(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.

(Psalm 95:6-11, Psalm 127:1-2; Hebrews 4:1-13)

Sara and I have gotten a lot of congratulations (and the occasional snarky comment) since we started telling people we’re going to have another child, and the congratulations are certainly appropriate and appreciated; I think, too, they’re a sign of health in this community, because children truly are a blessing from God, which is something our society seems to understand less and less these days. In our growing individualism and exaltation of the self, our culture more and more focuses on the inconvenience and burden that children represent, and the way in which they make you vulnerable to hurt, and misses the sheer wonder of the opportunity to love and know another person. That’s the wrong focus, and it’s an ungrateful response to the abundant goodness of God; and six months from now, when I’m trying to function on four hours’ sleep a night in three pieces, I pray you’ll remind me of that fact.

In all seriousness, the lack of rest that comes with a newborn takes a real toll on Sara and me both; I won’t call it one of the hardest things about parenting because it’s such a short-term thing, but man, you really feel it while it lasts. We need rest; our bodies need it, and so do our spirits, and if we don’t get enough, it takes its toll. Someone was telling me recently about a couple Navy friends who had tried to join the SEALs, but had washed out, for different reasons—one because he discovered a severe allergy to poison ivy, as I recall; of course, they try very hard to wash people out, and only accept those they can’t get rid of. One of the ways they do that is through extended sleep deprivation, pushing people far beyond what their bodies can really handle to see if they break. One of the stories I heard was of a prospective SEAL standing in the forest, trying to use a tree to make a long-distance phone call; lack of sleep had fogged his brain to the point that he could barely think. We need rest for our minds and bodies to function properly.

The problem is, we know this, but various things interfere. There’s strong economic pressure these days, if you have a job, to work whenever they ask—especially in businesses that can let employees go and just have others work longer hours to make up for it. People wind up working long, long days, or seven days a week, or both, because they feel they have to in order to stay employed. Others work erratic schedules with no rhythm to them, no consistent time for rest, because those are the hours they can get. I remember doing that, back when I was searching for my first call, working as a relief chaplain at our hospital; I remember times when I was there at 3, 4 in the morning. There are a lot of folks for whom work runs their lives, while rest is largely an afterthought.

This is a problem in better economic times, too, of course; the desperation isn’t quite the same, but the opportunities for economic advancement are better, and the carrot works at least as well as the stick when it comes to getting the mule to move. Someone once asked the great tycoon Andrew Carnegie how much was enough, and he replied, “One dollar more”; it’s an attitude shared by an awful lot of people. It’s easy to figure that we can rest when we just achieve the next goal, whatever that next goal may be—but if we get there, there’s always another one just up ahead, and yet another beyond that, and always one more mountain yet to climb before we can really sit down and rest.

For the world, rest is dependent on circumstances, and I don’t say that’s entirely unreasonable; true rest, after all, goes with true work—God gave us work to do just as much as he gave us time and space to rest. He gave us both because we need both to flourish. Work without rest is unbalanced, bad for the body and the spirit; but rest without work is even worse, because those who refuse to do good work do not find good rest, but only a counterfeit that sickens the soul. Those who feel they cannot do good work find their rest blighted; you can really see that in our shut-ins, which is why I often need to reassure them that their prayers matter, and we treasure them. (In the first draft of this sermon, I wrote “if nothing else, they can pray”; Sara read that, and God started convicting her that for all of us, prayer is the first and most important work he gives us. I looked at her and wondered why God hadn’t simply convicted me of that, and the answer is of course that he believes in efficiency, and this was a two-fer: he fixed my thinking, and at the same time reminded me how much I need my wife. Which I knew, but it never hurts.) Whatever the work God gives us, we need to do it for our own sake; the need for rest arises with the need to work, it isn’t an excuse to avoid work.

The problem is, though, we don’t understand what rest really is, and where we truly find it. When we think about this through an economic prism, as the world does, we essentially think of rest as a reward, something we have to earn; that misleads us in two ways. One, we get work and rest out of their proper balance—either by yielding to that way of thinking, which produces overwork, or by rebelling against it, into laziness and sloth—and two, that leads us to define rest in purely physical and material terms. Rest is a day off, a vacation, a morning to sleep in, a time to go do something fun. Which is all good and necessary for body and spirit alike, but it’s not enough. If you’ve ever had a day off where you couldn’t get your mind off work, no matter what your body was doing, or a vacation where you came back more exhausted than you left because you were frantically busy the whole time, you understand that—rest isn’t just a matter of your physical circumstances, it’s a matter of the attitude of your mind and your heart.

