(Habakkuk 2:2-4; Hebrews 10:32-11:2)

As he did in chapter 6, so the author of Hebrews follows his warning in chapter 10 with a reassurance to his people: no, you aren’t going to fall away from God, you aren’t going to abandon Christ. You need to take this seriously, he tells them, you need to understand the consequences of rejecting Christ—he is the only hope of salvation, and if you turn your back on him, there is no other way to God—but you and I, he says, “we aren’t the people who shrink back and are destroyed; we’re among the people who have faith and preserve their souls.”

We might compare Hebrews’ warning to standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. There’s a railing there, you don’t need to be afraid that you’re going to fall in and die—but you need to understand that if you climb over the railing to look over the edge, you may very well fall in, and if you do fall in, you’re going to die. As long as you understand that and take that seriously, you’ll be fine. The purpose of the warning there is to give us a proper fear of the canyon; and the purpose of the warning in Hebrews is to give us a proper fear of the Lord, which the Bible says is the beginning of wisdom. We don’t need to be afraid that God wants to hurt us, or enjoys punishing us, or isn’t really good or wise or faithful; but we need to understand that he is God and we aren’t, and that choosing to be his enemy would be a really bad idea.

As such, Hebrews combines this reassurance with one last section of argument; and where the book up to this point has been pretty deep water in a lot of places and has taken some time and effort for us to understand, here it really gets very clear, very simple—not that the water’s necessarily that much shallower, but it’s very clear, you can see all the way to the bottom. The point the author is making through this next part of the book is a very basic one. He’s told his readers they’ve been given a great gift in Christ, and he’s made it clear to them that Jesus is the only way—but they’re under a lot of pressure to go back to Judaism, it’s not easy for them to stand firm and keep the faith, an they have to be wondering if it’s worth taking the heat, even with everything he’s said to this point; and so he tells them, yes, it’s worth it. As hard as the world can try to make it, keeping the faith is worth it, and more than worth it.

Interestingly, the author starts by telling them they should already know this from their own experience. He doesn’t appeal to the Old Testament here—we’ll get to that next week—nor does he go back to the deep theological arguments; instead, he just says, “Remember.” Remember your own story. Remember when you first came to faith in Christ—the world gave you a hard ride. They insulted you because of Christ, they persecuted you, they made you the butt of their jokes, they convicted you of crimes you hadn’t committed and confiscated your property—and when they moved on to give your friends in the church the same treatment, you stood with those friends and supported them, even when they were thrown in jail. You didn’t lose heart then, he says; instead, you rejoiced, because you understood that you were suffering because of Christ, who suffered for you so that you might have life. You had that confidence in Christ then; don’t throw it away now. Be patient, stand firm, hang in there, and hold fast to Christ—you will not regret it.

Now, that can be hard counsel, those days, weeks, months, when we just don’t see it; but Hebrews says—and he’s working from the Greek version¹ here, which is why it looks different—remember the prophet. Remember Habakkuk, who called out to God to ask, “How long, O Lord, will you let evil and violence continue?” And what did God say in response? God said, “My deliverer is coming; it may seem slow, but he’s coming, and he won’t delay. But my righteous one will live by faith.”

The righteous will live by faith. Paul picked that verse up in Romans 1; Martin Luther found it there and started the Reformation. For Paul in Romans, and for Luther, the emphasis is on living by faith as opposed to living by the law, and that’s in view here, too; but more than that, it’s about living by faith that God will provide, that he will vindicate us, that he will get us where we need to go, that he will make everything right, as opposed to living by faith in ourselves and what we can see and touch and hold and put in the bank.

Just look how he defines faith: faith is the assurance of the things for which we hope, and the conviction that even though we don’t see them, they’re really there and truly real. That first word, “assurance,” is an interesting one, because it was the word that was used of the title deed to a piece of property; Hebrews doesn’t develop that image, but it helps us see just how strong this word is. Where the world often thinks of faith as something irrational, a blind insistence that things are better than they look—even a willful refusal to accept reality—Hebrews says no: faith is our God-given assurance that he will keep his promise and give us all good things, because that faith is in fact the first of those good things; it’s the title deed that tells us for sure that the whole house is ours.

And this, Hebrews says, is what the ancients were commended for. We don’t tend to get this; we tend to think of Old Testament religion as being all about law, earning salvation by doing this and not doing that, but it’s really not true. The law had its purpose before Christ came, but as Hebrews points out—and as Paul says many times in his letters—the people of the Old Testament weren’t saved by law any more than we were; they lived by faith in God, and depended on his grace and mercy, just as much as we do.

In fact, as strange as it may sound to us, they actually had to live by faith in God even more than we do, because they had not yet seen how God would keep his great promises to them; they hadn’t seen Jesus, because he hadn’t come yet. They just had to trust that somehow, someway, God would do what he’d said he was going to do. Those who lost faith went off to worship the gods of the nations around them; those who stayed faithful to worship God and God alone did so not because it was what “worked” or because it was obviously the practical thing to do, but because they believed God. That’s what God wanted from them; that’s what he wants from all of us.

Living by faith isn’t easy; it means, as Michael Card put it, to be guided by a hand we cannot hold, and to trust in a way we cannot see, and that’s not comfortable. It means looking beyond the measurables—not basing our decisions on what we can afford or what seems practical or what we know will work, but on prayer, listening for God’s leading, and the desire to do what will please him. It means taking risks, knowing that if God doesn’t come through, we’re going to fail. And it means setting out against the prevailing winds of our culture, being willing to challenge people and tell them what they don’t want to hear—graciously, yes, lovingly, yes, but without compromise and without apology—even when we know they’re going to judge us harshly for it.

This is not a blueprint for an easy, comfortable, “successful” life; often, it’s just the opposite. It defies common sense, because common sense is rooted in conventional wisdom, and living by faith is anything but. But it’s worth it, because this is what Jesus wants from us: to live in such a way that if he doesn’t take care of us, we will fall, to live in such a way that he’s our only hope—because the truth is, he is our only hope. We just need to believe it, and live like we believe it. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it, and more than worth it; there is no better way to live, because there is no foundation more sure than the promise of God, and no better place to be than in his presence.

¹ In his NICNT commentary on Hebrews, F. F. Bruce translated the Septuagint of Hab. 2:3-4 this way:

Because the vision is yet for an appointed time,
and it will appear at length and not in vain:
if he is late, wait for him;
because he will surely come, he will not delay.
If he draws back, my soul has no pleasure in him,
but my righteous one will live by faith.

(Deuteronomy 32:35-38; Hebrews 10:26-31)

Back this summer, when I was beginning this series on Hebrews, I told you that this book, in my judgment, is built on a repeating three-part structure: first the author makes an argument—for instance, in the first chapter, that Christ is superior to the angels—then he applies that argument, and then he warns you what the consequences will be if you reject Christ. The overall arc of the author’s thought is built mostly out of these three-part blocks of argument, application, warning. There’s an inserted section of reassurance that makes up much of chapter 6, and then chapter 13 is the conclusion, but they are the exceptions.

