Hebrews Lesson 46 March 16, 2006
NKJ Psalm 106:15 And He gave them their request, But sent leanness into
their soul.
Hebrews 5
We are going through our study of
Hebrews. We are going to open with a little introduction on the structure of
the book of Hebrews so far.
Remember, I have set forth the thesis that I believe that the book was
originally an oral message that was taken and edited and then maybe sent as a
letter. It has a structure built around 5 basic points. Each point has a
didactic section (a teaching section) that relies heavily upon Old Testament
imagery. I just loved it last night when Charlie was talking at the conference
about how important it is to tie these things together as you go through the
Old Testament. The Old Testament imagery sets the stage for the doctrines that
are developed in the New Testament. John Cross did the same thing in his talk
yesterday morning. I find that to be so helpful.
This morning I was teaching Joshua
in my class over at the college and was going through that again in the conquest
tying it to sanctification. I have been following that methodology - not just
teaching a dry OT survey type course but using a framework approach
embedded within the way I teach each book. These students have never heard anything
like it. It is showing how everything in the Old Testament is designed by God
to set the stage so that later revelation is made clearer so that when we come
to the incarnation and the cross, everything unfolds. Well the writer of
Hebrews talks more about that than just about any author in the New Testament
except perhaps Matthew who relies heavily on this Old Testament imagery.
So we saw that he began with an
introductory prologue in the first four verses of the first chapter which
introduces some of the main key ideas focusing on the present ascended Jesus
Christ currently in session at the right hand of God the Father at work to
prepare the saints of the Church Age to rule and reign with Him in the coming
kingdom.
The first teaching section is found
in the rest of chapter 1 in vs. 5-14 where there are 8 different Old Testament
quotations that he uses to weave together the principles demonstrating that
Jesus is the Son and that He is in His deity over the angels but in His
humanity through His victorious life on the earth and in His humanity walking
by means of the Spirit, He is qualified to go to the cross. He fulfills His
mission. He is elevated over the angels in His humanity. The focus here is in
His superiority over the angels in His humanity which
was something that He earned through His spiritual life and completion of His
mission during the First Advent.
Then out of that there is a
four-verse challenge or warning section that is developed in 2:1-4 warning
these recipients of the danger that is involved in the Christian life if we
fall by the wayside and we don’t stick with it and continue to press on to the
high ground of spiritual
maturity.
In chapter 2:5 he begins the second
point. He builds out of some of the main ideas that he developed in the first
chapter and he begins to extrapolate from that the doctrines related to Jesus
Christ’s high priesthood and His growth in sanctification during the First
Advent. In His humanity He had to be matured through suffering. This then
qualified Him to serve as our High Priest.
In 3:7-14 we have the next exhortation
and warning section. The main idea there is the idea of a promise remaining to
enter into God’s rest. We talked about the different meanings of the word
“rest” there. The rest can refer to God’s Sabbatical rest on the seventh day of
creation. That is creation week rest. Then the word rest is also used in the
Old Testament to refer to the Jewish rest, the Promised Land rest, that they
would enter into the Promised Land and there experience the rest of God but
that rest is a picture or a foreshadowing of the future rest that comes in the
Millennial Kingdom. So there is a challenge that as believers we aren’t to fail
like the Jews going through the wilderness who weren’t allowed to enter the
rest but we are to press on to spiritual maturity so that we are qualified to
enter into that kingdom rest in the Millennial Kingdom. This goes from 3:7 to
4:13.
Then in 4:14 we enter the next
didactic section, which is shorter than the previous one, 4:14-5:11 which goes back to the doctrine of the high priesthood
of Christ which is developed in 4:17. This section also goes back to the
sanctification and maturation process of the Lord Jesus Christ in 2:10-11. It
weaves these together in a very short section. It goes from 4:15-5:10. It
breaks at 5:10. It ends up pointing out that Jesus Christ has been identified,
named as a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek. The whole present
priestly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ is built off of this very short
image that you have back in the Old Testament related to this somewhat
enigmatic royal priest, this Gentile priest Melchizedek. Not much is said about
Him but that is God’s plan. God could have said a whole lot more about
Melchizedek, but He leaves out all of this information. He structures that
narrative in Genesis 15 so that He can use that image of that historical
personage to develop our understanding of the high priestly ministry of Jesus
Christ during the current age. So that is in 4:14-5:10. The reason I keep
messing up on this is I am using the New King James and it breaks the paragraph
at the wrong place. It breaks it between 11 and 12. The break comes between 10
and 11 in the Greek. The sentence ends with the end of verse 10 in the Greek.
