and the Mogami, in line behind her, plowed into her, flattening Mogami’s bow and breaking open Mikuma’s fuel tanks, leaving it vulnerable to be sunk by American dive bombers.
Trying to correct someone without overcorrecting them can be a fine line to walk, and it’s one that Hebrews takes very seriously. The author has come down hard on his audience because they need to understand the grave danger of their refusal to grow, and because he knows they’re resistant; but though he wants them to stop being so spiritually blasé, and so has used stark, grim language in warning them against their current, potentially fatal course, he doesn’t want them to overreact into despair and think themselves doomed, which would be just as fatal. Either one, really, would leave them focusing too much on themselves and too little on Christ, and thus heading in the wrong direction. The author wants instead to bring them back on center, back to focusing on Christ and putting their full faith in him, and so he follows this resounding warning with an equally resonant proclamation of the faithfulness of God and the sufficiency of Christ.
We read the first part of this last week, as the author declares his firm assurance that his hearers will not in fact fall away from Christ, that their salvation is ultimately secure because God won’t let go of them; but he goes further than that, in two ways. One, he grounds this assurance by reminding them of God’s faithfulness to Abraham; this sets up another reference to the story of Melchizedek, into which the author will finally delve in detail in chapter 7, and it also functions as a bit of a reassurance, I think, that the author isn’t asking these Jewish Christians to give up everything from their heritage. Indeed, the whole story of God’s covenant faithfulness to his people—including this story of God swearing an oath to Abraham, and thus in effect doubling the weight of his promise and commitment—it’s all still every bit as relevant and important as it was before; it just means differently than it used to, because the fulfillment and purpose of the Old Testament story has come in Jesus. Where the opponents of the church would have invoked Abraham to point to the Temple and the Law, Hebrews says no, Abraham points us to Christ. It all points to Christ.
God who cannot lie and who cannot go back on his word made a promise to Abraham which he ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, and this is why we have hope; indeed, where all other hopes will fail us in the end, here we have a hope set before us that will never fail. In Jesus, we need not worry about being swept away by the storms of life or capsized by their waves, for our hope in him is a soul anchor, a sure and steadfast anchor for the soul that holds us firm and steadfast where we need to be in the face of the worst life can throw at us. And notice why the author says this, because he connects it in to what he’s already said, and what he’s going to say, about the high-priestly work of Jesus: our anchor is secure because it isn’t hooked onto anything worldly, but onto the very throne of God.
In the temple in Jerusalem, the presence of God was understood to dwell in a little room right in the center, the Holy of Holies, which was closed off by a heavy curtain; it was the veil that protected the eyes of the people from the glory of God. Jesus, Hebrews says, has gone on our behalf behind the curtain, not merely of the earthly Holy of Holies, which is no more—at his death, the curtain split from top to bottom, ending this isolation of the world from the presence of God—but of the heavenly Holy of Holies, into the throne room of creation, the full celestial presence of his Father, and there he has anchored our hope to the very structure of the throne of grace. By the work of Christ on our behalf, the faithfulness and the character and the power and the glory of God are no longer a danger to us, they are the anchor and the essence of our hope. There is nothing greater, there can be nothing greater.
And notice, in verses 11-12, this is the reason he gives to encourage these Jewish Christians to press on, to hold fast to faith in Christ, and to live in the way of Christ. It isn’t ultimately “Do this or you’re going to Hell”—he’s certainly warned them of the danger of turning away from Christ, but he doesn’t want them motivated primarily by that warning, he doesn’t want them driven by fear. The warning is to help them see their behavior clearly and take it seriously, but their motivation for following Jesus should be positive, not negative. Nor does he push them with the language of duty and obligation; he doesn’t speak in the tones of command, or try to whip them along with the lash of guilt. He doesn’t threaten, or coerce, or cajole, or appeal to authority—whether his own or anyone else’s. These are all, every last one, popular tactics in churches all over the place, and probably in synagogues and mosques and centers of every other religion, too; but Hebrews uses none of them. Instead, he declares that he wants them to fully understand the hope they have in Jesus—which, yes, involves some effort on their part to do their best to understand it—and that he wants that to be their motivation to press on in the Christian life, to be imitators of God’s faithful people who have gone before them.
This is one of the key differences between the religion of the gospel and any merely human religion, even if that human religion uses the language of Christianity. Human religion is all about power and effort, command and control, bribery and coercion; it seeks, by one means or another, to make people behave in a certain way. It’s primarily about the outward self, because that’s what people can see. The gospel, by contrast, is first and foremost about our hearts, because God sees us as we are, all the way down, all the way through. It’s about shifting our deepest allegiances, freeing our souls from all the idols to which we’ve given ourselves so that we can give our allegiance totally and wholeheartedly to God; it’s about purifying and redirecting our deepest desires, the wellsprings of our motivation and conduct; it’s about setting us free from our fears and healing our distorted understanding of love. The gospel breaks the shackles of sin on our lives and changes the things that drive and steer us, changing what we do by changing why we do it and what we want to gain from it. The gospel says, “Fill yourself with the love and the grace of God, fill yourself with the full assurance of hope in Christ, and the rest will follow.”