We haven’t seen that for a while, though, since the fifth section of the author’s argument, dealing with the high-priestly ministry of Christ, is so long and so loaded with stuff that we spent a number of weeks working through it. He spends considerable time and effort making his case that Jesus has replaced the priests and priesthood of the law, that his sacrifice has finally made true salvation possible—something the law could not do—and so he is now the only high priest we have, and the only one we need.

Then last week, we saw why Hebrews spends so much time and energy on that argument when we reached its application, which I really think is the emotional center of this book. Everything before it builds to it, and the last major section is there to support it. Remember, this epistle is written to Jewish Christians who are under pressure to abandon Jesus and return to Jerusalem, and so the author is arguing in various ways to help them resist that temptation; but though he uses warnings and he uses all kinds of comparisons, this is the thing he really wants to capture their hearts: in Jesus—in Jesus!—they have been forgiven, they have been cleansed, they have received all the blessings they’ve ever longed for that the law could never give them, and they have an open invitation to come into the very presence of God whenever they want. He wants them to understand the gift they’ve been given and take advantage of it; he wants them to resist the pressure to turn away, and instead to draw near to God—and draw near to his people, the church.

As the author understands, though, this gift has consequences—as indeed any gift does; just as the blessings of the law in Deuteronomy were accompanied by the curses that would come if the people disobeyed—you can find that in chapter 28—so the appeal in this chapter is followed by a warning of what happens to those who reject God. This warning here builds on the argument he made in the last warning, the other really severe one in Hebrews, back in chapter 6; in fact, it essentially picks up where that one left off.

This is important to bear in mind, because as we saw back in July, Hebrews isn’t talking about sin in general, as if any sin at all will result in our damnation; that wouldn’t fit in any way with the rest of the book. Rather, the author is talking about a specific sin, the sin of apostasy, which he describes here as “to go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth”; as I said this summer, “this is the sin of those who are a part of the church—who have heard the gospel, who have seen its goodness and experienced its power, who have participated in its communion—and then have wilfully turned their back on it and chosen another way.” It’s the sin of choosing, deliberately, intentionally, and with malice aforethought, to reject Jesus, turn away from him altogether, and wholeheartedly follow another god and another master.

In chapter 6, Hebrews declares that anyone who does this cannot be saved—it is impossible to bring them back to repentance—and that assertion is repeated here: if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin. This connects back to verse 18, which says that now that Christ’s sacrifice has superseded the sacrifices of the law, now that God has put his spirit within us and written his law on our hearts, now that our sins have been forgiven, no further sacrifice for sin is necessary or possible—and thus, no further sacrifice for sin is available. The path to God through the law was open until Jesus came, and now that Jesus has come, it’s closed; the sacrifice of Christ is once for all, it’s final, and there is no other way open to God. He is the way; he is the way, the only way. To choose absolute rejection of Jesus is to choose absolute rejection of salvation.

That said, the author goes on in chapter 6 to say that his hearers have not fallen away from Christ, and won’t, because God is faithful and their faith is real. He’s confident they will escape the danger of apostasy because God won’t let go of them—but he still wants them to understand that danger and take it very seriously, because the Bible doesn’t promise that everyone we think is a Christian will be saved. Salvation is a work of God that we cannot undo, and so it’s impossible to “lose” our salvation, because God never lets go of his saints—but who are the saints? The saints are those who hold fast to Christ, who keep pursuing him even when the road is rough. The evidence of our salvation is our endurance, the ongoing faithfulness of God echoed and reflected in our own lives. And so Hebrews tells us not to get too impressed with ourselves, and not to take ourselves for granted; God is faithful, but we still need to keep running, to keep pressing on, to stay in the race, because we haven’t crossed the finish line yet.

Now, though the author is talking about one particular sin here, it’s important to realize just how seriously he takes sin in general—far more seriously, I suspect, than any of us do. Sure, we take some sins seriously—the ones that repel us, that offend us, that are characteristic of people we don’t like or respect; and there are no doubt some sins in our own lives that we really don’t like seeing in ourselves, and we take those seriously as well. In general, though, I think most of us think of ourselves most of the time as good people; we don’t agonize over our sin much, or see it as something over which we ought to agonize. We aren’t captured by the reality that our hearts are idolatrous, unfaithful, forever prone to wander off and pursue other loves besides our Lord and Savior; which means we aren’t captured by the greatness of God’s grace. Jesus tells Simon the Pharisee, regarding the woman who anointed his feet with perfume, “She has been forgiven much, so she loves much; the one who has been forgiven little, loves little.” We have all been forgiven much, and are being forgiven much—but we often don’t really feel that.

That, I think, is one reason why it’s so easy for those of us who see ourselves as good, moral people of sound character and judgment to slide away from grace and into legalism of one form or another. As I’ve said many times, the enemy is always trying to get us to do that, it’s something against which all of us need to be always on our guard—the old line that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance really applies here. The more we feel the seriousness of our sin, though, the less of a temptation this is, because the more clearly we see how far short of God’s holiness we fall, the more we feel our need for grace and the less we’ll believe that we can be good by our own effort. By contrast, if we don’t think our own sin is really all that bad, then we’ll tend to feel that we don’t really need all that much grace—we can be most of the way good enough on our own; and if that’s the case, then other people ought to be able to do it too. It’s easy to get to feeling like talking about grace is a cop out, that it’s taking sin lightly—when in truth we are the ones taking sin lightly, and especially our own, and thus taking grace lightly as well.

It might seem strange to be talking about grace when we’re looking at this passage; we don’t think of warnings as being full of grace, we think of them in terms of law and judgment and punishment. In truth, though, this is very much about grace. You see, when we think about sin—if we think about sin—we tend to think about actions, things we do and don’t do. Maybe we think about sinful thoughts. We focus on the symptoms, and those tend to be what we work on. It’s much like the way we think about our physical health—we see something we want to change, we get a pill or we exercise or whatever we believe will make that one problem better. We see the symptom or symptoms as the problem. That’s law-based thinking—and if we make visible progress on the symptom we’ve focused on, then we think we’re succeeding and that the course of treatment—the law we’re following—is working; and if it works, you keep doing it.

The reality here is that God doesn’t think that way, and he doesn’t work that way. He cares about our behavior, yes, but what he’s really concerned about is the root of the problem, which is the desire deep in our hearts to not serve him, or at least to not do so on his terms. There are many temptations we face, and all of them turn us away from God to some degree, but the truly fatal one isn’t any of the ones we think of; the truly fatal temptation is the temptation to believe that we can deal with all the others well enough on our own. It’s the temptation to reject grace because we don’t think we need it, to live by law because we think we can do it—that’s the one that turns us 180° away from God. What Hebrews is essentially telling us here is that anything we do can be forgiven by God’s grace, because of the infinite sacrifice offered by Christ on the cross—but if we reject that forgiveness and try to earn it for ourselves, we reject salvation.

