Clough Proverbs Lesson 24
Proverbs 3:11-12 expanded in Hebrews 12 – Hebrews
12:1-2
If you turn to the
back of the bulletin you will find one of the comments by a scholar in the Old
Testament on what I have said over and over concerning the way that wisdom was
taught in Israel. We have said
repeatedly that unlike modern American [can’t understand word] where we have
subject material compartmentalized and people are educated to be specialists
over a small area, in the Old Testament this was not so. And Dr. R. N. Whybray says this about the
chakmah or the wise man and how they were educated. We’ll read through this and comment on
it. “The educational system by which
they had been trained,” the people he’s speaking of here, particularly are the
advisors to the king, and this will show you how the men who were around the
king, who were his counselors, who were professional advisers, how these men
were trained speaks of that system. “The
educational system by which they had been trained prepared its peoples not
merely for a professional career, but for the enjoyment of life in all its
aspects, making no distinction between the ethical, social, political and
cultural but regarding them all as comprised within the single motion of the
good, or tov. Its discipline,”
remember the word musar, that was the
severe training, “Its discipline was directed toward the achievement of success
and prosperity through the acquisition of chakmah,
or wisdom, which conferred on its possessors the gift of life, the sum of human
success, prosperity and happiness.”
Notice how here he
has very ably put the Hebrew view of the word “life,” it wasn’t just some
spiritual thing, sort of a rain check that is cashed in when you die and go to
be with the Lord, something all together future. This isn’t the point at all. Life in the Hebrew sense meant life now and
they meant to see some very definite empirical signs of this life in their own
time.
If you’ll turn to
Proverbs 3 we will continue our study of wisdom and in Proverbs 3 we are spending
some time because this chapter points out what wisdom is and what it is not,
and thus we are still in the first 12 verses of the chapter and today we will
get no further because these 12 verses emphasize a theme of a loyalty to
Jehovah. That is their theme:
loyalty. Now you can’t have loyalty to a
machine and you can’t have loyalty to an abstract idea, really; you must have
loyalty to a person and that is the point that is under discussion here in
Proverbs, that true divine viewpoint wisdom always if focusing on loyalty to
Jehovah. And thus we have seen the
various couplets; verses 1 & 2; verses 3 & 4, combined, so that verses
1-4, the first section of chapter 3 shows loyalty to Jehovah or Yahweh by
showing loyalty to one’s teachers—the theme of verses 1-4. In other words, in verse 1 the admonition is:
“Forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my commandments,” that is, the
teacher. So you are loyal to Jehovah by
being loyal to the teachers that Jehovah has authorized. And the authorized teachers of Jehovah are
the parents.
Proverbs 3:3, “Let
not mercy and truth forsake thee,” that is, hold on to them, keep those
teachings, so the loyalty to Jehovah in the first four verses is expressed by a
loyalty to the teachers and their teachings.
Then verses 5-8, “Trust the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto
thine own understanding. [6] In all thy
ways acknowledge Him” or know Him, “and He shall direct thy paths.”
We had a question
turned in last week about verses 5-6 and the word “lean not unto thine own
understanding.” What about this? If the word “understanding” here is a word
which is used throughout Proverbs to refer to the divine viewpoint wisdom why
is it that here it seems to be used as human viewpoint wisdom. Well it’s not really, and here’s where
there’s a fine difference and I have to be very careful how I say this, but I
think the best way of explaining it is the thought of verse 5 is to think of a
situation, say in the military, where orders are given by a commanding officer
and you are receiving those orders.
There may be situations arise in your own area where you can’t quite
adhere to the letter of the order but because you know your commanding officer,
and you know his personality and you know what he is like, you know how to
adopt his orders to that situation because you just generally… if you’re
careful you study your commanding officer, you know his likes and dislikes but
loyalty is to him. Now here you have the
officer and he gives an order, and you’re down here and you get the order. You are to express your allegiance to the
officer by expressing your allegiance to the order, but there are going to come
times when there has to be a flexibility; no order can be ever perfectly
written; never, there will always be some flexibility of interpretation to
every order. Where do you get control on
interpreting a commander’s order? It can
only be one thing; your knowledge of the commander.
And that’s the
point of verse 5, “Lean not unto thine own understanding” is when a person will
take what they know, which may be very good, may be solid divine viewpoint, but
the trouble with it is it becomes inflexible when it’s not united with the
conscience and the divine viewpoint framework is in the mind and the soul and
in the conscience we have the moment by moment leading of the Holy Spirit and
the Holy Spirit may be urging at this point a certain unique application over
in some area, where the general divine viewpoint is correct it’s not
sufficient. It’s necessary but not sufficient. The sufficiency is you not only have to have
a divine viewpoint framework but in your conscience you have to have a
sensitivity to what God wants you to do right in this situation. Now this is not situation ethics; in
situation ethics you’d probably be completely without any objective controls
and that’s not right. But still, the idea is that we do not have a living
relationship with a computer; it’s not just simply the case that you get divine
viewpoint framework and you sort of crank on like a machine: in this situation
you will do this; in this situation you will do this; in this situation you
will do this. That’s not how it works in
practice; in practice it works because you have a spiritual sensitivity to
where the Lord is leading you this moment and you are divided within the domain
of His general orders. So this is the best illustration I can give.
The reason I do
not say that the “understanding” in verse 5 is human viewpoint is because the
other book on wisdom, Ecclesiastes, that speaks of human viewpoint never has
this word in it; it’s conspicuously missing.
