(Exodus 19:16-20, Haggai 2:5b-9; Hebrews 12:12-29)

As we’ve noted over the course of this series, the author of Hebrews is concerned that his readers are losing heart and thinking about giving up—they’re taking some hits for their faith in Christ, and they’re starting to get discouraged and wonder if they should just turn and walk away. To fight this, the author spends the bulk of the letter pointing them to Christ, showing them how great and good Jesus is; the main thing he wants them to understand is that they should put all their faith and hope and trust in Christ because no one and nothing else even comes close to deserving it. That’s one of the best things about this book, because that’s the point we all need to understand: whoever or whatever else we might value, wherever else we might put our trust, Jesus is better, and Jesus is worthier, and it doesn’t even begin to be close.

At the same time, though, while that’s the most important thing that needs to be said, it isn’t the only thing that needs to be said, because human beings are very good at being short-sighted. Left to our own devices, we tend to focus on what’s right in front of us, at the expense of the bigger perspective—and so if what’s right in front of us is painful and uncomfortable, we start looking for ways to get out of it or avoid it. Some people, then, are going to look at this and say, “OK, so Jesus is best. Fine. But if I can get something 70% as good as Jesus for 20% of the suffering, that might be a better deal”—and to some, that argument will seem to make a lot of sense. That’s why we have chapters 10-12 of Hebrews, to make the point that avoiding suffering isn’t really a good thing; in particular, that’s why the author uses the language of athletic competition to argue that trials and suffering are part of the discipline God uses to train us and build us up so that we will be spiritually fit to live well, and to have the endurance to keep living well all the way through life.

“Therefore,” Hebrews says in verse 12, you need to run the race differently than you’ve been running it to this point. Where the world teaches us to live to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, as followers of Christ, we have a different goal, and pursuing that goal requires us to value pleasure and pain differently. When trials come, when we face opposition for telling people truths they don’t want to hear, we must not lose heart or see them as things to avoid; rather, we need to recognize them as opportunities to serve God and grow in faith, and rise to the challenge rather than shy from it. And in a world that values the undisciplined and unquestioning pursuit of sensual pleasure—in our popular culture of a thousand Esaus, happily trading their spiritual birthright as children of God for sex, drugs, and rock and roll—we need, as a community of faith, to stand against that. More and more, our culture insists that sexual desire in particular should never be restrained—that physical desire is identity is destiny; it’s appealing, on the surface, to go along with that and indulge our appetites, whereas if you tell someone that never mind how powerfully they want to do something, it’s still wrong, you will be attacked. But we have to call people to holiness anyway, because those who live like Esau will ultimately derail themselves like Esau.

The key thing here is understanding that there’s something better coming. It’s not that God doesn’t like pleasure—God created pleasure, of every type, as part of making us and our world good. Nor does he like for us to struggle, and suffer, and grieve; all these things came into this world as a result of human sin and rebellion, not because they were part of his plan. But God doesn’t want us wasting our time on cheap, empty pleasures when he’s offering us infinite joy. If you knew you were having your favorite dinner tonight with your dearest friends and family, would you sit down this afternoon and stuff yourself with cheap Halloween candy? And yet spiritually speaking, that’s what we do, time after time. As C. S. Lewis said, our problem isn’t that we care too much about pleasure, it’s that we settle for too little; we’re far too easily pleased.

That’s the point of this interesting comparison between Mt. Sinai and the giving of the Law, on the one hand, and Mt. Zion, the city of the living God to which we are gathered in Jesus, on the other—a comparison which introduces the final warning of the book, a warning which sort of summarizes all the others. The first people to hear the book of Hebrews were thinking about going back to Judaism—back, if you will, to Mt. Sinai—and the author reminds them of how little that really accomplished. It was a necessary part of God’s plan, yes, but it couldn’t bridge the distance between God and his people; they didn’t stand before the mountain with joy, they were terrified. Even Moses, who spoke with God as a friend, was afraid. What Jesus offers us is far better—life made perfect in the city of God, with that distance removed and no need for fear; he offers far more than they, or anyone, could ever have thought to ask for before he came.

The question is, even though Jesus offers a gift far better than the Law is capable of giving—something far beyond any human ability to make or earn—why are those early Jewish Christians tempted to go back to Sinai anyway? And why are we so easily tempted to our own forms of legalism, to put our faith in our own little imitations of Sinai? It’s so easy for us to put our trust in money, to seek long-term security in our investments and let the laws of money and income rule our decisions; or to hope in our family, to love them more than God and put our hope for the future in marriage and children and grandchildren; or in our résumé, our education, our career, our traditions, or any of a hundred other human things that cannot save us. Why do we do that?