(Ezekiel 36:24-28; Hebrews 10:19-25)

Carpe diem. As you probably know, it’s a Latin phrase usually translated “Seize the day”; I first heard it in high school when they had us watch Dead Poets Society. Which is fitting, since the line comes from one of the great dead poets, the Roman Horace, who ended one of his odes by advising, “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.” Now, Horace’s idea was “Sit back, drink your wine, and don’t hope for much,” but the insight is sound, and one which we also find in the Jewish wisdom tradition. In the Pirke’ Abot, a collection of ethical teachings included in the Talmud, we find this prodding question: “If not now, when?” The future is not yours to rely on; it’s not even yours to know. James draws on this when he says in chapter 4, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. . . . Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live, and also do this or that.’”

Now, of course, that’s not to say that you should do everything you get a chance to do; some things aren’t really opportunities, and others aren’t good ones. But when something truly good comes along, we need to pursue it. It’s easy not to do so, out of fear, or uncertainty, or doubt, or lethargy, or simply because we’re otherwise occupied—but when there’s a chance not to be missed, don’t miss it, and don’t figure you’ll be able to take it later, because later might never come. Take the opportunity. Seize the day.

That’s the core of Hebrews’ point here. The author has argued at great length that Jesus has fulfilled the purpose of the law and replaced all the priests because he has given us true salvation and opened a way for us through the curtain that separated us from the presence of God—indeed, he has become that way for us, he is the way, and he is the door—and if that’s true, then what’s the application? Jesus has opened the way for you—take advantage! You have a great high priest in whom all your sins are forgiven—don’t be afraid! You are invited to come freely into the presence of the living God—so come! Approach God! Draw near! Don’t be afraid—in Jesus you have been washed, you have been purified, you are forgiven! God has put a new heart and a new spirit within you—his Spirit—he’s renewing you from the inside out. No matter what you’ve done, God sees you in Jesus, as he’s making you to be, and he loves you. Come to him, come close to him, with full confidence and trust, for you are welcome.

This is an invitation that should give us heart and courage, and I suspect it’s one that many of us can’t hear too often. There are some folks, certainly, who are quite sure they’re just wonderful—I’ve even known a few who were rather obnoxious about it; but for those of us for whom self-doubt is a familiar companion, this is a particular blessing. It’s very reassuring to know that it’s not about self-esteem or self-worth or believing in ourselves, all of which place a great weight squarely on our shoulders; rather, it’s about believing in God and his faithfulness and the power of what Jesus has done for us, and knowing that it doesn’t matter how we feel: whether we’re up or down and whatever the Devil may be whispering in our ears, Jesus saved us, God loves us, and we are his.

Which should give us courage to hold fast to our hope in Christ, and to our open declaration of that hope—which of course we must do if we are to draw near to God through him. If we begin to lose hope, or if we become ashamed to proclaim it, then we will naturally look for alternatives, and we will not draw near to God through Christ; but we have reason to be bold, for our hope is sure and certain. We have every reason for confidence in the faithfulness of God, because we have seen it in Jesus; we have every reason to be confident that Jesus is enough, because he has already done far more than we could ever have imagined. And we have every reason to proudly proclaim our hope to all who will listen, and to keep proclaiming it even when times get hard, even when we hurt, and even when there is opposition, because Jesus has never failed us yet. He doesn’t make the road easy, but if we hang on tight to him, he always leads us through.

Of course, doing that can be easier said than done, especially if we’re trying to do it alone. The reality that underlies the power and value of Alcoholics Anonymous and other such groups—one reality, anyway—is that it’s far, far easier to stay on the right road if we have others we care about who are walking it with us; and contrariwise, we’re a lot likelier to get ourselves into trouble if we’re hanging out with others who are going wrong. We need people around us who will spur us on to grow in love and to express that love in good works, and we need to do the same for them in turn. We need, we all need, that constant encouragement and support and exhortation if we’re going to draw near to God the way we should and grow in Christ the way he wants us to.

Now, can I just say, I love the way the author puts this here? I love the NIV’s translation, too. The word we have here in the Greek is the word from which we get our English word “paroxysm,” and it usually refers to intense anger; I’ve been told that the verb form is the one that would be used of prodding an ox along, and if they’d had spurs in those days, I would imagine it would have been used for spurring a horse, too. “Poke one another with a sharp stick to love and good deeds” just isn’t something most people would think to find in the Bible, but that’s basically the idea here, and for good reason: it’s something we need to hear.

We tend to be reluctant to provoke people, we hesitate to challenge others, because we’re afraid of the reactions we’ll get; we convince ourselves it’s not important enough to deal with. Instead, we go and complain to other people, which might relieve our stress a little but otherwise just makes things worse. The reality is, though, that we all need to be challenged at times, and we all have things we need to be called on; if you see something spiritually unhealthy in my life, or someone else’s—I’m not just talking about something you find personally irritating, but something sinful—then you need to go and do a little provoking to love and good deeds. And on the flip side, if someone comes up to you and says, “I see something in your life that’s getting in the way of your relationship with God,” be provoked—but not to anger. Rather, listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through that person, and let the Spirit provoke you toward Jesus.

For this reason, Hebrews says, we need to keep meeting together. I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “I don’t need to go to church to worship God, I can worship him anywhere”; I got that one a lot in Colorado, with people insisting they could worship God better hiking in the mountains or out on the lakes than in some building. There’s truth to that—though in my experience, most folks who say that are not in fact worshiping God when they go have fun, but whatever—but it’s not really on point, for two reasons. One, worshiping God together as a part of his body is different from worshiping him when we’re by ourselves, and we need both to be healthy—if the only time you worship is here on Sunday mornings, that’s not good either. And two, our gatherings are about more than just worship and teaching, they’re about living into one another’s lives, so that we have the time and opportunity to come to know each other, and thus to be able to poke one another to love and good deeds.

I’ve talked about this before, that the Greek word we translate “fellowship” is koinonia, from the word meaning “common”; it’s a much richer word than our English “fellowship”—it means doing, sharing, owning, living in common, being involved in something together, being involved in one another’s lives. It means doing life as a body, not just as disconnected pieces who happen to get together every so often, and being there for one another—all for one and one for all, sharing one another’s sorrows, and sharing our joys, too. It’s a powerful thing, because as the author Spider Robinson put it, shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased . . . but it’s completely impossible if we’re not together, and it’s hard for you to be a part of it if you’re not here.

And without that—without that support, without that encouragement, without that provocation, without that group of people we don’t want to disappoint—it’s hard to hold fast to our confession of hope in Christ, it’s hard to keep our faith from wavering, and so it becomes hard to keep drawing near to God through Jesus. We need to be worshiping God through all of life, but what we do here, participating in the life of his people and worshiping together, is the linchpin of that; we cannot sustain a life of worship if it isn’t anchored in the corporate worship of the body of Christ.