So this is a very special word and has to do with spiritual
understanding. The point is that God
isn’t going to conflict with the Word; that’s not the conflict; illogical
conflict here is not the problem. The
problem is just maintaining a sensitivity to what God wants you to do with it
now. And if you’ll see this then you’ll
grasp why wisdom from the divine viewpoint perspective is a personal
relationship.
So verses 5-8 we
can summarize, as we did verses 1-4.
Verses 1-4, loyalty to Jehovah by loyalty to His teachers and
teachings. Verses 5-8, loyalty to
Jehovah by loyalty to Jehovah’s character.
So verses 5-8 say that yes, divine viewpoint is important and necessary
but it itself is not sufficient. You
still have to have a moment by moment sensitivity to the Lord’s leading. Of course, you’ve got 10,000 details in your
life, you can’t possibly sit down and figure out how the Word of God is going
to apply to every single one, you have to be guided and that’s where the
guiding of the Holy Spirit comes in. So
always beware that ultimately divine viewpoint wisdom is always a personal
wisdom.
This is why we
have people, some of whom have come to
So you’ve got to
be careful, we don’t end here, we go on, but to get up to the top you’ve got to
pass through this stage of coming to know the Lord through His Word and there’s
no quick way around it. Now this
ultimately, I think, is the motivation behind a lot of the criticism is that we
have short-cut Christians. They want the
rah-rah thing and they get somebody to trust the Lord and they want immediately
to get up to the mature stage by bypassing all the labor and the work. This is
nothing more than spiritual laziness; they don’t want to put in the time, they
don’t want to put in the effort that it takes to come to know the Lord through
His Word. See, it does take time and it does take a lot of patience but it is a
prerequisite and you cannot bypass that point.
Now the last part
of Proverbs 3 deals with verses 9-12 and here we have loyalty to Jehovah again
but it is loyalty expressed to Jehovah, not by loyalty to His teachers or
teachings as verses 1-4 and it’s not loyalty to Jehovah expressed by loyalty to
His character, verses 5-8, but it is loyalty to Jehovah expressed under
pressure. And so we have two kinds of
pressure in verses 9-12; the pressure of blessing and the pressure of adversity. Verses 9-10 is the pressure of blessing,
“Honor the LORD with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine
increase.” Here is when you are blessed
materially and a lot of believers crack up under blessing, not under
adversity. This is why God may be, at
this moment, refraining from blessing you materially. He’s doing it for your spiritual benefit; you
can’t be trusted with material wealth because your spiritual concentration is
so weak that if God blessed you materially you would become distracted
immediately; you couldn’t maintain your spiritual orientation, you would be
worrying about the innumerable details of wealth and so on. So just because God has not blessed you
materially don’t cry to Him about it; He may have some very good reasons. He usually does!
In verses 11-12
this is the problem of loyalty to God under problems of adversity. “My Son, despise not the chastening of the
LORD, neither be weary of His correction; [12] For whom the LORD loves He
corrects, even as the father in the son in whom he delights.” I said we are going to go to the New
Testament and so this Sunday and next Sunday we’ll be in the New Testament
where the author of Hebrews expands verses 11-12 into a major doctrine for the
Christian life. So let’s turn to Hebrews
12.
Hebrews 12 is an
extensive chapter; I will only cover the first 13 verses. We will divide these verses as follows:
verses 1-2; verses 3-11; verses 12-13.
The first section, Hebrews 12:1-2 is exhortation to successful use of
the faith technique in adversity. This
is when the believers, that includes us, are exhorted to use the faith
technique under pressure. Now notice the
context of Heb 12 because it is this chapter that is going to be an
amplification of the truth we are learning in the Old Testament. Here’s where the richness, if you will just
take the time of coming to know the Old Testament it will improve your
understanding of the New Testament immeasurably. The trouble is, it takes work to understand
the Old Testament and who wants to work.
Hebrews 12:1-2
exhortation to the faith technique under pressure; verses 3-11, the motivation
for this exhortation and then finally, verses 12-13 some details to watch for
while you’re doing it. We will deal with
the last two sections next week, that is, Hebrews 12:3-11 and Hebrews
12:12-13. Today we are going to deal in
detail with the first two verses of Hebrews 12; these are very important verses
and they will give you the mentality of the Christian life and I hope forever
will protect you from this silly sentimental naiveté that is running around
Lubbock like a plague, that if you have pressure in your Christian life
something’s wrong; you’ve got to go out and flap your tongue at both ends or
have sort of an emotional experience to gain release from your pressure. If you look at Hebrews 12 you will see
pressure happens to be the name of the game.
And you don’t escape it by some sort of ridiculous, silly apostate experience. You meet the problem the way the Word of God
tells you to meet it; the way the Word of God orders you to read it.
In Hebrews 12:1-2
we read, “Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud
of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which does so easily
beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. [2] Looking unto Jesus, the author and
finisher of our faith, who for the joy that as set before Him endured the
cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of
God.”
Now in this
particular section of Hebrews we have to go back to review the historical
situation that was affecting believers.
This epistle was apparently written as an eleventh hour address to the
nation Israel. It is one of the
so-called Jewish epistles in the New Testament.
There are four Jewish epistles in the New Testament, or Jewish-centered
epistles: Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter.