In part, it’s because Mt. Sinai can be touched. Because you know exactly what you’re looking at and exactly where you stand, and you don’t need faith to know it. Because once you’ve decided to accept the standards, you’re in control of what you do and how well you do it. As such, you can interpret those standards, and what you need to do to meet them, to suit yourself—to allow you to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

In the short term, that might seem like a decent bargain; in the long term, it’s a disaster, for if we do that, we’re putting our faith and hope in things that will not last. At Sinai, God’s voice shook the earth; the time will come when he will shake the earth again, and the heavens, and all the nations, and nothing that can be shaken will survive. This isn’t arbitrary or unreasonable; our God is a consuming fire—his goodness and holiness and glory are so great that nothing that is not of him, no one who is not of him, can possibly survive in his presence. When he calls all the world to judgment, the mere sound of his voice will be enough to shake and shatter everything that is merely human, and the light of his glory alone will burn it like sawdust; and those who have put their faith and their hope in human effort, human laws, human religion, will see all that supports them and all they have trusted swept away, shaken and fallen and turned to ash. It’s a particularly salutary reminder on the eve of another Election Day, when many are looking forward to changing our government pretty significantly; by all means, go vote, but put not your trust in politicians, in mortal people who cannot save. In the end, no human institution will endure, only the kingdom of God.

All things human are shaky, and all things merely human will fall; those who seek them and build their lives on them will fall with them. We sometimes wonder why God doesn’t “show himself,” by which we usually mean do this thing we want or give us this thing we want; all too often, it’s because what we really want is something we can put our faith in instead of him, something we can see and touch—and that something would only be temporary. Time passes, things fade, and the joys of the past only ever slide farther and farther away from us. As natural as it is for us to want to put our trust and our hope in things and people we can see and touch, we need something more; we need something that will endure, a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a foundation for our lives that is rock-solid, no matter what this world might do. And our reason for worship, our reason to keep running and not lose heart, our reason to bow before God with reverence and awe and astonished gratitude, is that in Jesus, by his gift and his grace, that’s exactly what we’ve been given. Because of him, the kingdom of God is ours, no matter what.

(Proverbs 3:11-12; Hebrews 12:3-17)

The reason we don’t get this passage is that we think “discipline” is spelled p-u-n-i-s-h-m-e-n-t. We see the word “sin,” and we know that sin is bad, and we know—or think we do—that discipline means punishment, and we put those two things together and bang! we think we have it all figured out. We think this passage is all about God spanking us when we’re naughty, and that’s all we need to understand about it; and that’s just not true. Our translations don’t help us with that, but the biggest problem is our mental reflex; and so we need to stop, take a step back, and read a bit more carefully.

The first thing we need to remember is the context of this passage. If you look at the first two verses of Hebrews 12, and if you were here last week you remember we talked about this, the author tells us to run the race of faith with perseverance, with endurance—to run it all the way to the end, all the way through the finish line. He tells us we need to let go of the good things that have taken too large a place in our lives—they have become excess weight that slows us down as we run—and that we need to throw off the sin that distracts us into looking away from Jesus and running off the road; and then in verse 3, he says that we need to think about Jesus “so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” We didn’t talk about this last week, but this is also athletic language—these were terms that were used of runners who crossed the finish line and then collapsed from exhaustion. The author’s concern is that his fellow Jewish Christians not do the same before they’ve ever finished the race. He doesn’t want them—or, by extension, us—giving up and giving in when there’s still more to go and more to do.

It’s in this context, and with this concern, that the author does two things. First, he shifts the athletic metaphor from running to boxing, because he’s shifting his focus from the internal struggle against our own sin to the external struggle against the forces of sin around us; he’s concerned, as we’ve seen, that his readers will give up the faith because of external pressure and opposition, and so he wants them to understand that that opposition is also part of their struggle against sin, and also something in which they need to persevere, to keep going and keep fighting, rather than giving up. Part of following Christ is that it sets you against the power of evil, which is very strong in this world—and that means that the more faithfully and the more energetically you follow Christ, the more you will face resistance and the more you will be attacked. Indeed, the author reminds his readers—and it’s something we should also remember—that they haven’t really seen much trouble yet; Jesus died on the cross for them and never gave up, while they haven’t faced anything anywhere near that bad. Should they leave him over so little?