And that ought to be a priority for us, because we’ve been given an opportunity which no one had for thousands of years, and which millions of people still don’t know they could have: the opportunity to come freely into the presence of God without fear and without condition. It’s an opportunity people have literally died for, and are continuing to die for all over the world. And for us, it’s right here for the taking. All we have to do is see it for what it is, and recognize its value; all we have to do is recognize that this is something that’s worth more than all the other things we do and all the other things that fill up our days, and grab hold of it. Grab hold of it now, while it is still called “today,” and don’t let go. Carpe diem. Seize the day.

(Psalm 40:1-8, Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 10:1-18)

I’m no movie buff (that would be David Kavanaugh), but you don’t have to be a film-school geek to know that the story of the year in the world of cinema is Christopher Nolan’s Inception. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a movie about a man who makes his living, with his associates, going into other people’s dreams in order to steal information from their minds—or in this case, to plant an idea in someone’s mind—with dreams within dreams that have a powerful effect on events in the real world.

Or is it? There are those who argue that in fact, none of it is real, that what seems to be the real world in the movie is actually just another dream. After all, when you’re playing with the whole question of dream vs. reality, and when you have someone with the ability to create realities within the world of dreams, how can you tell when the playing stops? And does it matter? If this is what you perceive as reality, if it’s real for you, is it really important if that perception doesn’t exist outside your own head?

This all reminds me of the big news in film eleven years ago: The Matrix. This was another movie that played with the question of whether the real world is actually real, though from a very different angle and in a very different way. At the time, people were calling the Wachowskis geniuses, and I’m not sure the movie’s stood the test of time quite that well—partly because the sequels disappointed people—but even if nothing else endures, I think people will long remember the scene where Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus stands before Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, and offers him the choice between the red pill and the blue pill. “You take the blue pill,” Morpheus says, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Of course, if Neo takes the blue pill, no movie, so he takes the red pill and wakes up to find out that the world he thought was real is actually a virtual reality created by machines that have enslaved the human race to power themselves. As you can see, it’s not exactly a lighthearted comedy. But the idea that there’s a deeper reality behind what we see resonated with many, many people.

Of course, it wasn’t a new idea; as Professor Kirke said more than once in the Chronicles of Narnia, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato,” and not just in Plato, either. It’s an intuition rooted deep in the human soul—and for good reason, because the world we see is not all there is. Of course, as we’ve noted, human beings tend to overreact and overcorrect, and so you get the Buddhist idea that this world is just an illusion, and you get the old heresy of Gnosticism that says that only spirit is important, that our bodies and what we do with them don’t matter; that’s going way too far. The Scriptures tell us that everything matters because God made it, and made us as part of it, and so nothing about this world is to be put down or disregarded as unimportant. But there is a greater reality than what we can perceive with our senses, for which God is preparing us, toward which we’re being led—which is, ultimately, the full experience of the presence of God, who is the source of all reality and the maker of all that is. There are greater joys and greater goods than this world can give us, and greater possibilities than we can imagine; in God, the future is not limited by the past, and what can be is more than what has been.

This is profoundly good, not least because it means that in God, this is true of us as well; God has more for us than just more of the same. He’s at work in us making us new, from the inside-out. But that means that this thing that we’re on about with God, and that God’s on about with us, is a lot bigger than most people think. A lot of people like religion, and many who don’t will tell you that they like spirituality instead, and if you ask them why and what they mean by that, they’ll talk about finding meaning and purpose and significance, about becoming better people, about satisfaction and comfort, about wisdom for life and coping in hard times, and other ideas of that sort; you’ll get a laundry list of ways in which religion is just like Coke—things go better with it. These are good things, and blessings God does give us; but they aren’t what gospel religion is about. They aren’t the purpose, they aren’t the point. Any religion that’s focused on blessings and winning us benefits isn’t God’s thing—it’s too small for God. It’s a shadow religion, and God is calling us beyond that to something better, deeper, more true.

As we come to the end of this long central section of Hebrews—as the author wraps up his argument for the superiority of Christ and his priesthood over the high priests in Jerusalem, and thus for the superiority of Jesus-worship and Jesus-religion over Judaism—this is the truth he’s underscoring. He’s not saying anything new in this section, just summarizing the points he’s made so far: animal sacrifices could never be enough, could never bring salvation; the best the priests could do was only temporary, and so had to be repeated over and over and over; the law was just a shadow and a copy, not the reality; God wants to change our hearts, not just control our behavior; a greater sacrifice was necessary, one that could purify our hearts, not just our bodies, and thus make true salvation possible; Christ offered that sacrifice once and for all. These are all things we’ve talked about as we’ve gone through the last three chapters. But in pulling them together in this way, the author makes the fundamental appeal clear: the law is the shadow; Jesus is the reality. Come to the reality. Come be made new.

Come be made new. That really is the bottom line; that’s what God’s on about, and nothing less. Even the law, which was given by God to prepare the way for the coming of Christ, is by itself only a shadow, not able to accomplish God’s full purpose; and if that’s the case, how much more must we say this about any religion that isn’t all about Jesus? We all want life to go better—we want things like long, happy marriages and children who turn out well and healing when we’re sick and successful careers and prosperous retirements, and there’s nothing wrong with any of those, nothing wrong with asking God for them; they’re all blessings that he may give us if we serve him and follow him faithfully. But they aren’t why God saved us. He didn’t send Jesus to be tortured to death so that we could live happy, comfortable lives protected from the agony of the world. He’s on about something a lot bigger—and a lot better, in the end.

And so James declares, “Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance”; and if you were here last fall, you know what was going on the morning I preached on that passage. You remember the agony of the Sonntags as someone appeared to be stalking them and threatening their lives, and it turned out Joel had made up the whole thing. Consider that all joy? And the pain of the world marches on. I gave Tom Abbitt a hug yesterday after Cathy’s memorial service, and I grieve with him; it is deeply wrong that she’s dead of cancer at 49, with their youngest still in high school. We don’t want that, we want to avoid it—we want a god who offers us a road around the valley of the shadow of death; and so there are no end of religions promising that sort of god. But in the end, that god and that road are illusions, and we all know that valley, all too well.

This world is deeply wrong, it’s broken at the core, and God does not and will not shield us from the pain; and shadow religion can’t deal with that. It has no answer for pain, except to insist that those who suffer must have brought it on themselves—they didn’t obey well enough, or they didn’t have enough faith. Shadow religion can’t deal with our sin, except to tell us to just work harder. It can’t deal with the fact that the world is wrong, because it has no power to make things new. Only Christ can do that, and only his gospel can give us hope. Only he can say to us, “Your sins are forgiven”; only he can tell us that our pain and our sorrow are not for nothing, and are not forever. He doesn’t lead us around the valley of the shadow of death, but he does lead us through it, walking with us every step of the way—and assuring us with every step that he knows where he’s going, because he’s been this way before, and this is the way that leads home.

(Exodus 24:3-8, Hebrews 9:15-28)

Sacrifice is a powerful thing, and its power is bone-deep, soul-deep—it’s something we know at our core, at the level of ourselves that shapes and drives our instincts, whether we know or acknowledge it at the rational level or not. I said last week that sacrifice is central to worship, and that wasn’t just an Old Testament insight; paganism in all its many forms has always understood the same thing. Whatever god you worship, you must go with your sacrifice, with the blood you are willing to shed to appease and satisfy the god; then once you’ve done that, you can ask the god for what you want and expect to receive it.