These are particularly Jewish centered epistles. Now they are all obviously Jewish, they were
written by Jews and they were written to churches that had Jews in them, but
these four in particular have reference to problems peculiar to Hebrew
Christians. And whereas we can gain a
lot from them, we have to be careful as we interpret them that we understand
they are Hebrew Christian epistles and the people that are dealt with here in
chapter 12 have a tendency.
Forty years has
elapsed since Jesus Christ; approximately forty years and now the crisis year
of 70 AD is bearing upon them. In 70 AD
Jerusalem will fall under judgment, a judgment predicted in Leviticus 26 and
Deuteronomy 28, the fifth degree of chastening upon the nation Israel. But these forty years, in the Hebrew
mentality forty is the number of testing; it’s as though God has tested the
nation and given it another chance, for forty more years, after Messiah has
been rejected until Titus and Vespasian together finally destroy the city.
During these forty
years the gospel has been preached and many Hebrews have been won to Jesus
Christ. They operate in the synagogue
structure and this epistle is written to those groups, some of whom are
Christian Hebrews and some of whom are non-Christian Hebrews. And so this epistle is addressed to a mixed
multitude. And although most of the
people that read this epistle were believers, that is Christian Hebrews, some
perhaps gathering along with them, had never really become regenerated. And this is why this epistle is very
critical, because in some ways we have exactly the same problem. We have people who have gone to church all
their life, who know the vocabulary of fundamentalism, who know about the
blood, so to speak, the cross, but have never personally accepted Christ as
Savior. It has become a lot of hocus
pocus, a lot of ritual to them. You
usually can spot these people because the first characteristic is they tend to
be quite religious. But it’s a religion
that is empty of a spiritual joy and zeal; it’s more or less a religiosity that
says well, I’ve got to go to church and I’ve got to do something else, I’ve got
show up. It’s that kind of a dead
religiosity that is a signal that something is not right, and it may be the
fact that people are not truly regenerated; they have never become Christians
in the first place. And so the author
here has to deal with this problem.
However in the
first verses that we are dealing with, Heb 12:1-13, he doesn’t enter directly
toward that point, though that is in the back of his mind. He is now addressing the fact that these Jews
are under tremendous persecution. On the
first hand they are persecuted from the Romans; the Romans are attacking them
because they are Jews. On the other
hand, the Jews are attacking them because they’re Christians. And so these people suffer the martyrdom of
Hebrew Christians throughout the world, throughout all centuries, namely that
they are the most persecuted minority of people on the face of this earth. They are always persecuted from both sides
because the Gentiles say they are Jews and I dislike them, and the Jews can’t
stand them because they have traded… so to speak, they have become traitors to
the cause and they have surrendered their allegiance to Jesus, the
Messiah. Because of this, then, these
Christians are in a unique position.
They are in a position where they are facing tremendous adversity and
the test of loyalty to Yahweh comes up.
Therefore Hebrews
12 is going to go back to Proverbs 3 and pick up that theme mentioned there, of
loyalty to Jehovah under pressure. It’s
only normal that the author of Hebrews, facing a group of believers as he does
and in a position where he’s got to give them some counsel on how to withstand
the persecutions which would include physical persecution, though that hasn’t
by this time yet become anything of great importance, there has been some
physical attacks, but by and large it’s been a family type of a pressure; a
pressure of these snotty remarks passed around, a pressure of the cutting
off. I knew some Jewish people who
became Christians; you have heard one who came in to speak and his parents had
a funeral for him when he became a Christian.
And this is not too unusual for a person like this, so when you talk to
a Hebrew who has become a Christian you usually find he’s all the way, simply
because when he made his decision it wasn’t just trotting down the aisle and
signing a card and saying I’ll show up next Sunday in church. It was a different thing altogether; with him
it mean a violent break with his family and having been raised in a tight knit
family this exerts a tremendous emotional pressure and psychological pressure
on the individual.
So these people
had tremendous pressure and therefore they become witnesses to us. By looking at Hebrews 12:1-13 we can, if we
study it carefully, enter into their persecutions and learn by watching them
and how they were supposed to perform under pressure, and from this we can
learn how we, as believers, are supposed to handle our pressures and our
adversities.
Hebrews 12:1,
“Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of
witnesses….” “Wherefore” refers back to
chapter 11 and in chapter 11 you have the story of examples of Old Testament
faith. It goes all the way back to Adam
and comes forward in time. The writer of
Hebrews did not believe that evolution and creation could go together. Verse 1 says that we have a situation where
you as believers in the New Testament era are to turn back and look upon the
witnesses that, he says, I have just told you about, the heroes. And the word “compassed about with so great a
cloud of witnesses” has in view the great coliseums of the ancient world and
the idea is, and this is going to be an analogy that is used throughout this
passage, is a track and everybody’s in the stands and in the stands you have
thousands and thousands of Old Testament saints and the New Testament saints
are the ones that are running along the track.
And the Old Testament saints, so to speak, are in the stands
watching. And he says you New Testament
saints, you people who are running the race with faith, remember that you are
compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. And from this point forward the athletic
contest will take up as the major motif of this passage.
I want you to see
this because in Christian circles we have another little heresy that creeps in
and that is that because we are saved by grace it means that we can relax
forever. This is not true; grace is
given to enable us to run the race and the race mentioned here is not addressed
to unbelievers. This is not an
exhortation to say come on, get hustling in the religious circles so you can be
saved. That’s not the race. The race is not that but something
different. The race here is a race given
to believers who have already become Christians by grace and therefore they are
to earn, so to speak and we have to be careful here that we don’t get into
sanctification by works, but still the idea is that there is a race where
there’s competition.
