Hebrews
Lesson 21 August 4, 2005
NKJ Romans 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect
will of God.
Hebrews 2
We are in Hebrews 2. This begins the
first of five passages in Hebrews and they get successively longer. These five
passages are generally referred to as warning passages. They come at the end of
lengthy sections in the book that are expositions or developments of doctrine
and developments of Old Testament passages out from the ritual practices of the
Old Testament. Each one of these sections drives to a certain application. It is important for us to understand
both types of sections. As I said in the introduction, I believe that the
writer spoke this or wrote this as a five-point sermon. It drives to a
conclusion of how important and crucial our Christian life is and how crucial
it is that we continue to grow and advance and not give up along the way. There
is a tendency in the lives of people to slip away or drift away from doctrine.
They get on board for a while and get excited and then a few months or a couple
of years later they disappear. They end up in some church that is all emotion
or all experience. You wonder what happened. You never learn enough. There are
so many more riches in the Word of God and understanding what goes on in the
spiritual life that challenges us. There is no reason to ever give up. So we
come to this first warning passage. That is the first four verses of chapter 2.
NKJ Hebrews 2:1 Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the
things we have
heard, lest we drift away.
This introduces the warning theme to
these four verses. There is a challenge to what we have been taught so that we
will not face negative consequences. We need to take some time to understand
the context. As we get into the Word it is important to do three things when
you are studying the Word.
First is context. We look at context
because that puts it in perspective. We don’t want to lose sight of what is
going on in the text. We don’t want to lose the forest through the trees. The
first phrase in the Greek is dia touto. The preposition dia means because when it is with the
accusative. The word touta is a pronoun indicating this. because of this
literally. It means because of this or for this reason. So we always have to
look at these statements to find out why they are there. It isn’t therefore. He
is saying more precise that therefore. He is saying “for this reason”. So when
we see that we need to ask the question, for what reason? So he draws a
conclusion from everything that has been said in the prior chapter, especially
from verse 5 on. So we have to see what that reason is. So this gives us a cause to go back and
review and summarize the thrust of what the writer is saying in the first
chapter.
The focus in the first chapter is on
who Jesus Christ is. That takes us back to a couple of verses. I pointed out as we went through that
that the main idea is that God has spoken today by means of His Son. In the past He spoke by means of the
prophets. He spoke to the fathers, that is to Israel. He spoke in a variety of ways and in a variety of forms. But
“in these last days” which is the Church Age, He has spoken by means of His
Son. What is so important about that?
That is what he is answering in the rest of the chapter.
He focuses on the priority and
superiority of the Lord Jesus Christ. Then he will draw a conclusion from that.
The first thing we saw is the emphasis of His Sonship in terms of His
deity. As I pointed out there are
6 different Sonships of the Lord Jesus Christ. The two crucial ones that are
used in this chapter are the title Son of God that emphasizes His deity and the
second is that He is the Son of David. That comes out of His humanity. It
specifically ties Jesus’ present role at the right hand of God the Father to
His future role when He will come as the Messianic Son of David who will
establish His kingdom and to rule and reign on the earth. So in terms of His
sonship we have seen that the title itself Son of God indicates that Jesus
Christ is full and undiminished deity. He has all the attributes of God the
Father. He is not subordinate to God the Father in His essence. He is equal in
His essence. The Son of God emphasizes that.
The second thing we see is that He
is identified as the immediate creator of all things. God the Father is the
architect, but God the Son is the contractor on the job. He is the building
supervisor who saw that everything was accomplished. He is the one through whom
He made the ages.
The third thing we saw related to
His deity was that He has the exact same essence as the Father. He is said to be the flashing forth of
His deity, the exact representation of His nature. This is in Hebrews 1:3.
The fourth thing is that He is seen
as the perfect one who reveals the Father. God has now spoken through the Son. The Son is the
expression of the Father. It is by through the Son that we come to know who the
Father is. Heb 1:2-3 emphasize that He has spoken to us by means of His Son.