This is an important reality, and it points us to what Hebrews is doing here in chapter 4. The author, in the warning that concludes chapter 3, has pulled this passage from Psalm 95—God’s people rebel against him in the wilderness, refusing to trust him, and so he bars them from the Promised Land; and how is that phrased? Not, “They shall not enter my land,” but “They shall not enter my rest.” It’s an interesting statement, and the author picks up on it to argue two things. First, he notes that this is God’s rest, and like any good Jewish teacher, he goes looking in the Bible for God’s rest, which he finds in Genesis 2:2—“God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” God’s rest is the Sabbath rest, which he commanded to his people in his Law.

What does that mean? It means to do as God did, to rest from all our works. It means laying down our own efforts, letting go of our striving, taking the burden off our shoulders and setting it down. It doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing—though there are times when that can be important—which is why it’s not supposed to be a legalistic observance, because it’s not physical inactivity that’s the main point; what matters more is the heart attitude of rest. Obviously, stepping aside from one’s job is necessary to this, but simply not going in to work is meaningless in this sense if you take your work and its worries home with you; if you’re still focused on your expenses and what you have to get done and how you’re going to pay the bills, if you’re still trying to carry your life on your back, then you aren’t experiencing God’s rest, and you have no true Sabbath.

The key here is the understanding we see in Psalm 127: what matters most isn’t what we do, but what God does. If it’s just your work, it’s going to collapse sooner or later, no matter your frantic efforts to prop it up; but if God is in it, you can leave it in his hands, and go rest, because you can trust that he can keep it going just fine without you.

Again, this is partly a matter of physical circumstances, because one of the ways God does this is by providing for us physically and financially. The promise of rest in the Exodus, after all, was entrance into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey where making a living would be easier than most places. One of the ways we know God is building this church is that he has provided us over the years with gifts of money that have enabled us to keep going and keep doing his ministry until, as I believe, the day comes when that ministry will bear fruit and we will have the people we need to be self-sustaining, and indeed to grow the ministries he has given us. More broadly, as he gave the Promised Land to his people, so he has given us the country for whose freedom we give thanks at this time every year; our constitutional protections and our economic strength make rest much easier than someplace like Haiti, or Iran, or Zimbabwe, or North Korea. The fact that we often turn them into new and creative reasons to stress out instead doesn’t change that. Our political and economic blessings are among the ways God provides for us, and we should always be grateful for them.

That said, we need to understand what Hebrews is telling us: that’s only part of the picture. These are gifts God gives us, but we must not focus on the gifts, because they aren’t enough; we need to focus through them to the one from whom all good things come, because more than the gifts, we need the giver. As the author points out here, if Israel entering the Promised Land had been enough to fulfill God’s promise of rest, God wouldn’t have needed to keep making the promise. There’s more, and better; there’s a truer, deeper Sabbath rest than anything merely physical; and that rest is found in Jesus. Jesus, as he is superior to all other spiritual powers, as he is superior to all other authorities in heaven and on earth, as he is superior even to the Law of God, so he is superior even to the greatest earthly blessing of that Law, the Sabbath; he is the true Sabbath rest, the final fulfillment of that promise.

Why? Because Jesus gives grace, and he gives it to us to live by grace. If we’re trying to live by our own efforts, we can never truly rest, because there’s always more that we urgently need to do; there’s always one more problem coming down the pike, and one more opportunity not to miss, and one more sin we haven’t beaten, and one more area where we need to improve. If it’s just us guarding the walls, then sleep is a risk we can’t afford. But Jesus tells us, it isn’t just us; we aren’t on our own in this. We keep trying to be big enough, strong enough, smart enough, fast enough, good enough, and the burden of needing to be enough crushes us under the weight of musts and shoulds and regrets; Jesus tells us we don’t have to be enough, because he is enough for us. All we have to do is what he gives us to do, and trust him for the rest.