Now this motif is
picked up by Paul also in his epistles, and there’s something for some of you
to think about. Have you ever… and you
might just check your own thought patterns on this, have anyone of you ever
thought of your Christian life as in competition before the Lord with other
Christians. There can only be a limited
amount of prizes and therefore you are to outrace other believers. Now this is not to be overly stretched
because of the problem of God’s infinite grace but the motif in the New
Testament definitely is one of a race in which there is competition. And this competition is to be a healthy competition,
not trying to outdo other Christians for the sake of the brownie points in the
local set up somewhere, that’s not the point.
The point is that you see other believers going on with the Lord; where
are you in the race; are you back in position 108 or are you up in position 3
or 4. Where do you stand in the race of
believers? In other words, there’s an
aggressiveness that is condoned in the New Testament, not only condoned but
urged upon believers that we should be aggressive in maturing as rapidly as
possible, going as far as possible with the Lord.
So this motif that
“we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses” is that the Old
Testament saints, so to speak, are in the stands. But if we left it there we would be not truly
faithful to the text because there’s more than that meant in this cloud of
witnesses. It is not that the Old
Testament saints are in the stands looking at us and wondering how we are going
to come out in the race; that’s not the whole point of the story. The imagery here is rather that those Old
Testament saints are in the stands but they are bearing witness, not looking to
us but they are witnesses to us of their own race. In other words, the people in the stands have
already finished their race and they sit in the stands as, you might say, they
have finished the previous race and they have done a good job, the author of
Hebrews 12 would say. He says they’ve
done such a fantastic job I can take you to some of them and he just has done
in chapter 11, and because these Old Testament saints have done a good job, now
they’re sitting there, and it’s, as it were, as we run by the track and look up
into the stands, and it’s not that they look at us, we look at them and we are
reminded of the fact that yes, they ran the race, and they ran the race with
far less than you have by way of operating assets. Very few of those saints had the indwelling
Holy Spirit. None of them knew the
details about Christ’s finished work on the cross as you do. None of them lived after Pentecost when the
Holy Spirit was doing a great thing in many different cultures. So the cloud of witnesses are the Old
Testament saints, not witnessing us but witnessing to their own race.
And then he says,
“let us,” seeing all these things, “let us lay aside every weight, and the sin
which doth so easily beset,” now that is the prerequisite of running the
race. Now the Old Testament saints did
this and in here we have an interesting construction because “let us lay aside”
is an aorist tense, that’s a point in time.
In other words, right now, as we begin the race, let us lay aside this
thing. And now we are stripping off, so
to speak, all these extra weights, look up at the stands, and look and see
them, and what do you see? You see
people there who were loyal under pressure.
They used the faith technique.
What is the faith technique?
Let’s review.
The faith
technique has four prerequisites; you cannot believe unless these four
prerequisites are true in your life. You
may try to psychologically work up a belief, say I believe, I believe, I
believe, I believe, I believe, I believe I believe and have a great emotional
experience but to truly believer you must have these four things. First of all, the universe must be created
the way the Bible says it was. You can’t
get away from the creation narratives in the act of believing because if the
universe was not structured the way the Bible says it was it won’t work the way
the Bible says it does and therefore you can’t believe the way the Bible tells
you to. So the universe has to be
structured the way the Bible says it was and if you don’t really believe that
you should work on it a while; I’m not telling you to just accept it because I
tell you to, you go home and think about it.
All I’m saying to you is that you can’t believe until you get this
straightened out in your mind.
A second
prerequisite is that you must have historical revelation. You must have
creation, your must have historical revelation. That means you can’t have some
sort of a mystical spooky thing where you climb into your closet at 11:30 in
the evening for an inner light. This
cannot be the kind of mystical type thing.
The Bible doesn’t say this is the way God reveals Himself. When God reveals Himself in history it is
public historical revelation. It is
revelation that on Mount Sinai was heard by two point some odd million people,
such that if you had been there with your little cassette you would now have a
recording of God’s voice in Hebrew.
That’s what I mean by a public historical revelation. As historical revelation you have to be able
to test it. Jesus said if I have told
you earthly things and you believe not, then you’re never going to believe if I
tell you heavenly things. This is what is wrong with these poor naďve believers,
many of them are believers who are going around today—my faith in God is just a
faith, it isn’t affected by Genesis or evolution or any of these facts; my
faith just stands up here in thin air, unsupported by any facts and I’m safe
because you can’t disprove my faith either because you can’t bring any facts
against it. Now that’s not the biblical
position. Jesus said if you can’t check
out and test what I have told you down here in the realm of history, then you
have no right to accept My authority about telling things, what’s going on in
heaven. That’s John 3:12, a very
important verse for today’s sloppy thinking.
And then we have
the third prerequisite for the faith technique is that we most know a piece of
the mind of God. Obviously you’ve got to
know some content in order to believe.
What are you going to believe?
That involves content and so you must know what God has said, something
of what God has told you. It may be John
3:16 but it’s got to be something that God has said that has to be the content
of your faith.
And the fourth
thing, you must have personal convictions.
This is why at Lubbock Bible Church I don’t make it an emotional scene
to come trotting down the aisle because I want this to come home to you on a
personal level where you have time to think it through on your own and arrive
at your own conclusion and you can rest assured I am not going to embarrass
you; you have the right to walk out of here and reject everything I’ve said;
that’s your privilege. That’s your privilege;
but don’t walk out of here and say I didn’t give an invitation. The teaching of the Word of God is the
invitation.