Fifth we see the Lord Jesus Christ
as the one who sustains the universe. This is a function of His deity. He
continues to sustain the universe and upholds things by the Word of His
power.
Sixth we see that He is the eternal
omnipotent one who made the universe and will outlast the universe. That was
indicated by the quotes from Psalm 102:25-28 given in verses 10-12 of chapter
one. All of that emphasizes the Sonship of His deity.
Then we have the concept of His
Davidic Sonship, His messianic Sonship. This is an outgrowth of Psalm 2:7 as we
saw. We see about 7 things related to His Davidic sonship that emphasizes His
humanity.
What the writer is saying is that
since (referring to the whole body of information in the first 14 verses) Jesus
Christ is the expression and ultimate revelation of God, since Jesus is fully
God, since Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament covenants, since Jesus is
superior to the angels and worshipped by the angels, since we will share His
rule and reign and share His joy, and since He will destroy the nations and
establish His rule. In light of all
this, we must do something. That is the thrust of this. We are going to draw a
conclusion from everything said. There is a mandate at the beginning of verse
one.
The “we” there refers to all
believers. It includes the writer as well as his initial audience. By virtue of application it includes
us. There is an obligation that is part of the package of salvation. It is not an obligation that has to be
fulfilled to be saved or to keep salvation. It is an obligation that if we are
going to benefit from all that God has given us then there are certain things
that follows from that. It is not an opportunity to live any way you want to
and do whatever you want to without going to the Lake of Fire. God has done so
many things for us that there is an incredible transformation that has taken
place at salvation. He has given us 40 things that are our reality in terms of
positional truth and these provide the potentials for living the Christian life
and these provide the potential to prepare for us for our future. Therefore
points us to that future mandate.
The verb used here is the Greek word
dei. It is in the present active
indicative. It is not in the imperative. There is an imperatival meaning in the
meaning of the word. This is an obligation term. There is something inherent in
this. The word dei means that it is
necessary. It is something that one has to do or something that is inevitable
in the nature of things. In other words if you really understand the dynamics
of salvation and you understand what Christ did on the cross as He paid the penalty
for our sins and as He defeated Satan and all of his strategies to rule the
world and become a god on his own.
If you understand what transpired in the ascension and session, then you
must see that this will change the way you live. The problem with a shallow
superficial gospel is that people don’t understand why it radically transforms
the present tense life of the church age believer. That is what these warning
passages focus on. This verb refers to what must be done on the basis of our
duty. There is an obligation as believers. It is not what is prescribed by the
Mosaic Law, but what is prescribed by the mandates of the New Testament. All of
the various imperatives that we have in the New Testament define the boundaries
of the Christian way of life. That is the obligation. Some think we have no
obligation in the Christian life.
In a sense you don’t. You are still going to be saved. But if you are
going to enjoy the blessing and privileges of salvation, if you are going to
advance to spiritual maturity and enjoy the happiness and peace that the Lord
Jesus Christ has for us that means we have to follow the mandates of
Scripture.
If you were given a Jaguar SR12, you
drive it for 90,000 miles and you don’t change the oil or check the tire pressure.
One day you go out and turn it on. Nothing happens. That car is still yours but
it isn’t doing you a bit of good. You had an obligation with the gift to take
care of it and maintain it. You need to do all the things that go along with
car maintenance. Since you failed to do that it isn’t any good. It is still
yours. It is still parked in the driveway. You can look at it and enjoy it but
it isn’t going to do you any good. That is how the Christian life is for many,
many believers. It doesn’t do them
a bit of good because they don’t look at the owner’s manual. They never figure
out what they need to do to maintain it. They never learn anything about I John
1:9 and how to get back in fellowship. They never learn the dynamics of the
Christian life. As far as they are concerned the Christian life is nothing more
than a series of ethical commands. It isn’t any different from what the
unbeliever can do. So we have to
understand the dynamics of the Christian life in order to go forward. This is
the mandate.
