(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.”

(Exodus 7:1-5, Nehemiah 9:9-21; Hebrews 5:11-6:12)

So a couple times now, the book of Hebrews has quoted Psalm 110 and the line, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” You might be wondering what that’s all about. Most likely, so were the people to whom this book was addressed. As such, you might have expected the author to move on and explain himself, because the Melchizedek reference isn’t obvious by any means; it’s going to take some unpacking, and it’s clearly important to where the author is going. But he doesn’t do that; instead, he gives them another warning. This is the fourth so far, but it’s the first of the two big ones in this book, and it’s fairly complex in its argument, so we need to unpack it carefully; there’s a lot that it’s easy to miss.

The key thing to remember is what the author has just been arguing, in the passage we read last week: Christ has fulfilled the core purpose of the law, he has completed in full, once and for all, the work that the priests and the sacrificial system could only do partially and temporarily, and so he has replaced the priests and their sacrifices. He is the final and greatest high priest who has offered the final sacrifice; nothing else is necessary, and nothing else accomplishes anything. The priests can continue offering their sacrifices if they want to, but those sacrifices are empty, meaningless, unheeded by God and outside his will—as indeed any human religious activities that are not centered on Christ are empty, meaningless, unheeded by God and outside his will. That may be the way things always used to be done, but it’s all served its purpose, and has now outlived it; God is no longer in it, and to the extent that the old sacrificial system now stands opposed to the worship of his Son, he’s actively opposed to it, and to all who maintain it.

This is, of course, a hard thing to hear; after all, this is an epistle to the Hebrews, to Jewish Christians who surely loved and valued their heritage and everything that went along with it. No doubt they understood the author’s point, at least to some degree; the question was, were they willing to accept all its implications? Were they willing to move on from their heritage, to accept that the law had fulfilled its purpose and the sacrificial system was no longer necessary? And in particular, were they willing to do so if it meant standing up to those who refused to accept that fact?

It seems clear that they were not willing; hence the author’s complaint in the end of chapter 5. “You’re going to have a hard time understanding this,” he tells them, “because your minds have become sluggish. You ought to be teaching this to others yourselves, but instead you’re making me go over the basics all over again. You’re refusing to act your age, you’re refusing to be mature—you’re acting as if you don’t understand all this, as if you still need to be treated as spiritual babies.” It’s not that they hadn’t been taught, it’s not that they didn’t know enough to know what was right, or what they were supposed to be doing; but they were sluggish, they didn’t want to actually do it, because they didn’t like the next steps they were supposed to take. They didn’t want to take the risk of faith, they didn’t want their friends who were still Jews turning against them; they had faced some persecution for Christ in the past, but if they bought in completely to what Hebrews is saying, they’d have a lot more to deal with, and they didn’t want that.

That’s why the author wasn’t able to just start off talking about Jesus as our great high priest, and why he can’t just plow right on and teach them about Melchizedek; it’s why he had to build up to that point with his other arguments, and why at every stage of his argument—including this one—he’s felt the need to offer a warning, to make sure his audience is taking him seriously and listening closely to what he’s trying to tell them. Clearly, though, he’s had enough of laying the groundwork, enough of talking about the basics; and in fact, he says, therefore, let’s press on to talk about the high priesthood of Christ. Why therefore? Because the problem isn’t that these Jewish Christians don’t understand this stuff. They understand it just fine. They just think they can get away with not committing to it, not living it out; they think they can keep one foot in the gospel and one foot in their old world—which in their case happens to be the world of Judaism and the Jewish law—and they’ll be just fine. In response, Hebrews sets out to show them how wrong they are, and why.

Now, the biggest part of that is coming beginning in chapter 7, where the author does exactly what he says he’s going to do and teaches them in detail about the high-priestly work of Jesus; when we get there, we’ll take several weeks to explore that, because he’s not kidding when he says it’s hard to explain. We’ll get there, and it’s worth it, but it does take some effort. First, though, he reminds them what they’re called to—“repentance from dead works and faith in God”—and lays out the consequences of turning away from Christ and that calling. Those consequences are severe; nothing less than salvation is at stake. It’s easy to slip into the mindset represented by the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, who once wrote, “I love to sin. God loves to forgive sin. Really, this world is admirably arranged.” The truth is very different. It is not that God loves to forgive sin; rather, he loves us and so he paid a horrendous price in the sacrifice of his Son in order that we might be forgiven. To sin casually is to take his forgiveness lightly, and to do that is to take the sacrifice of Christ lightly; and that is profoundly serious, and profoundly wrong, and not something God will simply brush off.