Then starting in 5:11 you have the
beginning of the next warning section, from 5:11 down through the end of
chapter 6. This is a crucial warning section. Of course we will get into that
fun passage in 6:1-8 where it says it is impossible to renew those who were
once enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have become partakers of
the Holy Spirit. A lot of people use that verse to say that you can lose your salvation.
So we will get into that, but not tonight.
These are the first three points
that the writer is developing in the structure of his message. There are two
more major sections coming. The last one ends with two warning or two
exhortation sections. So that is where we are. We are just starting this third
warning section, this third exhortation section.
The previous section ends with
Melchizedek in 5:10.
Hebrews 5:10 called by God as High Priest "according to the
order of Melchizedek,"
In 5:5 and 5:10 we are reminded that
Jesus Christ is a priest according to the order of Melchizedek. He is identified by God as the High Priest. The word there translated “called by
God” is the Greek word prosagoreuo which means to refer to someone by name or some other term.
It means to call, to name, to designate. It means to name or promote someone.
They are identified in the sense of a glorified position. So this is an
identification of Jesus Christ in His glorified position at the right hand of
God the Father as a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek. The Old Testament priesthood was
limited. That is going to be the main driving argument in the next section
beginning in 7:1. He builds to this point, developing his point from 4:14 to 5:10
and then he just stops. He has to go back and almost reams out his readers
because they are not ready to listen to the advanced doctrine based on the Old
Testament understanding of the Melchizedekean priesthood. There are serious
problems with his readers which is what we will get
into tonight. These are the verses from 11-14 that describe the sluggish
backslider believer. Prosagoreuo – Jesus Christ is promoted or
identified as a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek.
NKJ Hebrews 5:11 of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain,
since you have become dull of hearing.
Hebrews 5:11 begins a new sentence.
In the English translations it doesn’t look that way, but that is the way it is
in the Greek. “Whom” refers to Melchizedek.
The first word in the Greek is the
preposition peri.
Used with the genitive it means on account of, with reference to something or
concerning something. We could translate it about something or about a topic. I
prefer that particular translation. That is followed by the relative masculine
singular pronoun for whom. So the beginning of the sentence is “about whom”.
The subject shifts. About whom we have much to say, but.
That is how it is going to go. “About whom (that is about Melchizedek) we have much
to say.” This phrase “we have much to say” is a very difficult Greek
construction.
Literal Translation: About whom the message with
reference to us is great or much.
That is how it would be literally
translated. So you see it has a little different sense than what it reads in
the English. The emphasis is on the word message because that is the noun that
is in the nominative case. The nominative case is your subject case so that is
the topic of the sentence. That is what the sentence is all about. The message
is built off of Melchizedek. The message about Melchizedek has reference to
us. It is a dative third person
plural pronoun which means that it is in reference to us. The message about
Melchizedek has direct application to every believer. He is telling the
congregation that about Melchizedek, the message with reference to us is much. It’s
the Greek word polus.
It means much or many. There is a tremendous amount of important doctrine that
is based off of this.
Then he immediately goes on to say
it is hard to explain. He uses the word dusermeneutos. That core word there
ermeneutos
is related to the English word hermeneutics which has to do with interpretation
and explanation. So this word means with the prefix dus something that is hard or
difficult to explain. Now it is not difficult to explain because the topic is
difficult to explain. With the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit any
believer who is walking by the Spirit and advancing in their understanding of
doctrine is going to be able to understand it. All doctrine is available to
every believer. That is God’s grace package. It is the Holy Spirit who helps us
to understand these things. The reason that this is difficult for the writer to
explain is given in the next clause. It is not because the topic is so
difficult. It is because the sheep he has been talking to have
become dull of hearing. They have become sluggish, lazy, back-slidden sheep. It is their spiritual condition that makes
it difficult for him to explain this doctrine. So he has to stop a minute and
reprimand them because they have become lazy in their spiritual growth.