The writer says, “Therefore in light
of these things that Jesus has done for us we must.”
There is the word more in the
English that is a comparative. In Greek the comparative is sometimes used for
the superlative. More is the comparative. That is comparing two things. Most is
the superlative. It takes it to the highest level of intensity. That is what we
have here. The adverb is perissos. It
has the idea of something that is over and above. It is going to the fullest extent
of something. It gives 150 % instead of 100%. One of the things that I have
often said about my ministry is that I would rather have 30 or 40 or 50
believers who are sold out to pursuing the Christian life than to have a church
of 300 or 400 or 3,000 or 4,000 with only 30 or 40 who want to go somewhere. Those
other people who don’t want to go anywhere will just drag everybody else down. We
need to have people that have a goal of excellence in the Christian life who
want to fully understand the Bible and want to make it part of their thinking
so they can press on to be a part of this cadre that will rule and reign with
the Lord Jesus Christ in the Millennial Kingdom. So that is what the writer of
Hebrews is driving at. The adverb indicates exceedingly and abundantly beyond
all measure. Those of you who believe in excellence and always want to go the
extra mile; this is the verse to challenge you. We are to pay closest
attention. It is to pay attention or to focus on something.
The next word is the verb prosecho in the Greek. It is the present
active infinitive. It means to apply oneself to something. With the superlative
it is used to apply oneself to the highest degree. It means to pay attention or to occupy yourself with
something. What the writer is saying is that in light of everything we have
seen the Lord Jesus Christ do because of who He is, what He is, and where He is
headed if we are to be those companions then we must give ourselves to the
closest possible attention to the most dedicated occupation with the Lord and
the Word of God that is possible. It is not something you just do on Sunday. It
is something that is the heart beat of your life. You do it every single day. You
get doctrine in. You make it the first thing you do in the morning so that it
orients your thinking throughout the day. You start the day in fellowship. You remind yourself of a few promises. The
focus of your day and of your life is to live today in the light of eternity. That
is the challenge of the whole book of Hebrews. The verbiage here is as strong
and dynamic and powerful as it can be expressed. He is almost pounding his
pulpit to tell people you have to make doctrine the highest priority of your
life. Nothing else will do. You have to give it the closest attention. You have
to concentrate day in and day out because it doesn’t take much for you to lose
it and start slipping away. In fact one of the meanings of this word prosecho is that it is used in nautical
terminology for holding a ship on course. It means to firmly anchor a ship to
the ocean floor. It has the concept of being tied down to something or being
right on target all the time.
Corrected translation: It is necessary for us to pay the
closest attention to the Word.
Or
It is necessary to be the most
occupied with the Word
Or
We are to be firmly anchored in the
message of what we have been taught.
How do you do that? How do you
anchor yourself in the message? It is more than coming to class and listening. It
is more than just taking notes. It is more than having a doctrinal notebook or a
doctrinal file. It means that some times you are going to go home and maybe in
the morning you will review your notes. You look at them from a personal
perspective. You ask how you will put them into personal practice in your own
life. What does this mean you need to do in terms of your thinking in terms of
your priorities and how you spend your time so that there can be change. The
whole issue of sanctification is change. A lot of people don’t like that. They
don’t want to change because they just want to be comfortable. One of the
things that the Holy Spirit is going to do if you are serious about your
Christian life is, He is going to push you out of your comfort zone. If you like
living in your comfort zone and want everything to move along nice and smooth,
you are in for a rude awakening when the Holy Spirit starts using the Word of
God in your life. He wants to conform you to the character of Jesus Christ. It
is sort of like a sculptor taking a rough block of granite and trying to turn
it into Michelangello’s “David.” You have got a lot of rough edges so you may
look like Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is going to take you through a boatload
of situations to give you the opportunity to trust God and so the Holy Spirit
can knock those rough edges off. That is too much for some people. They want a
Christianity that makes them comfortable. They want a Christianity that makes
them feel good about themselves – a Christianity that will help them
improve themselves every day so that they can name and claim all the blessings
that God has for them. They do not want to go through the difficult challenges
of learning the Word and learning to think biblically and learning to analyze
situations they run into everyday from a Biblical framework. They don’t ask
where these situations occurred in the Bible. Who faced similar things in the Bible? Was it David?