Second, it’s here that Hebrews starts talking about discipline; and we need to realize that while punishment for wrongdoing is part of the meaning of this word, it’s far from all of it. The Greek word here is one from which we derive some of our technical educational terms, and it’s as much about training and instruction as it is about punishment—in fact, it’s related both to one of the words for “child” and to the word for “teacher.” It’s a word that encompasses all the things that are necessary to train and prepare and equip a child to grow up into an adult who is mature, well-rounded, knowledgeable, wise, and generally capable of living a good and productive life in society. As such, this word fits right in with the athletic metaphor in this passage—the discipline that is in view here is the training and coaching that is necessary for athletes to compete well and win.

With this, then, we have a new thought introduced—and a profoundly important one. To this point, as the author has addressed the struggles and pains of the life of faith, his focus has been on telling his readers that it’s worth enduring them because there are joys and pleasures coming that will make them worth it in the end. Now, he goes beyond that to make the point that as unpleasant as the struggle against sin may be—and this is true both for the struggle against sin in our own lives and for the things we suffer as a result of the sinful brokenness of the world—as unpleasant as that may be, there is good in our suffering. It’s not just something that’s bad and we have to get through it, but God is actively at work in our trials and our pains, in the times when we’re attacked and the times when others hurt us, in our temptations and our struggles with sin; in all those times and all those situations, God is at work in us for our good.

In other words, the bad things in life aren’t obstacles to God’s plan for us, they aren’t necessarily signs that we’re outside his will, they aren’t evidence that we don’t have enough faith, and they aren’t even times we just have to grit our teeth and get through in order to get the blessings God has for us; they are, as strange as this may sound, part of the work God is doing in us to bless us. They are part of his discipline—he’s using them to make us the people he created us to be. Training is painful at times, if it’s effective, because in order to be effective it has to push us past the point where we’re comfortable. One of the reasons I’ve been out of shape most of my life is that I have always found exercise quite unpleasant; now I’m in a position where, for a couple reasons, I’m forced to exercise, and I’m starting to learn for the first time that the pain and the discomfort actually have a good side—they are part of a greater blessing.

What I’m starting to figure out when it comes to physical discipline is something I already knew to be true in other areas of life: in our sin-sick world, there is no growth without pain. It just doesn’t happen. To seek to avoid pain is to stunt ourselves—physically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually—and ultimately only to ensure greater, more hopeless pain in the end. This is not to say, of course, that pain is always good for us; to intentionally seek out pain for ourselves would likely do us worse than trying to avoid all pain. But as Christians, we have the remarkable assurance that the pains and struggles and temptations we face are ones which God has allowed for our discipline—that we may have the endurance we need, as James says, to run the race of faith all the way through the finish line; and that as Hebrews says, we may share in the holiness and righteousness of our perfectly good and perfectly loving Father God.

Therefore, Hebrews says—and we’ll look more at this next week—take heart. Don’t be listless, don’t give in to fatigue, but gather your resolve and recommit yourself to running the race; run hard, and run straight for the goal (that’s what the phrase “make level paths for your feet” means). You can do it, because God is enabling you to do it—it’s by his power, not yours; in our own strength, this would be too much for us, but God has placed his Spirit in our hearts and what he asks, his Holy Spirit makes possible. Take courage and run hard, not just for yourself but for those around you—so that those who are weaker and those who are wounded may find healing, and so that no sin will grow up within the community to defile it and turn it away from God. It is for this, too, that God is disciplining you, so that he may work through you to guide and strengthen others.

Let me close with an illustration. When Sara was in junior high, she and her best friend did the 10-mile Crop Walk. They’d done it before, and usually took about three and a half hours. This time, as they were starting off, they noticed a woman ahead of them wearing headphones who was walking at a good, steady pace, and decided to match her. They followed her the whole way, about 20 yards behind, and finished the walk in two and a half hours. When they were done, they went up to her and thanked her for the help she’d given them; she was of course quite surprised, since she hadn’t known they were there. For her, it was just another day’s walk, the result of a settled discipline of walking most days; but for them, her discipline had enabled them to go beyond anything they’d ever done before, or known they could do. Hebrews challenges us to accept the Lord’s discipline as a sign of his love for us, because it trains us and builds up our endurance to run the race of faith well; but how we run isn’t just about us, because we don’t run this race alone—and you never know who might be following you.

(Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 11:39-12:6)

Through the ages, Hebrews 11 reminds us, God has raised up men and women to love him and praise his name, and he has called them to live by faith. The details have changed—Abraham was called to leave his entire world and travel someplace else; Moses was called to lead his people out of slavery and be the man through whom God would give his people law; David was called to rule the people in accordance with that law; the prophets were called to challenge and rebuke the people, including the kings of their times, for the ways in which they were misusing and disobeying that law—but the central command has always been the same: base your entire life on the belief that God is who he says he is and that he’s faithful to do what he says he will do.

Generation after generation lived and died on that basis, waiting for God to keep his promise to send the Messiah; and then Jesus came and accomplished our salvation, and then he left again, promising to return—and since then, generation after generation have lived and died waiting for him to keep that promise. All of them received part of God’s blessing, but none fully received it in this world; and yet, they did not lose heart, but stayed true to him, running the race of faith all the way to the end. Abraham and Moses, the apostle Paul and John the evangelist, Augustine and the Cappadocians, Martin Luther and John Calvin, William Carey and Hudson Taylor, and the heroes of faith of our own lives—all of them did what they did, not because they had some confirmation or some experience we lacked, but simply by faith, because they trusted that what God had promised, he would be completely faithful to do.

And therefore, Hebrews says, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us do the same. The point here is not that all these people are watching us, but that they are witnesses in the legal sense: they testify with their lives that the race of faith is one that we can win, because God gives us the power to do so, and that crossing that finish line is truly a victory. As the singer-songwriter Carolyn Arends put it in her song “Great Cloud of Witnesses,” we hear them telling us, “Don’t quit,” because “the finish is worth every inch of the road.” They bear witness to us that God is indeed faithful, and we will never regret putting all our trust in him and giving him everything we have. The only thing we will ever regret, in the end, is failing to do so.

Therefore, the author says, let’s commit to this; and he specifies two things we need to do. One, we need to shed all our excess weight, everything that burdens us and slows us down as we try to run. He’s not talking about sin here, that’s the next clause. Instead, what is this? It’s too much of a good thing. You can think of this like the Oregon Trail, travelers setting out with all sorts of furniture that they had to abandon in order to make it through the mountains before winter closed the passes; or you can think of it in terms of physical fitness, of weight that comes from eating more food than our bodies need for energy. Either way, the point is clear: these are things which aren’t wrong, they’re good things, but which come to have too big a place in our lives—they use up energy and attention and trust and love which should go only to God. For me, one of the issues this way I had to address back in seminary was baseball. It’s a marvelously good thing, but it was sucking away time from my classwork, from ministry, from Sara, from time spent in prayer and Scripture—it was, spiritually speaking, excess weight. I had to cut back for the sake of my health; and, over time, I did.

Beyond that, of course, you have things which are wrong in and of themselves; and here we have a bit of uncertainty in the text. Most texts of Hebrews have the word the NIV translates “entangles,” but that word takes some fiddling to make sense of it; for my part, I go with the minority who follow the oldest text we have of Hebrews, which reads this way: “let us throw off . . . every sin that so easily distracts us.” Not only is it the oldest, it vividly captures the reality that if you want to win a race, you have to stay on the course. You can’t let yourself be distracted and tempted into running off the road and chasing after something else—if you do that, you’re going to lose. That’s what sin does to us. We run the race of faith by keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the one who marked out the course for us—he is the author, the pioneer, of our faith, the one who blazed the trail and is leading us home to the Father—and the only way to stay on course is to keep our eyes fixed on him; and sin is always trying to catch our eye, to get us to look at anyone or anything else, so that instead of following Jesus, we’ll run off the road.

In other words, then, we need to look at the good things in our lives and figure out which ones are too much of a good thing, which ones are slowing us down spiritually because they’re too important to us, and let go of them; and we need to throw off sin because it doesn’t just slow us down, it steers us off the road entirely and sends us off in the wrong direction. And of course, both these things are much easier said than done, and nothing we’ll do perfectly in this life; but these are tasks to which we need to be committed if we are to run this race all the way through to the end. That’s what it’s about. You can run a brilliant race 95% of the way, but if you give up and don’t run the last 5%, you lose. The story is told that when Napoleon was asked why he and his armies lost at Waterloo, he answered, “The British fought five minutes longer.” I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s something that could be said of a lot of battles, and a lot of athletic contests. The race goes not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but often, they go to the one that keeps running, keeps fighting, keeps striving five minutes longer.