Now, it’s important to recognize that Hebrews here isn’t just talking about sin. There have been those who have tried to argue from this passage that any sin after conversion is unforgivable, and that’s just not the point here; this passage won’t support that, nor would that square with the rest of the New Testament. Rather, we’re talking about a very specific thing, one which is quite unfashionable to talk about these days: the sin of apostasy. 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. Such people, Hebrews says, have deliberately chosen to crucify Christ all over again and to put him to public shame, and so for them, any return to repentance is impossible.

Now, does that merely mean it’s humanly impossible, or is Hebrews saying this is even impossible for God? Honestly, I don’t know. On the one hand, Jesus says, “With God, all things are possible.” On the other, Jesus also calls blasphemy against the Holy Spirit the unforgivable sin. We’re in one of those areas where Scripture doesn’t really give us a nice neat conclusion tied up in a white satin ribbon. But the argument here is clear, and it does parallel Jesus’ statement about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit: if you reject the only means by which you may be saved, and the only way in which you can possibly repent, then you have nowhere else to go. Christ’s sacrifice was once for all, and nothing else is coming along to offer the same opportunity—if you decisively reject that, then you have locked yourself in a room with no windows and welded the door shut behind you, and there is no way out. There is no way but the One who is the Way, and if you turn your back on him, you have no way to go. Whatever else, this is certainly impossible by any sort of human effort or human choice.

There are those who have been arguing of late that our denomination is apostate; if you follow the news stories, you know why. For my part, I say it isn’t, for two reasons. One, I don’t believe a denomination, a bureaucratic and corporate structure, can be apostate, because it’s a thing. People are sinners, and commit sins, and we use many, many things to help us do so, but the things themselves are not guilty of sin. Two, it must also be said that what certain people, or certain collections of people, do is neither necessarily representative nor necessarily determinative of the denomination as a whole. General Assembly may well vote to reject the plain testimony of the word of God in any number of areas, but they aren’t the ones who decide; the presbyteries do, and so far, the presby-teries have swatted them down every time. What GA does gets the headlines, but it’s what the presbyteries do with it that matters, and that remains to be seen. So no, the Presbyterian Church (USA) isn’t apostate. But are we led by apostates? Are we led by people who have turned aside from the gospel to follow their own gods with their own laws? Ultimately, only God can judge that; but in some cases, there’s reason for concern. Which obviously means we must watch closely what they do and go carefully lest we be judged for following them, and believe me, we of the Session are doing exactly that.

The broader question that arises from this passage is, does Hebrews teach that you can lose your salvation? The answer is, if it does, it also teaches that you can only lose it once, and it’s gone forever—there’s no falling away and coming back and falling away and coming back—but I don’t believe that’s what’s in view here, because that isn’t where Hebrews goes with this. Rather, we see the author go on to express confidence that his readers haven’t fallen away from Christ, and aren’t going to, because God is faithful and their faith is real; like the field in verse 7, they have already produced real fruit. In Christ, they will escape the danger they face, the author has no doubt, because God won’t let go of them; but he still wants them to understand that danger and take it very seriously.

The truth is, we affirm the perseverance of the saints, that salvation is a work of God that we cannot undo, and that thus it’s impossible to “lose” our salvation; but nowhere does the Bible promise the perseverance of everyone we think is a Christian. Who are the saints? The saints are those who persevere. It’s why Paul stresses running to win, crossing the finish line, finishing well, fighting the fight all the way to the end; we can’t judge people’s hearts from the outside—we can barely judge our own. There are those who seem to run well for a while, but then they drop out, and in so doing, reveal that we misjudged them. It’s like Jesus says in the parable of the sower—it’s not just that the seed springs up that matters, it’s whether it can thrive despite the weeds, and whether the soil is deep enough to sustain the growth through the heat of the summer. And so Hebrews tells its audience, and 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.

The thing that makes this tricky is that it isn’t a matter of just working harder; this doesn’t boil down to “just grit your teeth and keep going.” That’s living by law; that is, ironically enough, one of the temptations we have to resist. In truth, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of folks who turn their backs on the church aren’t really turning their backs on the gospel, they’re turning their backs on that sort of “just do it” legalism; they aren’t rejecting Christ but a counterfeit, though that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to get them to listen to the gospel. Following Christ, putting our faith in him alone, produces good works, but those good works are not the ultimate point, and our goal is not to get those good works by any means necessary; good works done in our own strength are like costume jewelry—they may glitter and sparkle on first appearance, but apply any pressure and they break. What God calls us to is, in truth, harder: to continue to live by faith, to continue to put our trust in the grace of God and the saving work of Christ, to continue to put to death our own egos and their demands for credit and attention, to continue to learn and accept humility and acknowledge that we are not enough, only Jesus is enough. It means setting aside the demands of our selves with our agendas and our plans, and letting ourselves be filled instead with the mind and the Spirit of Christ, that he would fill us and dwell in us, that he would mark out our way and direct our paths.