So here are the
four prerequisites for the faith technique.
The second thing about the faith technique you must remember, what it is. And I have defined faith before and I’ll
define it again as use the words. Faith
is the assurance of God’s eternal gracious plan in the life of a believer,
(it’s not just His plan in general but in your life,) in the life of a believer
which permits his own rational submission….
It permits his own rational submission; now that isn’t rationalistic,
that is rational, it means you don’t have to turn a little switch to lock your
brain off while you’re believing. It
means you can believe with brains turned on.
…rational submission to it, and this is the last phrase, very critical,
in the present moment, not just because you believed yesterday but do you
believe today, with the present situation as it is. That’s the definition of faith: assurance of
God’s eternal gracious plan in the life of a believer, which permits his own
rational submission to it in the present moment.
A third very
important distinction in the faith technique has two parts; it has a doing and
it has a resting. And if you get these
out of balance you’re going to be a sick Christian. These two elements are always in faith. There is a resting in faith; what does that
do; that is where you depend on God’s grace to supply what you can’t do
yourself. That’s the resting part. Every point of faith is a resting; you didn’t
become a Christian by doing anything. When you became a Christian doing was
about 0.0000000, that’s about how much doing and it was 100% resting simply
because at that point you could have done nothing whatever to be saved. In fact, that is the offense of the
gospel. The offense of the gospel isn’t
that it’s stupid. Some people get hold
of 1 Corinthians 2 and they see the foolishness there and they say all
Christians gospel preaching should be stupid; that’s not Paul’s point at
all. Paul’s point is that the offense of
the gospel is that we have to rest and let the help come from outside and that
smashes all human pride.
So we have the
resting part but the doing is also true.
God never cancels our creature responsibility so that we always wind up
doing something, if it’s only breathing, at least we breathe to get some oxygen
into our brain so we can understand why we’re believing. So doing is always… and this would come out when
you’re trusting the Lord to work, say in getting you a job or in business, it
doesn’t mean the businessman sits down and rests and waits for God to drop it
in his lap. It means that he undertakes
certain things and he does certain things but he does it with an attitude of
resting while he’s doing it.
The fourth thing
about the faith technique is that the faith technique is the modus operandi of God’s plan. God’s plan in no part ever operates apart
from the faith technique. You will never
find any area of your relationship with the Lord that doesn’t involve the faith
technique, even confession. You can’t
confess unless you can confess successfully faithfully. So the faith technique you meet at every
point in your Christian life, every point!
There’s not an area of your life that is free from the faith technique.
The fifth thing;
every time you use the faith technique you express allegiance to Jesus Christ
and rejection of Satan. Why? Because Satan always dismantles, or tries to,
smear the character of God and when you stand here and you resist the pressure
and you say I am going to believe what God has told me, period over and out,
you are glorifying the character of God in so doing. Satan would love to have you depend on your
character because he says oh, God really won’t do that, God is a meanie, He’s
going to let you starve, you single people, He’s going to pick out the ugliest
person for you. And this is the way
Satan would speak to us and so therefore when you stubbornly trust the Lord in
the face of adversity you are declaring right at that point, I’m in allegiance
to Jesus Christ and you are essentially dismantling Satan because you are
saying to Satan I don’t buy your character assassination of our Father.
The sixth thing,
the faith technique must be exercised.
This is going to be emphasized in Hebrews 12 and it’s going to be again
under the athletic metaphor. The faith
technique is something that doesn’t come just sitting down and intellectually
perceiving. The faith technique is
something that has to be done in practice.
Intellectual understanding is fine to get started with but…, and you’ll
find as you go on it must be exercised or you’ll lose your understanding.
Finally point
seven, and that is that if the faith technique is not used you will harden your
heart and here is where we have no choice.
God gives us no choice. The only
choice we have is whether to use it or not use it but we do not have a choice
on whether we’re going to grow or we’re going to harden our hearts in the sense
that we can’t stop the process once begun.
In other words, if we’re on negative volition we don’t have the right to
say I want to be on negative volition but I don’t want my heart hardened;
that’s not the condition. If we reject
the faith technique our heart will automatically begin to be hardened. This is the technique that is mentioned here
and that is the race in verse 1.
Now let’s go back
to Hebrews 12:1, “Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a
cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which does so
easily beset,” two things are mentioned that have to be dumped off. Now the metaphor, the athletic metaphor, the
picture of the runners coming into the stadium and they would take off their
clothes, their outer clothes, and the weight and the sin that easily compasses
about are the obstructions to the runner’s motion when he’s running the
race. So there are two words here we
have to understand. What is weight and
what does the word sin mean. There are
two things that must be removed from believers who are attempting to use the
faith technique under conditions of extreme adversity.
The first thing is
the weight; this would refer to any natural encumbrance; this may mean you have
to cut down some of the parties, some of your extra curricular activities in
order to go on a crash program of growing spiritually. It may mean you’re going to have to cut out
some social activities because you’ve got to grow spiritually. It may mean a lot of other things have to go
but what this author is saying, you look around and you take an inventory of
the kind of things that obstruct your faith, that cause you to become
distracted from the Word of God at the critical moment. I have known people with great talent in many
areas, who have had to momentarily give it up.