That next word in the next clause
sets it up. It is the word epei. It means since, because, or for this reason. It is
hard to explain for this reason. It is hard to explain because of the fact that
you have become dull of hearing. The key word there is the verb become. They
have become something. It is a perfect active indicative. I don’t think that it
is always necessary to refer to the Greek, but it is important when it brings
out the sense and the meaning of the passage. It forces us to slow down a
little bit and think about what the writer is saying. When you look at this
verb and look at the parsing it is a perfect indicative. Now a perfect tense
emphasizes an action that is completed. It emphasizes the present state that is
the result of an already completed action. That means that they are not in the
process of becoming dull of hearing. They have been dull of hearing and they
are still dull of hearing. They have completed the process of becoming dullards
and are still dullards. They are sluggish and lazy in their spiritual
understanding. The verb here ginomai
means to become something you were not before. So this indicates that
previously they had grown to a higher or more advanced level of spiritual
maturity and they had been able to understand these things. But, because of sin
in their life and a variety of factors, because they were being tempted to
throw out their Christianity and go back to Judaism these factors were dulling
their spiritual senses and they were reversing their spiritual growth. So they have gone through a growth
process up. Now they are regressing to spiritual infancy. So they have become
something that they were not before.
So it is important to look at different elements of the Greek syntax to
emphasize this.
Now they have become dull. What does
that word mean? That’s the Greek word nothros. It means lazy, sluggish, dull, or hard of hearing. So
they are sluggish backsliders. They are lazy Christians. They have become lazy
in their spiritual lives. They reached the point where they are comfortable and
then they began to slide backwards. When they began to slide backwards, their spiritual
sensitivity was dull. All of a sudden they began to recognize that they were
facing problems related to their stance for Christ as the Messiah, of the Old
Testament and they began to realize that they were coming under persecution. Now
they were tempted to go back under the law, to go back under the Judaist
practices that were dominant in the first century. So the writer describes them
as being lazy, dull, and hard of hearing.
The idea of being
lazy means that you are adverse to activity or exertion. Now do we know
of any Christians that are adverse to spiritual activity or exertion? That is
the old nod to God crowd. They just show up on Sunday morning or they show up
on Easter or they show up on Christmas. They just don’t have a sense that in
their Christian life that it is a priority to know the Word of God so that it
completely overhauls their thinking. It is not just a matter of thinking biblical
thoughts. To make it somewhat simple it’s not just a matter when you become a
Christian of realizing that you have certain thoughts in your mental attitude
life. There are certain mental thoughts that are wrong – jealousy, envy, bitterness,
anger, resentment. It is not just a matter of saying
that you are not going to have those mental attitude sins because you can take
those mental attitude sins out of the house of human viewpoint and fill that
house of human viewpoint up with human good it is still a human viewpoint
house. It is still a human viewpoint house with human good morality in it. It
is not doing you a bit of good as a believer because you are just a pagan as
before you were saved. It is that now you are a moral pagan. Now you are a
self-righteous pagan. But you are still a pagan. You are not thinking
biblically.
When I was a student at Dallas
Seminary there was a professor of homiletics there. George had him. Bruce had
him. His name was Robinson.
Robinson used to poke fun at the guys who wanted to do any kind of
exegesis in the pulpit. One of our other board members of Chafer Seminary is
Todd Kennedy. He is the pastor of Spokane Bible Church. Todd told me that he
got an F on a sermon because he used an overhead projector from Robinson. That’s
their mentality of teaching. But Robinson had a few things to say now and
then.
“One thing that stuck with me was
that it was hard enough to think, but it is really hard to think about how we
think.”
Think about that for awhile. It is hard enough to think. That is the reason most
people don’t want to go to doctrinal churches. You guys have a cerebral
ministry. What it means is we are teaching people to think biblically. They
just don’t want to say that - a cerebral ministry as opposed to a heartfelt ministry.
We are not emotional. We are teaching people to think biblically. But it is not
just a matter of having the right thoughts. It is a matter of the structure of the thinking. The fancy word
for that is epistemology. Charlie used that word a few times the last few
nights where he talked about not being an epistemological pagan. That’s what we
are getting at here. When you still think like an unbeliever you are an
epistemological pagan. You may have moral thoughts and you may have establishment
principles in your thinking but the structure of your thinking is built on
autonomous reason or autonomous experience or (dare I say it?) mysticism and
subjective intuitiveness.