(Deuteronomy 33:8-10, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 4:14-5:10)

As the author of Hebrews has been building his case for the supremacy of Christ, he’s been gradually zeroing in on his key point. All the way along, he’s had his eye on the Jewish law; as we know, one of the main attacks on the early church was from those who insisted that even after Jesus, it was still necessary to keep the whole law in order to please God, and the author is concerned that his hearers might give in to that attack. He doesn’t want them to go back to putting their faith in the law—which is to say, in their own ability to keep the law—and so he’s writing to strengthen their conviction that not only do they need Jesus, they need only Jesus, with nothing else mixed in.

Having shown Jesus to be superior to the angels who delivered the law, to all other authorities including the law, and to the Sabbath which is the law’s greatest earthly blessing, he now arrives at his central point, one he’ll focus on (from a couple different angles) through the middle section of the book: Jesus replaces the core of the law. He’s not merely superior to it as an authority, he’s superior to it in its very essence; what the law could never fully accomplish, he accomplished. The Old Testament law can never be understood in the same way again, because Jesus has fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. It’s still the word of God, we still need to understand it and learn from it, but we don’t live under it anymore; we live under grace, in Christ.

This may sound strange, because we normally think of law as something which is designed to compel and control behavior, to make people do certain things and not do other things; you can find a great many churches that preach the Old Testament that way. For that matter, you can find a great many churches that preach the New Testament that way. That’s a very common form of religion, because it’s what we human beings keep trying to collapse our relationship with God down to—if I do enough good things and avoid enough bad things, God will be pleased with me and will give me what I want. That’s a very common form of religion, but it isn’t the gospel, and it isn’t what following Christ is about; and in fact, it isn’t what the Old Testament is about either, or ever was about. The core purpose of the Old Testament law was to provide salvation from sin to the people of God by providing a means by which the price for their sin could be paid and the holiness of God could be satisfied. That means was imperfect, and could only be temporary, but it was the main reason for which the law existed.

This can be hard for us to understand, because as I’ve said before, we Protestants don’t understand priests. We don’t really know who they are, or what they do, or even what the whole priesthood thing is about—the whole idea is unfamiliar to us. One reason for this, of course, is that we aren’t Catholic (though a few of us used to be), and so we don’t have priests. We know the Catholic church across town has a priest, but for most of us, that’s just external knowledge, not a matter of experience; we know that the pastor there has the title “priest” and is addressed as “Father,” but most of us don’t really know what that means, because it’s never been a meaningful part of our lives.

That being the case, though, it needs to be said that even that would only get you so far, because Catholics don’t understand priests the same way the Old Testament did either. There are similarities, but also some very real and significant differences, and especially the whole sacrificial system—to my knowledge, no Catholic priest has ever sacrificed so much as a pigeon, let alone a cow. As such, even understanding the Catholic priesthood is of limited value in understanding the Old Testament priesthood.

To understand the central focus of this book and its argument, we need to address that, because Hebrews puts considerable effort into showing that Christ is the new and greatest and final high priest, that he has replaced the entire human priesthood and the whole sacrificial system which they served; to get a handle on why the author does that and what he’s really trying to prove, we need at least a basic grasp on what the priests did and why, and how the system worked.

To get the essence of that, look at our passage from Deuteronomy—this is from Moses’ blessing on the tribe of Levi, from which the priests came; look specifically at verse 10, and you can see the two parts of the priest’s work, and the two directions in which that work moved. First, “They teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your law.” This is the work of representing God to Israel, of teaching them the will and the ways of God and proclaiming God’s word to them, and this part of the job, we’re familiar with.

But then look at the second half of that verse: “they place incense before you, and whole burnt offerings on your altar.” This is the work of representing Israel before God. The people of Israel couldn’t go directly to God to ask forgiveness, because their sin got in the way; they had to go through the priests. They would bring their offerings of animals and grain to the priests and the priests would then offer them to God on behalf of the people. Every sacrifice was a prayer, and it was a prayer you couldn’t pray yourself; the priests had to pray it for you. They were the only ones who were allowed to do so. They were sort of professional holy people—you might even call them professional pray-ers.