That’s not easy to do; but in this as in all things, our ultimate model is Jesus. However rough you may have it, Hebrews says, look at Jesus, who had it a whole lot worse, but for the joy set before him, he endured the cross. He took the pain and the agony, and though others looked at him on the cross and saw only shame and disgrace, he rejected that—he knew it for a victory, because he accepted it in obedience to the saving and reconciling will of his Father in heaven. He took the worst this world could hit him with, and he didn’t try to avoid it, he just went right on through it. And in so doing, he opened the way for us—he became the way for us—so that all we have to do is keep looking to him, keep watching him, and follow.

(Hebrews 11:3-40)

“By faith Abel . . .” “By faith Enoch . . .” “By faith Noah . . .” “By faith Abra-ham . . .” “By faith Sarah . . .” “By faith Isaac . . .” “By faith Jacob . . .” “By faith Joseph . . .” “By faith Moses . . .” “By faith Rahab . . .” And on and on goes this chapter people have called the honor roll of faith; it’s a long passage with a lot of stories, and in-deed time would fail me to deal with all of them—but for all that, and for all the lessons we could draw from this chapter, it’s a long passage with one single main point, and it’s the same point we considered last week: faith in Christ is worth keeping. The life of faith is absolutely worth living.

As part of that, it’s worth noting that the author of Hebrews doesn’t just tell happy stories. Indeed, he doesn’t mostly tell happy stories. The first person named is Abel, who was murdered by his brother; and at the last, we get a list of all sorts of horrible things that God’s faithful ones have suffered over the years. In between, of course, we get heroic figures like Abraham and Moses, but even there, we see a definite emphasis on the trials of life—with Abraham, we don’t just get his journey by faith to the Promised Land, we see him trading in a city for tents, and the author reminds us of the time when God tested him by commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac. When the author talks about Moses, he emphasizes the tyrannical anger of Pharaoh and the mistreatment of the Israelites. Hebrews gives us the power of God and the victory of faith, yes, but it also tells us clearly not to expect that victory to be easy, or the road to be smooth. Unblinkingly, it tells us we’re going to have hard times.

That’s not so much the way we tend to do business these days. There are a lot of big churches and ministries and movements out there that are built on telling happy stories of faith. This person had faith and God healed their incurable cancer, and that person had faith and God gave them success in business, and that couple over there had faith and God freed their son from addiction and turned his life around, and if you have faith, you’ll see everything start to go right just like they did. And you know, as a sales pitch, it’s a remarkably effective way to get people in the door. But it has two problems. First, it’s right back to the old pagan idea of religion as a contract with the gods—you do this to please your god, and your god has to give you something you want in return—and that’s not what Christian faith is about. And second, what about those of us who don’t see all that good stuff happen? What happens if you buy into the idea and you don’t get better—or your spouse doesn’t—or your business fails, or your children keep going astray? What then? Well, either you blame it on yourself—something must be wrong with your faith—and so you work harder to try to earn that reward, or else you conclude you’ve been sold a bill of goods, and you walk away from the whole thing.

The fact of the matter is, God does bless some people in those kinds of ways, but not everyone, by any means; some people he blesses in other ways. And even those who do see miraculous healing and amazing financial success still have their temptations and their struggles—life still isn’t easy, it’s just differently hard. Hebrews isn’t interested in trying to sell us on faith by telling us faith will give us the life we’ve always wanted; rather, it’s trying to show us that God has something even better for us—something which is worth the trials and suffering and difficult times that come as part of the package.

That, I think, is why we also have the emphasis on the amazing things God did through these people. No, he didn’t protect them from pain or always give them the successes they would have hoped for—but look what he gave them instead! They won victories they could never have imagined and received blessings beyond any human power to give—and more than that, they had the honor to be included in God’s plan for the redemption and transformation of the world. Part of the reason God doesn’t always give us what we want is that unlike us, he doesn’t have to think that small; he can do far more.

At the same time, though, the blessings God gives us and the things he accomplishes through us are not to be our reason for faith, but rewards for it—and not the main rewards, but little reassurances along the way. Hebrews underscores the fact that these people were living toward something they would never see in their earthly lives—they lived in faith and they died in faith, still waiting and hoping for God to keep his greatest promise. They lived between the promise and the fulfillment, looking forward to—well, us: to the coming of Christ, the gift of his Holy Spirit, and the church; the meaning and significance of their lives depended on something beyond them, something still to come. And though our circumstances are different, in this they are an example for us, because we too live between: we live in the time between the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise and its conclusion, between the first coming of Christ and his return, when the kingdom of God is breaking into this world but has not yet been fully realized. Which means, to live in this time, we too must live by faith, looking forward to a time when we will all fully receive what has been promised.