I knew a fellow that I went to seminary with that was a brilliant
musician, absolutely brilliant. He had
to give up his music, not out of penance, it wasn’t that at all, now this is
not to give up music as such, just in his life; he found that every time he
would begin to operate in the Christian life this thing would interfere with
it, and that if he got a little on it he’d get high on the stuff, in other
words, he just had to give the whole thing up.
Later on, as he grew in the Christian life this would change and
gradually he would get back into it. But
the idea, for a time while he was running a race through a special trial he had
to give it up. That’s the weight.
“Let us lay aside
every weight,” and that is any obstruction; is it social relationships, is it
something else. This is not some
monastic denial, this is simply the idea of the runner, he’s taking his clothes
off because he wants to run faster. Now
don’t take your clothes off… “and the sin which does so easily beset us.” Now “the sin which does so easily beset” is
the –R learned behavior patterns and here’s where Proverbs 3:11-12 is going to
come into the picture. The second area
is these –R learned behavior patterns or favorite techniques you have. For example, you have a problem and you have
a favorite little gimmick that every time you face a problem you waltz around
it, or you may have another little favorite technique, every time you have a
problem you see some little pseudo problem over here and you say that’s my
problem, you frantically over here and you always clobber it; the trouble is,
this is the problem, not that. Then we
have some people that come up to a problem and just turn around and forget the
whole thing, quit it. These are all –R
learned behavior patterns; no matter what the problem is, it could be in your
home, it could be in your marriage, it could be in your business, whatever the
problem is, if you have any one these attitudes that’s a sin that easily
encompasses you.
And the analogy
again with the athlete running is the mental attitude the athlete has while
he’s running. “…the sin which doth so
easily beset” is made an analogy in this verse with the fact that the athlete
runs and then he has this quitter attitude, I can’t make it, I can’t make
it! Mental attitude influences you
tremendously, particularly in track.
This is why, for example in many, many years the four minute mile was
looked upon as a physical impossibility and then Roger Banister made it and
then everybody makes it. Why is
that? Did suddenly some runners become
physically stronger? Not at all; it was
just that someone had the faith he could do and once he did it then the others
said well I can do it too. Don’t you see
how the mental attitude influences?
Well, it’s the same thing here, the mental attitude of the believer is a
“sin which does so easily beset;” it is singular, not plural. The word “sin” therefore refers to a pattern
of thinking, not something specific.
It’s an attitude that you have and this writer is saying you’ve got to
get those out of the way.
“… and let us run
with patience the race that is set before us, [2] Looking unto Jesus, the
author and finisher of our faith.” Now
notice in verse 2 we have what is to be done while the running occurs. “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher
of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross,
despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of
God.” Now while the runner is running
his mind ought to be on the goal. What
is in the goal? What is He going to get
when the race is over. In this case we
are ordered, as believers, to focus our attention upon the humanity of Jesus
Christ. And we are to look “unto Jesus,
the author and finisher” in other words, the point is that Jesus Christ went
through the same thing; He’s one of those “great cloud of witnesses,” and He is
a finisher of the faith, it means that He had perfect faith in His humanity. The word “finish” means He’s absolutely
perfect here, so Jesus Christ in His humanity, not His deity, in His humanity
Jesus Christ ran a perfect race. Don’t
buy this line that oh, Jesus had it easier than I did because He was God. Huh-un, won’t work, read Psalm 22 some
day.
“Who for the joy
that was set before Him,” now how did Jesus win the race. You see the point is as we run the race in
the church age, the author of Hebrews tells us to look back and watch how Jesus
Christ ran His race in His humanity.
What was it that motivated Jesus Christ?
He ran the race “because of the joy that was set before Him.” Jesus was a competitor and He realized that
He had a tough race but down at the end He had a worthy goal. He “endured the cross, despising the shame,”
and now there’s a switch in the tenses in the Greek, “endured” is past tense,
simple aorist; “despising” is past tense, it means He didn’t count it worthy of
embarrassment. This word “despise the
shame” means that Christ knew what He was going to do, He knew they would spit
in His face, He knew some Roman soldier would come up and clobber Him, He knew
that people would think He was a religious fanatic, some psychiatrist would
probably have locked him up today. So He
knew the kind of cracks that would be made against Him but He “despised” simply
means He says so what, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the
final goal. He just despised it, meaning
He didn’t consider worthwhile bothering with, just trivial.
So He “despised
the shame,” that’s aorist tense, past, and He “is now set down,” and that is a
perfect tense and a perfect tense means action completed in the past with
results continuing to the present moment.
And so here it is as though Christ Himself is seated in the
coliseum. And that’s what the author is
saying, as you run down there, remember, the Lord Jesus Christ now, He once
endured the cross, despised the shame, and He sat down at the right hand of the
Father. In other words, where is Christ
now, this moment, as you’re clock ticks, where is Christ? He’s already on the other side. He already has attained the glory ahead of
Him. Now it didn’t come easy to Jesus
Christ.