Our modern forms of paganism, our various cultural idolatries, are less obvious about this, but they have the same understanding—you can see it in phrases like “you have to pay your dues”; those who worship the god Success, for instance, are expected to lay offerings of time and commitment on his altar, often accompanied by offerings of their marriage and children and other relationships. As I told our older kids last week in Sunday school, the old form of our English word “worship” was “worthship”—it meant to acknowledge someone or something as being of great worth; and the way you do that is by laying before the one you worship things which are also of great worth, to show that you value your god even more. You offer sacrifices.

But some might wonder if that’s still true in Christianity—we certainly don’t kill animals to keep God from striking us down; and haven’t we said over and over that we don’t need to earn our way into the presence of God? And yet, if we just remove sacrifice from the picture altogether, we get a bloodless faith and cheap grace. The Roman church long ago developed the understanding that the center of Christian worship is the re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ in which they vicariously participate, but we don’t believe that—and in fact, this passage really rules that out—so what do we do with this?

The answer to this is really twofold. One we’ll come back to later, as Hebrews 13 tells us to “continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God,” and calls good works and generous giving sacrifices which are pleasing to him. We no longer need to offer sacrifices in order to earn God’s love and approval, and we can no longer see them as levers by which we may compel him to do what we want him to do, but we do still need to offer them for our own sake. Part of the function of sacrifice in worship has always been, as I said a moment ago, to declare to those around us—and to our resistant selves—that God is this good, that he’s worth this much to us. If your praise to God is grudging or merely habitual, if your financial giving isn’t enough to keep you from spending everything you’d like to spend—if what you give to God of your money and your time and your energy isn’t a sacrifice and doesn’t really cost you anything—then that’s an indication that God isn’t your first priority, that there’s another god or gods in your life whom you worship more, because that’s where your sacrifices are going. As such, while we no longer sacrifice by commandment under the law, our willingness to sacrifice freely in gratitude for grace is still a meaningful thing.

At the same time, though, we must always remember that the old reason for sacrifice no longer applies. We should no longer be driven to sacrifice by fear, for God’s perfect love has cast out all fear. We should no longer be driven to sacrifice by the need to be worthy, to be good enough, for that was impossible for us, but it is possible with Christ, and he has done it. We should no longer be driven to sacrifice by pride, by the desire to show ourselves holier than those around us, for the work of Christ has shown us that we have nothing to justify such pride. And we should no longer be driven to sacrifice by the desire to earn our salvation, for our salvation has already been earned for us and given to us as a free gift; as we read last week as well, when Christ died on the cross, out of his never-stopping never-giving-up love, his will went into effect, and he passed on the greatest thing he had to give—his never-ending undying life—to us as our inheritance.

This is actually an interesting play on words in Hebrews, because in the Greek, “will” and “covenant” are the same word, diathēkē. A will is, you might say, a kind of covenant which only takes effect at the death of the one who made it, because only death makes the benefits of the covenant possible. Christ could not give us his life without giving it up himself; and so he did. And then, because he could not be the executor of that will and the one who put that covenant into effect while remaining dead, he rose again so that he could be both sacrifice and priest on our behalf.

In so doing, Jesus made us more than merely passive recipients or observers; in giving us his life, he united us with himself and made us his body and his temple. Hebrews doesn’t explicitly say this here, this truth comes mostly from the letters of Paul, but the author of Hebrews is clearly a disciple of Paul and is assuming Paul’s argument in making his own. That’s why we have this rather strange statement in verse 23 that “it was necessary . . . for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.” Is Hebrews saying that the heavenly throne room of God was polluted and needed to be purified? No, the “heavenly things” in view here are the members of the new spiritual temple of God—us, our souls, our consciences. This is hooking back to his point that the sacrifices of animals were not enough to cleanse the conscience—there had to be a greater sacrifice that could wash us clean from the inside out. Only the death and resurrection of Christ could unite us with him so that he could bring us with him into the presence of God as his people; only his sacrifice could wash away the stains and pollution in our consciences so that we could be united with him, and so that we could stand in his presence.

And he has done it, and he has done it once and for all; this is why he declared on the cross, “It is finished,” because there was nothing more that needed to be done and nothing more that needed to be added to it. We noted this last week, that Jesus didn’t have to enter God’s presence and then leave, and then do it all over again the next year and the next and the next, the way the old high priests did; but here the author expands on that, showing how ridiculous the idea would be. If Jesus’ sacrifice were not once and for all, if it were only good for a while, then he would have to keep dying and rising again and again—and that’s not how it works. With rare and temporary exceptions, people die once and that’s it, and so it must be for our Redeemer. We die once, by divine appointment, and then comes the final judgment; Jesus died once, by divine appointment, and then comes salvation for all his people. His sacrifice is eternal in its effects, reaching backward and forward in time and across all creation, but it is once for all in time; we do not re-enact it in worship because he doesn’t need to repeat it. We merely need to remember that it is by and through his sacrifice that we come to God, and to give thanks.

And because of this truth, we have a hope that will never fail us. Our politicians may promise us hope, but they can’t deliver; our self-help gurus and self-appointed experts may offer us hope, but their methods fall short. We may put our hope in our own efforts, but given enough time the market will crash, people will die, others will let us down, and we will fail. “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” the world tells us, but eventually it will fly away again, and we can’t fly after it. We need more; we need Jesus.

And so we have this last line in verse 28, which I love; it’s easy for us to miss, but this connects right in to what Hebrews has been saying about Christ as our great high priest. On the Day of Atonement, when the high priest entered the sanctuary, all those gathered in the temple watched anxiously for him to come out, as the sign that God had accepted the sacrifice. When he did, they rejoiced. The apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus offers this description of one such day: “How glorious he was when the people gathered round him as he came out of the inner sanctuary! Like the morning star among the clouds, like the moon when it is full; like the sun shining upon the temple of the Most High, and like the rainbow gleaming in glorious clouds”—and in fact, it goes on for a while after that. This is the shadow of the glorious appearing of Christ; and one day, our great high priest will come out of the heavenly sanctuary and appear among us once again, just like this, to complete our salvation. This is our hope; this is the end toward which we worship; and our hope is sure because this is for us, because Jesus has done it, once and for all.

(Leviticus 16:29-34; Hebrews 9:1-15)

When the Protestant Reformation finally broke loose after several false starts and began rolling across Europe, one of the things it brought with it was the practice of iconoclasm. Nowadays, the word “iconoclast” tends to be applied to anyone who merely snarks at the conventional wisdom, but back then, the word had a rather different meaning: iconoclasm was the deliberate destruction of statues, pictures, stained-glass windows, and other images in churches across Europe. Not all of the Reformers called for this or encouraged it; Martin Luther, for instance, eventually concluded that religious images and the use of the arts in worship were just fine as long as they were the servants of the gospel. Others, though, including John Calvin, considered that to be impossible, and argued that all images of any kind were violations of the Old Testament commands against the making of idols and must be destroyed. This is why the great historian Eamon Duffy titled his study of England through the Reformation period The Stripping of the Altars. The historical irony of this stained-glass window behind me, standing in a Presbyterian church, is truly nothing short of staggering.