Now, this was the system the Israelites had, and it was better than anything anybody else had; it enabled them, however imperfectly, to pray, and to come to know and serve the one true God, and that’s no small thing. Still, it wasn’t enough. The most it could do was address the symptoms—the outward sinful acts, and not even all of them, and certainly not the sinful attitudes and desires in the heart that were the true disease; and even for the symptoms, all it could offer was an endless series of temporary fixes, not any kind of cure. It was like dialysis for someone with kidney disease, or insulin for a severe diabetic—it was enough to keep going, but the real problem remained. And of course, the priests themselves were sinful, too, and had to offer sacrifices for themselves as well as for everyone else; that wasn’t all bad, because it meant they could understand the sins and failings of those who came to offer sacrifices for sin, but it meant that their work was inevitably imperfect, just as the sacrifices they offered were by nature limited. Something more was needed.

That something more came in Jesus; but it’s important we understand that it was something more, not something different. It’s easy to lose track of that, since the whole sacrificial system is so foreign to our experience. You all can pray for yourselves and for each other, by yourselves or together. When you sin against God, you don’t have to come to me and have me pray for you in order for you to be forgiven—you can do that yourself. When you have a need, I’m certainly glad to pray for you, but God will take care of you whether you ask me to pray or not—his action isn’t dependent on me one way or the other. I’m not a priest, I’m just a pastor. Or rather, I am a priest, but only in the same sense as each of you is a priest, that all of us who belong to Jesus are called to be priests to each other in the name of Christ. We’re called to intercede for one another, to speak truth to each other, to encourage one another, and so on. But at the same time, our relationship to God doesn’t run through someone else, it’s direct, one-to-one.

That does not mean, however, that we don’t still have a high priest, or need a high priest, and it doesn’t change the fact that a sacrifice was necessary to make that possible. Nor, indeed, does it change the fact that we need a high priest who is one of us, fully human, and thus fully able to understand the struggles we face; or that to finally solve the problem of human sin, we also needed a high priest who was more than human, someone who could offer a perfect sacrifice, and one which was sufficient to pay the price for all our sin, not just some of it. Whether we knew it or not, all those things were necessary. Jesus didn’t change any of that. He simply fulfilled the requirements.

Jesus, Hebrews says, is our great high priest, the highest priest, who has done everything necessary for our salvation; nothing and no one else can add anything to his accomplishment. He fulfilled every requirement. He knows what it is to be human, because he is one of us; he lived as one of us in this world, facing all our struggles and all our temptations. He knows our desires and our fears, from the inside out, and you can be very sure that the Devil hit him with every temptation possible. Indeed, as we noted a couple weeks ago, Jesus was tempted far, far worse than any of us ever are, because at the point where we give in to temptation, he kept right on resisting. Whatever we’re dealing with, Jesus understands; when we go to him to ask forgiveness, he knows what we’re talking about, because he’s been there. At the same time, though, because he never gave in to fear or desire, he was able to offer a perfect sacrifice, untainted by sin; and because he was God, he was able to offer a sacrifice of infinite value, sufficient once for all to bring full and permanent salvation to all who trust in him.

Therefore, Hebrews says, “Let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” We no longer need human priests to present our prayers to God, because we have Jesus, who is himself God, to do so. We pray, and the Holy Spirit carries our prayers to him, and he presents them to the Father, interceding on our behalf, pleading our case for us. When we pray, we aren’t praying alone, nor are we relying on our own merits and good works, any more than the ancient Israelites were; rather, Jesus prays with us and for us. We rely on his merits and his good work on our behalf. This is why we pray in Jesus’ name; indeed, this is what it means to pray in Jesus’ name.

Which, if we really stop and think about it, should move us to awe. We’re used to it, so we don’t stop and think about it, but prayer is no small, safe, domesticated thing. Annie Dillard puts this brilliantly in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk when she writes,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

This thing that we do—we run as children into the throne room of all creation and climb up into the lap of the King of the universe and tell him everything, in the absolute assurance that he wants us to, and he’s listening with care to everything we say; and we do so because Jesus makes it possible, because he has opened the door for us and he’s the one who lifts us up to the Father to be heard.

It’s a shame when we take that for granted, because it’s a wonderful gift; and more, because when we take it for granted, we take it less seriously, like it’s no big thing. And that’s a problem, because there are times when we need a big thing, and we know it. There are times when we’re desperately in need, or desperately afraid or worried, or when we really feel guilt and shame for our sin, and we truly need something big; if we don’t realize just how big a thing Jesus did for us, and how big a gift he gave us, then when we get to those times, we go looking for more. If we don’t really understand that our acceptance into the presence of God isn’t dependent on whether we feel worthy to be there, then on those times when we don’t feel worthy, we go looking for some way to earn our way in. And we don’t need to. We don’t need to go back to the law, we don’t need to find some way to measure up, we don’t need to add anything to what Jesus has done; what he has done is enough. Jesus is enough. There is nothing more.