And I want to take
you two passages, Hebrews 5:7. Like any
race it was tough and Jesus Christ had it tough and just how tough is brought
out in Hebrews 5:7, “Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up
prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able
to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared, [8] Though He were a
Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered, [9] And being
made perfect He became the author of eternal salvation,” author, the same word
used in Hebrews 12:2. How did Christ
become the author? He became it because
He learned. Remember the difference
between man and animal; animals have instinct, man must learn. Part of that which separates as an absolute
chasm man from animal is not just the learning patterns, of course some animals
can learn, but it’s the distribution of the learning patterns; man must learn
practically everything he does. We don’t
come into life born with an instinct to do everything or at least a lot of
things like the animals. Man has, for
most of his part, must learn, even how to eat and how to drink; animals do not,
they have an instinct. So here, we find
that Jesus Christ, being a true man, member of the human race, He too did not
come into the world with an instinct to be holy, with an instinct to do just
the right thing. Jesus Christ had to
learn to do the right thing.
Notice what it
says in verse 8, I’m going to misquote verse 8 and you follow me through and
watch where I misquote it. “Though He
were a Son, yet learned He about obedience….”
He didn’t learn about obedience, that is true too but He learned the
obedience and there’s a difference.
Further in this
same chapter we have a passage that takes this whole thing and applies it to
us; Hebrews 7:12-14. “For when for the
time you ought to be teachers,” that’s referring to believers that have gone on
with the Lord, it’s time that they started moving on and teaching other
believers, “For when for the time you ought to be teachers, you have need that
one teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God, and are become
such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. [13] For everyone that uses
milk,” and notice this, “is unskillful in the word of righteousness, for he is
a baby. [14] But strong meat belongs to them that are of full
age, to those who…” notice this, “by reason of use,” not just sitting down
thinking but by actual exercise, “by reason of use have their senses exercised
to discern both good and evil.” That
word “exercise” is the word from which we get the word gymnasium, gymnastics
and it is the word that means you can’t get this unless you practice and
practice and practice and practice and practice and practice. Now that should supply us with some
background on Hebrews 12:1-2 and next week we’ll begin in verse 3.
But just to drive
this point home a little bit further I’m going to read a section from a
magazine, a missionary magazine, Underground
Evangelism. I want to leave with you
a historical truth where some of your brothers and sisters are learning this
because it’s forced upon them. Some time
ago a 21 year old Russian boy, who was the head of some secret police
operations in the peninsula of Kamchatka against believers, while they were
beating up believers noticed that… of course, if you listen to the United
Nations they have religious freedom in Russia, but just listen to what is said
here. Notice the World Council will
never say a word about this, they will be concerned about every left-wing idiot
in the world but when it comes to the communist persecuting of believers by
horrible means you never hear the World Council say a peep and it shows you
where they stand. So this boy found out
that by watching these believers being beaten up that they had a quality of
life that he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand why these people
endured such fantastic pressures. So he
thought there must be something to this and while he was on a Russian naval
vessel off the coast of Canada he jumped overboard and swam to the Canadian
shore through icy water many miles and finally came to America and became a
Christian and is now involved in underground evangelism; it’s an organization
that I hope we can get some film to show you what they do. This is an interview with him and I’m just
going to read part of the interview just to give you some concrete historical
illustration that Hebrews 12:1-2 is going to walk out of here and say oh well,
that isn’t for the 20th century; you’d be surprised.
“What specific
incident caused you to escape?” Answer:
“Not only was I disillusioned with communism but my heart was broken from what
I began to see that we were doing to the believers in God. I began to be very impressed by those
believers,” he calls them believers, apparently that’s how the underground
church goes in Russia, they’re just known as the believers; it’s a biblical
way. “I began to be very impressed by
those believers; I was not impressed by what they said but what they did, how
they lived their lives and how they suffered for their faith. I began to realize that when I was told that
these were [quote] ‘criminals, worse than murderers’ [end quote], I was being
terribly misled. I began to find that
their faith was real and I wanted this faith.
I hungered for it but I wanted to do more than hunger, I wanted to have
a faith so real I could share it with the people in Russia. But the problems were great because with
someone who is as high in rank as I was, to reject all this and become a
believer would have meant imprisonment and worse, so I knew I could find God,
effectively serve Him and give my life for my people only by actively serving
on the outside as I am now beginning to do through radio broadcasts and other
such ways.”
Question: “How many attack raids did you lead against
believers?” This is in a country with
religious freedom, the United Nations says so.
Answer: “I led between one hundred and fifty and two hundred separate
special police raids on believers.”
Question: “Was
what you did the official government policy or was it simply that your attack
group went beyond your instructions when you beat and in some cases killed
believers?” Answer: “It was absolutely
in keeping with the official policy.
When my attack gang killed [can’t understand name] the underground
pastor, we came back and reported it to our police supervisor. He laughed and congratulated us on doing an
excellent job. He was very pleased and
he commended us and congratulated us on [quote] ‘removing the problem,’ [end
quote]. What we did was by the
instructions and the training of the Soviet government. The only time we were reprimanded was when we
were either too easy with the believers and let them off without beating them,
or else when we drove the open trucks through the streets with the nude
Christian girls on it; then we were reprimanded only because it would [quote]
‘embarrass the police.’ Of all assignments
we were given precise instructions what to do.
And I can tell you that that was done with the official policy. When we
didn’t do it we were severely reprimanded.”
Question: “Does
what you did in the attack raids occur only in your area,” which is the
Kamchatka Peninsula, “or of is it general today throughout the Soviet
Union?” Answer: “Of course it’s general;
I have traveled throughout the Soviet Union and found this thing happening
everywhere. I know that in [can’t
understand word, sounds like: Gra naul] the attack gang beat the believers very
much and also threw out in the street a pregnant Christian woman. This is documented, we have this evidence
now. Also such attack gangs are now
operating in Odessa, Leningrad, Moscow, and all other cities throughout
Russia. It is very general and
widespread.”