Now, this might sound really bizarre to you—and in an absolute sense, I think Luther was right, not Calvin. However, remember what I said last week about reform movements—new structures by themselves mean very little; we’re used to the denominational structures that emerged from that period, but that’s not what the Reformers themselves were on about. Their focus was on cleaning away everything in the church that was obscuring the gospel so that people could come to understand that their salvation was in Christ alone through grace alone by faith alone—and so their primary target was the worship of the church. They understood that there is a connection between our worship and our redemption, but not the one that the church of Rome had been proclaiming; and if the statues and the windows and all that other stuff was drawing people’s attention away from worshiping Jesus Christ and hearing the gospel message, then however beautiful it might be, it absolutely had to go.

The problem the Reformers faced was that the people of Christendom were operating on something like a detached version of Old Testament worship: show up, watch the priest offer the sacrifice—not bulls and goats, but a re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ—and simply from that, receive your allotment of grace to enable you to go out and be a Christian until the next time you showed up for Mass. They understood that our redemption comes through sacrifice and that that sacrifice is central to worship, but their understanding was passive in its essence. The Reformers sought to fix that by clearing the dead things out of the way and actually preaching the gospel, something which was not being done in most places at that time. This was a good thing; but with the human tendency to overcorrect, any good thing has its downsides, and so it was here. In this case, it was a swing to a more intellectualized religion—bloodless, if you will—that lacked that sense of the connection between worship and sacrifice, and thus worship and redemption; over time, that allowed for the development of the highly individualistic and self-oriented view of worship to which our culture is prone today.

In that respect, it’s instructive that the author of Hebrews continues to build his case for the supremacy of Christ by going on to talk about worship under the old covenant. In chapter eight, he’s pointed out that the priests of the law serve “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things”; in the first five verses of this chapter, he gives us a description of that copy—and specifically of its first version, the tabernacle which God told the Israelites to build in the wilderness to carry with them on their wanderings. It’s interesting that he uses the tabernacle here rather than the temple that was built later in Jerusalem; I suspect it’s because the tabernacle was clearly temporary, designed to be used only until something more permanent had been built to replace it. This underscores the author’s point that the whole system was temporary, merely preparing the way for its replacement when Messiah would come.

Of course, the tabernacle only had two rooms, while the temples in Jerusalem that followed it were much, much bigger—but at their heart were the same two rooms, the same small sanctuary. You had one curtain that kept out everyone but the priest of the day, who went in to the Holy Place to tend the lamps and the incense, and place twelve fresh loaves of bread on the table; and then after that, you had another curtain, and it kept out everybody. Only the high priest went through that curtain into the Holy of Holies, and only one day each year, and only under the strictest orders—once with a blood offering for the sins of himself and his family, and then again with a blood offering for the sins of the nation; and as I’ve told you before, somewhere along the line they started tying a rope around the high priest’s ankle, so that if he did something wrong and God struck him down, they could get his body out of there without having to go in themselves.

By this, Hebrews says, the Holy Spirit showed that the way into the presence of God had not been opened by the law. It was certainly better for the people of Israel to keep the law than not, but merely keeping the law—even true obedience to the law, not merely outward conformity—could not open the way to God; the veil remained outside the sanctuary, keeping out the people, and then again at the door to the Holy of Holies, excluding even the high priest from the presence of God. Why? Because the true barrier that divides us from God had not yet been removed—the barrier within ourselves, the barrier of our sin and idolatry. As we saw last week and as Hebrews emphasizes again here, the law could not remove that; and as long as that barrier remained, the curtain had to remain as well, for no one who has not been made holy can enter the presence of the most holy God and live. Under the law, even the holiest people could only worship God at a safe distance. For anything more than that, more was needed.

And then in verse 11, we get this: “But when Christ came.” When Christ came, he didn’t have to restrict himself to the earthly copy and shadow, he could go right into the real thing in the heavens, right into the presence of God; and he didn’t have to buy his way in with a sacrifice for himself, for he was already perfectly holy. Nor did he have to turn around and leave again, as all the priests before him had had to do; he could remain there to be the way for us, because he belongs there, because he is God. He entered the presence of God with his sacrifice, with the sacrifice he offered for us, and by virtue of that sacrifice—by the infinite virtue of his blood—he secured for us eternal redemption, purifying us eternally by his blood so that we might eternally come with him into the very presence of God. By his blood he removed the barrier in our hearts, washing away the stain of dead works from our consciences, cleansing us from all the things that defile us. By his blood we come before him; by his blood, we worship.

This is profoundly important: what Christ has become the way for us to do is something far greater than we usually think of when we think of worship. Worship isn’t just something we sit around together and do; it’s not just about the music we enjoy, or about hearing a sermon that makes us think, or about the time we spend together. It’s not something we can take lightly, as if it’s of no great importance whether we’re here or not. We are gathered in the presence of God; he is here with us, among us, within us, by his Spirit, hearing and receiving every word we say and every thought we think. The living God, creator of the universe, is alive and moving in this room; though the eyes of the flesh see painted walls and stained glass, in the Spirit, we stand in the company of angels, in the celestial Holy of Holies, before the seat of majesty of all being.

It’s a profound and costly gift, and we take it for granted. It’s interesting, I have many times heard people give thanks that we live in a nation where we are allowed to worship God without having to worry about dying for it, and that is indeed reason to be grateful; but how often do we stop to give thanks to Jesus that we can worship God without dying for it? The fundamental freedom to worship God in spirit and in truth doesn’t come from our Constitution, it comes from Christ. Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered, because it’s only through his blood, it’s only because he allowed himself to be butchered, that we can enter the presence of God.

We are always welcome to come to God, always, no matter what we’ve done, no matter whether we feel ourselves worthy or not—and I’ll tell you this much: it’s often those who think themselves most worthy who are least worthy, for exactly that reason, but they’re welcome anyway—we are always welcome, though we could never have paid for our invitation, because we didn’t have to; Jesus did, though he had to bear all the evil of Hell to do it. We are always welcome to worship God, no matter how unworthy, because of Jesus; we are only welcome to worship God because of Jesus, for we could never be worthy enough. Apart from him, the presence of God would be instant death for us, glory our unholy selves could never endure; because of him, to stand in the presence of God is life itself.

(Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 7:23-8:13)

The problem with reform movements and revolutions is that they don’t change people, just structures. Which makes sense, because structures can actually be changed relatively quickly without direct divine intervention—but structural change by itself really doesn’t mean much. I forget who it was who observed that there has never been a constitution that could withstand the people responsible for implementing it, but it’s true; words on a page are meaningless unless everyone is committed to abiding by them. Indeed, more than that, everyone needs to be committed to the principles underlying those words, not simply to twisting the words themselves however they need to in order to get what they want. If you change the system but people’s hearts are the same—even if it happens to be different people in charge—well, what you’ll get will be, as the old camp song says, “second verse same as the first, English version and a whole lot worse.”