Was it Daniel? Was it Joseph? Was it Abraham? How did they respond? What was
going on in their lives? In order to do that, you have to understand Abraham
and David and all of the other characters. You have to have a full
understanding of the Old Testament so that you have a frame of reference to go
to. You are not going to get it in church once a week. At the end of twenty
years you might know who David is.
You might know who Abraham is. But you are not going to be able to face
crisis in life and then reflect back on it. You won’t be able to reflect back
on the Scripture and the characters of Scripture and to think critically and
analytically about it.
This is one of the things we are
building into the curriculum that we are developing for the prep school. We
want to train the children so that they can think biblically and come to know
who the various characters are in Scripture. We have built the curriculum so
that they can cycle through the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation five or
six times between the time they are two years old and the time they are twenty years
old. If someone comes in and grows up in this church over the next twenty years
they will go through the Scripture five or six times from beginning to
end. When they are two years old
it will be taught at a two year old level. They will be exposed to the basic
stories and the basic principles. Each year it will get progressive and build. We
will build with an emphasis on Bible memory and the problem solving. They will
learn to deal with the intellectual attacks that they are going to face from peers
and teachers and cartoons and the Internet. They will have the intellectual
spiritual ammunition to deal with these things. We have to be occupied with the
message.
The next word is the aorist passive
participle of akouo. The aorist tense
indicates that it is something that preceded the action of the main verb. They
had already heard because they have been going to church. They have been
getting instruction from the Old Testament and instruction related to New
Testament doctrine. The fact that it is a passive participle indicates that
they receive the action. They are in the mode that you are. They are sitting
and paying attention. They are not thinking about what is going on tomorrow.
You have to listen and concentrate. People aren’t taught that anymore. They
don’t know how to take notes. They don’t know how to focus. If you are going to get anywhere with
the ideas of Scripture you have to listen and it must be over the months and
years to transform thinking. You must pay attention to the doctrine that is
being taught.
Let’s talk about the term Bible
doctrine. What is Bible doctrine?
NKJ 2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable
for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
The devil plays interesting games
with people. One of Satan’s greatest ploys is to distort and dilute the
vocabulary of Scripture so that people no longer understand what it means. The
word doctrine has been yanked out of context. The way it is usually used by
most people is that it as abstract theology. Some relate it to dogma or a
technical doctrinal statement. They think that it is abstract reasoning. They
want something more practical. They want something with shoe leather on it. They
want to go home and have some principles to apply. Do they use them when they
are there? No they just want to take pot shots.
By defining doctrine in a narrow
restricted way where it refers to an impractical type of abstract theological
type of teaching, they get away from understanding the facts, the teaching and
the foundational ideas of Scripture that teaches reality. We have seen some
difficult stuff in Hebrews. We
have seen the ascension and session. We went back into Psalms 2 and 110. We
have gone through some difficult things to lay the foundation of who and what
Jesus Christ is. If you do not understand the nature of reality and the nature
God, then when we come to an application like that found in the first four verses
it won’t mean anything. When you divorce morality and ethics from its
foundation of the realities that God teaches in the Scripture, you end up in
legalism. They want five points on how to live. But they don’t understand the
foundation for that. If you don’t understand the foundation for that then you
are on a grocery list and become a Pharisee. You are a legalist. You are no better
than any ethical person. We are not in the job of producing moral, ethical
people. We are in the job of producing spiritually mature people. Any unbeliever
can be ethical and moral. We want people who are spiritually mature walking by
the Spirit and applying the Word.