Question: How many
such special police attack gangs are there operating in Russia?” Answer: “There
are vast numbers; ours was attached specially to suppressing religious freedom
and destroying faith in God. Also there
are probably tens of thousands of others throughout the Soviet Union amongst
these millions who are assigned to special police work dealing with [quote]
‘religious parasites’ [end quote].’”
Question: “Why
doesn’t the free world hear about such tragedies and such brutal harsh
suppressions?” Answer: “You don’t hear
about it because you’re not supposed to hear about it. That was one of the most
intensive points in which we were trained by the police, that we must keep this
secret and not let the outside world hear about it. We were told [quote] ‘under no condition are
the general public or observers to know about what is happening, nor are
photographs to be taken. Security is
absolutely first; it is most important.
Neither the outside world nor anyone inside must know what really is
happening.’ So you don’t learn about
these things but they are happening in all parts of the Soviet Union. And yet I have heard some of your Christian
leaders say there is religious freedom in Russia. How deceived they are.”
Question: “We
often hear it argued why there should be an underground church in Russia since
there are official churches there. What
would your answer be to this?” Answer:
“Well, I can tell you, having been on the inside of the Russian police
apparatus the police in Russia don’t wonder about the question, they don’t even
have such a question. They know that
there are underground churches; they are almost everywhere. They are a very great problem to the Russian
police. Yet it is almost unbelievable
what I have read here in the free world that some people say there are no
underground churches. How do they know? They go to Moscow, to Leningrad or to some
other major city, they walk around the streets, they look around and they don’t
see any underground churches or underground Christians walking around the
streets. Do they expect them to carry a
sign? Do they expect the underground
churches to be visible to some foreigner when the Soviet secret police are
searching for them frequently and forcing them to take precaution? If it were not so unfortunate I could laugh
at the foolishness. Of course there are
underground churches throughout all the Soviet Union. Why?
Because there are so many, many more believers than there are places of
worship. So what do the believers
do? They either don’t worship or they
worship in secret churches, it’s that simple.
So of course there are underground churches and secret churches; people
from the outside may say they are not but I am from the inside; I was charged
with dealing with these secret churches and I know what I speak of.”
Question:
“Visitors to Moscow and official churches often report there is religious
freedom. What would be your comment on
all that?” Answer: “All I can say is that they are completely
wrong, but I don’t blame them, I myself had been taught that communism in
Russia gives religious freedom to believers. When I was in Leningrad I saw
believers going on Sunday morning to the one official church that is left open
in that huge city of several million. I
looked at these believers and being only 17 years of age I thought well, we do
give religious freedom. I was a Russian
and I was deceived on this so I don’t blame these foreigners so much. But then I began to be part of the police
apparatus, responsible for persecuting believers and destroying faith in
God. Then I had my eyes opened; then I
heard of the massive effort to destroy faith in God and I realized that below
the pre [can’t understand word] which they allow in major cities they were
waging a great war to destroy religion.
I was part of that war; I was an officer in this anti-Christian
war. I read all of the instructions from
Moscow; I read the top instructions sent from the highest officials on how to
destroy religion and what steps we could take.
I can tell you it was fantastic reading.
So believe me, there is no religious freedom in Russia. Ask those whom we beat and attacked; ask
[pastor’s name] who is now dead and lying in a grave because he conducted a
baptism of believers in a Russian forest.
Ask those others who have suffered because of their faith. Only foreigners can believe such any longer.”
Question: “The
communists have said they are willing to coexist with Christians; this idea is
being believed here in the free world.
What is your comment on that?”
Answer: “I have heard this word
coexist here in the free world; I do not hear it in Russia. Why?
Because it is a word meant only for you in the West. It is a word meant only to deceive
foreigners. Such a word is not used
inside Russia; there they are dealing with reality and not propaganda. We in the police knew exactly the kind of
coexistence it is. I can tell you there
is open warfare against religion and believers in Russia today. There is suppression and brutality; the
police are given any power to destroy faith in God, even a license to kill as I
had. What we did was approved by the
official police. Our top police officer
on instruction from Moscow told us, [quote] ‘Do what you want to with believers
in sight and out of sight but only be careful that you do nothing in public
lest it get abroad,’ [end quote]. We
were constantly told give the believers something to remember, and we did. We
beat them viciously and horribly, and we sent out reports on every raid and
handed them in officially and they were approved. No, I tell you it is only propaganda for the
West that communism is coexisting with religion.”
Question: “How
many believers are there in the underground church?” Answer: “The police operations unit estimated
30,000 believers in Kamchatka alone, a province of only 250,000 people. Also there were a smaller number of believers
than normal because much of the population in Kamchatka is young and
military. So I think that if you have a
general cross section of the population there would be even more believers than
30,000 in a total of 250,000 people.
Project these figures over all of Russia and you will understand that
there are several million believers in Russia today, worshiping God in secret
churches and homes. I can tell you that
the communist government gives this problem of believers in God,” now listen to
this, “I can tell you that the communist government gives this problem of
believers in God the top most priority, second only to military and heavy
industry. The money that is being spent on suppressing these believers and
their faith in God is just unbelievable.
It is tens of millions of dollars every year.”
But the U.N. tells
us they have religious freedom. Now
there are some believers and when you see on our prayer list that we should
uphold them in prayer, just think about it.
With our heads bowed….