Which is why it’s not enough for Hebrews to argue, as we saw in last week’s passage, that the priesthood of Christ is better because it has a better foundation; a better structure doesn’t mean much without a better leader. The author also has to show that Jesus himself is a better priest, and better suited to be a priest, than those whom he is replacing. He made a comment in that direction in the first part of this chapter, but here’s where he really dives in to make his case, and he says two things about that.

First, Jesus is a better high priest because he’s permanent. Human priests, like human pastors, come and go; some are better, some are worse, and whatever else may happen, all of them eventually die. This necessarily limits the work they can do; any minister who is merely human is temporary, and thus cannot offer permanent salvation. Jesus, by contrast, is eternal and immortal, and so he truly stands as our great high priest forever; he can offer us permanent salvation because no matter what, he is always there, interceding for us and drawing us to God.

Second, and most important, Jesus is superior in character to any merely human priest, because he alone is free of sin. It’s not just that he never did anything wrong, he never yielded to temptation in any way, even in his innermost thoughts; he never did the right thing for the wrong reasons, and never put his own desires ahead of the will of his Father in heaven. He faced every temptation, and never once chose to do anything except what the Father called him to do, and so he is perfect and perfectly good beyond even the imagined possibility of imperfection—he is perfect life incarnate, in whom all is perfectly right and as it should be. As such, he did not need and does not need to offer sacrifices for himself, because there was nothing of which he was even the least bit guilty; he could do everything for us. Equally, there is nothing in him that mars his work, nothing that could interfere, and nothing that could cause him to do less or worse for us than he has promised; because he is perfect, he is perfectly faithful.

Because of all this, Hebrews is able to declare without reservation that Jesus has brought us into a better covenant, one which is superior to the covenant made through Moses because it is the fulfillment and completion of that covenant. The Old Testament law set up a copy and shadow of the heavenly reality, preparing the way for Jesus to come and replace it with the reality; now that the reality has come, the copy is no longer needed. It has served its purpose—we must learn from it, but we no longer live under it. And if we can say that of the law of Moses, which was given directly by God to his people, how much more must we say that of all other human ideas, and especially religious ones? This isn’t to say that behavior doesn’t matter, but it is to say that we aren’t saved by behavior; it isn’t to say that there aren’t wiser and more foolish ways to live, but it is to say that we aren’t saved by human wisdom. It isn’t to say that human leaders don’t matter, but it is certainly to say that there is no salvation to be found in any of them, and that the best any of them can do is make things a little easier on the journey. Our salvation is in Christ alone, and we do not live by laws, principles, precepts, or rules; though we make use of all of them along the way, we live by grace, and grace alone.

The reason for this is made clear as the author of Hebrews quotes this passage from Jeremiah: outward law cannot change us, it can only change the ways that our sinful attitudes and desires express themselves. We might look better to the world around us—as long as they don’t look too closely, anyway—but we won’t really be any better. In truth, we might be worse. Law might only make us better liars, to cover up our sins, or better manipulators, to find other ways of getting what we want; or if we choose, as some do, to use the law to find our validation—if we choose to find satisfaction in keeping the law better than others so that we can feel superior to them—then the law can nurture spiritual pride, which is a subtle, deadly sin. The root problem is our tendency to idolatry, to direct our love, trust, and worship to people or things other than God, and the law can’t do anything about that, because the law is outside us and our idols are beyond its reach. Something else is needed if we are to become the people God made us to be.

This is why, back in the Old Testament, God repeatedly told his people that something new was coming. It’s why he promised through Jeremiah that he would make a new covenant with his people which would give them more than just external laws to follow—it would be a covenant that would change them from the inside out, as God would write his law on their hearts and fill their minds with his truth, and enable all of them to know him, rather than having to approach him through the priests. It would be a covenant that would enable God to declare, “I will forgive their wickedness, and I will remember their sins no more.” It would be a permanent solution to human sin, and it would be a real solution, not just treating the symptoms by forbidding some things and demanding others, but healing the root disease in the human heart, replacing the rebellion and idolatry in our hearts with the truth and love of God.

This is the promise Jesus came to fulfill. He was the final prophet who proclaimed the deliverance God had promised from sin and death; he is the final high priest who offered the final, perfect sacrifice of his own life to pay the price for that deliverance, and who brings us into the presence of God to speak with him at the throne of grace; and he is the final king who has authority over all things because of the victory he has won. He has satisfied every requirement, and so he eternally guarantees God’s eternal covenant of grace with us; and because his sacrifice was of infinite value and the victory of his resurrection was of infinite scope, so the covenant he makes with us is infinite in its power and reach. There is no sin too big or too unimaginable, no sinner too great or too far from God, to be included and redeemed within this new covenant. This is the scandal of grace: it is truly free, and it is truly for everybody, no matter how unworthy. The ground is level at the foot of the cross, and all are welcome, if they will only come.

(Genesis 14:17-20, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 7:1-22)

My grampa was a preacher with a really corny sense of humor. So is his second son, my uncle. I am the third generation, on at least one of those. With Grampa, one of the ways that showed itself was a real affection for bad Bible puns. Where is baseball mentioned in the Bible? Genesis 1, “In the big inning . . .” What did Jesus drive? A Honda—“The disciples were all in one Accord.” Who were the shortest people in the Bible? Knee-high-miah and Bildad the Shoe-height.

And then there was the one I never thought quite kosher: who’s the only person in the Bible without parents? “Joshua, son of None.” Because to that one, the author of Hebrews would rise up and say, “Wrong—it’s Melchizedek!” And while he’s sort of punning on this as well, he’s also trying to make a serious point. The high priests in Jerusalem received their position because they were part of the priestly tribe, descendants of Levi and of Aaron, according to the law God gave through Moses. Jesus wasn’t, so how could he be a high priest? And in truth, to be a greater high priest than those in Jerusalem, to be the high priest of a greater covenant than that given in the Old Testament law, wouldn’t he need a better claim than theirs? This isn’t the sort of thing we tend to think about, but to those steeped in the Old Testament, it was an important set of questions. Hebrews answers them by appealing to Psalm 110 and the story of Melchizedek.

It’s rather a strange one; in fact, the whole chapter is rather strange. If you go back and look at the first part of Genesis 14—this is after God has called Abram into the promised land, but before God has made his covenant with him and renamed him Abraham—war breaks out in the land. It’s rather confusing, because there are so many names, but some of the cities are serving the king of another city, and they rebel, and they lose. Among the losers are the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is a problem for Abram, because when he followed God to Canaan, he took his nephew Lot with him, and Lot’s been living in Sodom; when Sodom loses, the winners take Lot, his family, and all his stuff, as part of the spoils of their victory. Abram hears about this, takes all his servants, and sets off after those kings; he launches a night attack on them—quite a tricky one by the sounds of it; he would have made a good general—and he beats them and drives them off a long way north. It’s a remarkable victory.