Bible doctrine is not a term that is
a synonym for theology. The term comes from the Greek word didaskolos that means teaching. That includes everything from
basics (understanding the trinity, the hypostatic union, the person and work of
Jesus Christ, atonement, redemption, propitiation) to more advanced concepts
(inheritance, dispensations, ascension and session of Christ). In order to do
that you must understand those doctrines that become the foundation for action,
for thought change for life change. You have to teach line upon line, verse
upon verse, and precept on precept. It takes time to build that reservoir of
knowledge in your soul so that when you face the issues in life you have
something to draw on and you can apply it.
So let’s look at some basic thoughts
on doctrine. The best way to understand the word is how the military uses it. They
use it in terms of various procedures how they go on patrol. All of that
relates to doctrine. It includes everything the soldier does. It is all part of
the doctrine of military engagement of the enemy. It is the same idea that we
have in Scripture.
The word for world (aionos)
indicates the spirit of the age. It is what the Germans called the zeitgeist
– the spirit of the times. It is the thinking that is going on around us
in our culture of the day whatever it is. Every one of us grew up and was
influenced by the zeitgeist. Most of us don’t realize how influenced we were. It
is why your parents like certain kinds of movies and want to read certain types
of books and certain types of music. You don’t get into their music or their
art or whatever it might be. You don’t understand why your children listen to
what they listen to. You don’t know why they are dressing the way they do or
why they are getting tattoos and getting pierced. It all flows out of the
zeitgeist – the spirit of the age.
If you are going to understand cosmic thinking you have to do some
digging. We are going to study worldliness – understanding your times. The
challenge is that if you are going to understand what is going on today you have
to understand post modernism. If you want to understand post modernism, you
have to understand existentialism. If you want to understand that, you have to
understand Hegelian idealism. If you want to understand Hegelian idealism, you
have to understand the content of Copernican revolution in philosophy. To
understand that you have to understand Hume. To understand Hume, you have to understand the enlightenment
empiricists like Locke. To understand them you have to understand their
reaction to Descartes. The enlightenment is a reaction to the Middle Ages. If
you are going to understand the Middle Ages where they tried to merge Greek
philosophy with theology, you have to understand Greek philosophy, including
Plato and Aristotle. They in turn were a reaction to the pre-Socratic. The
pre-Socratics were a development or reaction to the mythic anti-mystic nature
religions of early civilizations. To understand that, you have to understand
Genesis 3. To understand Genesis 3 you have to understand Genesis 2. So you
start there and you get the whole history of ideas. You have to do that to say anything
substantival about how you think and what you think. I am going to do this
enough so that when I talk about what is going on today in the world in terms
of cosmic thinking and you don’t set it up with all the other stuff. You will
think that it is just my opinion. It will blow your socks off because we don’t
think objectively about our own thinking. We don’t see how it is influenced by
the cultural air that we breathe. It will take a lot of time to develop.
If you don’t know the characteristics of the spirit of the age, how do
you know that you aren’t being conformed to it? You don’t. People think that is
such abstract stuff. They want to know how to have a happy marriage. But the
reason you don’t have a happy marriage is that your thinking is worldly
viewpoint. You think about the world of men and women in ways that are influenced
by the cosmic system. You don’t even know it because it was instilled in you as
you grew up in this culture. It’s ultimately the most practical thing you can
do. Do not be conformed to this world. The doctrine of faith affects every
dimension of human learning from the sciences to the arts. If affects your view
of history to geology from music to theater to literature – every
dimension of life is affected by Bible doctrine. You don’t get there unless you
spend hours and hours thinking about these things. That is what produced the
high points of Christian culture in various stages of history because you have
because you had large number of believers and you have large numbers of pastors
and theology professors who were thinking about these things. You go back to
the period after the Reformation and you had pastors who also had hobbies in
the natural sciences. They were categorizing and classifying various species on
the side. You have people like Isaac Newton who formulated the law of gravity.