On his way back home, he meets up with the king of Sodom, who’s understandably grateful, since Abram’s just gone out and won his battle for him; in fact, he’s so grateful, he heads north to meet Abram partway, in the King’s Valley, just south of Jerusalem. As Abram pauses there, something equally remarkable happens. The local king comes out from the city to the valley to play host, bringing bread and wine. He’s not worried about the presence of these armies; instead, he comes down among them to serve them, and to bless Abram.

This king is identified here in three ways, and we’ll look at these slightly out of order. One, he’s identified by his city, but by a shortened form of its name: he’s named as “king of Salem.” “Salem” is the Hebrew shalem, which is a form of shalom, which is the word for “peace”—and specifically used for the peace of God. “Jerusalem” means “city of peace,” but here the king is identified simply as the king of peace. Two, we’re given his name, Melchizedek, which means something like “my king is righteous” or “righteous king”—or, as Hebrews takes it, “king of righteousness.” And three, Melchizedek is named as a priest of God Most High. How that happened, we have no idea; indeed, we have no explanation for him at all—he just is. He blesses Abram in the name of God, and from the context, it’s clear that he also has Abram swear to take nothing from the king of Sodom except the necessary provisions for his expedition. Abram responds by tithing to Melchizedek, giving him a tenth of the spoils of his victory.

We have here, then, a completely unexplained person—we are told nothing of his lineage, or how he came to be here; he’s never appeared in the story before, and never will again—who is identified as a priest of the one true God, king of righteousness by his name and king of peace by his city, which will in the end be the city of God, who blesses Abram and to whom Abram bows and pays tribute. The founder of the nation of Israel acknowledges and honors him as priest—and in doing so, Hebrews argues, commits all his descendants to do the same. Thus Melchizedek stands as a higher authority and a superior priest to all the priests established under the law of Moses, which is yet to come; and this is confirmed in the declaration of Psalm 110, “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”

In the application of Psalm 110 to Jesus, the author of Hebrews finds his justification for declaring Jesus the greatest high priest and the guarantor of a better covenant than the old priests could offer. Like Melchizedek, Jesus received his priesthood not by inheritance under the law of Moses, but direct from the hand of God; he received a priesthood which existed before the law, which Abraham himself had acknowledged as superior, and he received it because of his perfect life and the perfect sacrifice which he offered, to do what the law could never do. The story of Melchizedek, coming at the very beginning of the story of Israel, even before God has made his covenant with Abram, is a sign that the law and the priesthood which are to come are not God’s final plan, but merely steps along the way; however great Abram is, there is someone greater. In Jesus, that sign is fulfilled, as God’s final plan is revealed.

And look at verses 18 and 19 of Hebrews 7: “The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.” Now, that “useless” might seem rather strong—we may argue with individual laws, but typically we think of law as useful; and I think our standard assumption is that the people of the Old Testament were saved by the law, and now we’re saved by Jesus, and so the law was at least useful for a while. But consider that parenthesis: “the law made nothing perfect.” Perfection is what the holiness of God requires; only Jesus is enough for salvation because only Jesus can make us perfect before God, through his sacrifice on the cross. The law couldn’t do that, so ultimately, yes, it was useless. Its usefulness wasn’t real, only apparent.

The key here is a question Hebrews doesn’t elaborate on, probably because Paul had already done so in detail: if salvation came through the law, then what about Abraham, who lived hundreds of years before the law was given? The answer, Paul says, comes in Genesis 15, which declares that Abraham believed God, and God counted him righteous because of his faith; and we see it reflected here, as Abraham accepts the blessing and direction of the priest of God. The law did not, could not, save; its sacrifices were not sufficient for that purpose. The law simply provided a mechanism for the people of God to worship him, to bow to his authority and accept his will.

Just as the priests served under the law to mediate between God and his people, so the law in a broader sense served as a mediator: in the time before Christ had come to die for his people, the law and its structures mediated his sacrifice to them, offering them a way to express their faith in God, and their gratitude to him. It wasn’t the law that saved them; they too were saved by the sacrifice of Christ, they just didn’t know it yet.

In other words, even in the Old Testament, though the people of God were under law, they were still saved by grace, and were called to live by faith; you can see this all over the place, and especially in the prophets. Again and again, the prophets of God denounce the people, not because they aren’t performing the sacrifices and keeping the outward rituals of the law—they are—but because they’re doing so in the wrong spirit, for the wrong reasons. They think that simply doing the rituals is enough, and that if they just do them well enough, God will have to bless them—and that’s not the idea at all. In fact, that whole idea is paganism in a nutshell. God wants more; he wants their full devotion. He wants them to obey, not in expectation of earning a reward, but because they love him and trust him and are grateful to him for all he has done.

The supremacy of Christ, the supremacy of his high priesthood over all pretenders, is the supremacy of grace. We cannot please God merely by keeping laws, and we cannot live a good life merely by keeping laws. Looking good on the outside, keeping up appearances, measuring up, having success in the world’s eyes—none of that matters, none of that is what God is on about with us. The world is happy to play church dress-up and tell you that Jesus came to give you your “best life now,” that if you just follow the right rules you’ll be good enough to get everything you want—but that’s not the gospel, and that’s not Jesus.

We can’t be good enough, and God didn’t send Jesus so we can be; he’s about something far deeper than that. He’s about changing us from the inside out, making his love in us the deepest, most fundamental reality of our hearts and lives; he’s about teaching us to live by grace, to live in his love, both accepting it when we sin and when we fall short, and giving it to others when they sin and fall short. He’s about making us true Christians—not “nice people,” but little Christs.

In case anyone is interested, this is the structural analysis of Hebrews from which I’m working in this series; it’s not one I’ve seen anywhere else, it’s my own reading. I think the warnings are the key to understanding the structure of this book, which is mostly composed of triadic subsections, each of which makes an argument, applies it, and then warns the reader of the consequences of ignoring the message.

• 1:1-14: Argument: Christ is superior to the angels

• 2:1: Application: Take the gospel message seriously

• 2:2-4: Warning

• 2:5-18: Argument: Christ has been given authority over everything as high priest

• 3:1-6: Application: Christ is superior to Moses and the Law

• 3:7-19: Warning

• 4:1-10: Argument: Christ is the fulfillment of God’s promise of rest

• 4:11: Application: Press forward to enter his rest

• 4:12-13: Warning

• 4:14-15: Argument: Christ is a unique high priest

• 4:16-5:10: Application: We can approach God with confidence

• 5:11-6:8: Warning

• 6:9-20: Reassurance: God is faithful

• 7:1-10:18: Argument: Christ is a better high priest of a better covenant

• 10:19-25: Application: Live the faith fearlessly

• 10:26-31: Warning

• 10:32-11:40: Argument: Faith in Christ is worth keeping

• 12:1-24: Application: The fruit of endurance is worth the trial

• 12:25-29: Warning

• 13:1-19: Closing applications: Life in the people of God

• 13:20-25: Blessing and farewell

(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.”