Did you know that Isaac Newton wrote more on the Bible and theology than he did
on science? That is what laid the foundation for modern culture. People let
their thinking be radically transformed by the Word of God. They didn’t just
show up for church on Sunday and go home. That is what we have today. We have a
superficial Christianity today that will never change the individual much less
the culture. Yet they talk about it all the time. They don’t have a clue how it
happens. It only happens when you have a profound understanding of the
Scripture.
Then we have a warning. In the New
King James version we have the word “lest”. It is a translation of the Greek
word mepote. It is a compound verb,
the negative plus ever or time. It is a temporal conjunction. It indicates that
we might never drift away. It is a very strong statement. We must pay attention
or else we will drift away.
Corrected translation: Therefore it
is necessary for us to pay the closest attention to keep anchored to the things
that we have heard so that we might not ever…
The key is staying anchored it the
Word of God. That is the anchor of the soul that gives us the stability we
need.
The verb is the aorist passive
subjunctive of pararreo. It indicates
purpose. It means to slip anchor. It is not a word that indicates something
that happens instantly. It is a gradual process. All of a sudden we see that line slip overboard. The next
thing you know you are drifting on the current and the tides of worldly
thinking. You wake up one morning and your ship has been pushed around the
point and you don’t know where you are. All you see is water everywhere and you
know that you are in trouble. It happens so easily in our lives. We start
making decisions. It is little decisions that don’t seem to matter much. But
they accumulate over time. One day we wake up and ask how we got so mixed up in
our spiritual lives. We don’t know how it happened. It was gradual. It was one
little move at a time.
It happens differently at different
stages of life. It happens first when you first leave home. When you are young
and leave home, it is now your decision. You are off at college and you have a
lot of opportunities. You have social life and social pressures and academic
life. Sometimes you want to sleep late on Sunday morning because you were up
late on Saturday night. You have to discipline your nightlife and your
partying. Then you have the academic rigors all week. If you work while you go
to school you have those extra obligations. It is easy to say that you are just
too tired to go to church. The next thing you know your life isn’t any
different from the unbeliever in the dorm room next to you. Then when you
graduate from university you think you will get back. You are constantly being
pelted with human viewpoint. But now you have a job. They expect you to be at work 50 to 60 hours a week. You
have to fight traffic. You are too tired to go to class at night. You will go
on Sunday. Then Sunday comes and you don’t go to church. You sleep all day. You have another
major test when you are in your twenties. How will you balance priorities in your
life with material things? In your twenties you think you can put it off. You will wait until you are married.
Then you want to have fun and travel. Then you have to deal with two sin
natures under the same roof. You didn’t make doctrine a priority when you got
married so have someone who really doesn’t care about doctrine. They are saved
but don’t care about spiritual things. They don’t care much about the
infallibility of Scripture. So now there are these tensions.
Parents let their kids date
unbelievers or believers that were falling apart in their Christian lives. And then wonder why they married that
individual. Now their spouse destroys them spiritually. Then you have kids. That
is a real challenge to a young couple. How will they manage their time? You are up all night. Some manage to get
organized and others don’t. But by the time they get all packed up church is
over. Then you get a little later on in life and there are always issues in
life that keep you from being in class studying the Word. The issue is your
volition. If you are going to blame your circumstances, your work, or whatever,
then you have a recipe for spiritual disaster. The issue when it is over with
is whether you hear the Lord say, “Well done thou good and faithful servant.” Or
are you just going to be glad you aren’t in hell? That’s what the writer is
challenging us with.
Therefore we must give the highest
possible priority to the doctrine we have studied. We must concentrate on it. Otherwise
we will be cast adrift by the currents of cosmic thinking. We will destroy our
temporal impact and long-range impact. Then he gives us an illustration in
verse 2 and the Mosaic Law.