That is what happens. You have to
restructure your thinking according to biblical revelation. Most people don’t
want to do that because they are lazy. They don’t want to restructure the
priorities in their life so they are in Bible class three or four times a week
and listening to tapes the rest of the time. When I get up in the morning I
have all kinds of stuff on my iPod. My friend Tommy Ice loves to download
stuff. When we get together he fills my iPod with all kinds of stuff. It will
be the rest of my life before I can listen to all of this stuff. I get up and
whenever I am doing anything – like this morning I was getting up and
getting ready to go and I just turned on the iPod and put it in the external
speakers and I was listening to a series on the history of Calvinism. I am
constantly being hit with stuff that reminds you; bring back to your
consciousness and learning doctrine where it is part of your life. One of these
days in your spiritual life you realize that Christianity is not just something
you do along with doing shopping and going to your job and ongoing continuing
education with your career but that learning the Word of God and learning to
think biblically becomes your life. It is what drives everything else in your
life. It is at the center of life. That is the only way we can have real
stability and real happiness in life. These believers have become lazy. They
have become sluggish and slow to respond. They are not responsive at all. They
are dull of hearing – of hearing the Word of God.
When the Bible talks about hearing
the Word of God it is not just talking about sitting in class or listening to a
tape and getting your auditory nerves vibrated and filling up your notebook
with notes. It is talking about application. That is the whole message in the
first point in James 3 point sermon. Don’t just be hearers of the Word, but be
appliers of the Word. Take what you learn and apply it to the way your think
and the way interact with people and the way you conduct your life. It starts
with thinking. All application starts with thinking. It doesn’t start with external
behavior.
So in Hebrews 5:11 we read.
NKJ Hebrews 5:11 of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain,
since you have become dull of hearing.
This is something that we find
reinforced even in the Old Testament. You have several passages that describe
this kind of laziness where the prophets challenge the Israelites. An example
is Ezekiel 12:2. This is right before they go out under the fifth cycle of
discipline
NKJ Ezekiel 12:2 "Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, which
has eyes to see but does not see, and ears to hear but does not hear; for they are a rebellious house.
When a believer reverses course in
his Christian growth then what happens is his spiritual seeing and his
spiritual hearing and his spiritual perception start to become dull. He is not
able to perceive things from that divine viewpoint framework. So he operates on
a human viewpoint framework. As a result of that he starts to make bad
decisions. He is operating on autonomous reason so he is making bad decisions from
bad reasoning. He is operating on autonomous empiricism. So he is making bad
decisions from bad interpretation of the experience. Or, if he is in our modern
culture he is operating on some kind of intuitive mysticism. All mysticism is
subjective. The problem with mysticism is there is no guard. There is no form
of correction in mysticism because mysticism completely ends all discussion or
evaluation.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because God told me to.”
“Oh.”
End of
discussion. That is why it is so difficult to
talk to somebody who is a mystic, who is a Pentecostal or a new age
believer.
You say, “Well, how do you know that
that is true?”
“It’s true to me. I just know it
is.”
How can you talk about that? Well, you can’t. You can’t bring reason
to bear on any kind of mystical decision making. Therefore mysticism always
goes hand in hand with irrationalism. It is anti-rationalism. Mysticism has
never been a good term to describe anything in the Christian life. In an older generation when mysticism was virtually dead (in the
early part of the 20th century). There were Christians who
used the term to describe the mysterious relationship of the Holy Spirit to the
individual believer because it was difficult to articulate it. So they moved from
that use of the word mysterious to the word mysticism. But, it is a poor use of
the word mysticism.
NKJ Zechariah 7:11 "But they refused to heed, shrugged their
shoulders, and stopped their ears so that they could not hear.
This is another indication of the
challenge from the prophets to the hardened spiritual hearts of the Jews. They
refused to heed, shrugged their shoulders and they
stopped their ears so that they could not hear. It is not that they stuck their
fingers in their ears. They stopped them because of their negative volition and
because of their rejection of the truth.
What causes a believer to become
lazy, sluggish, and dull of hearing?
This is what Elijah is challenging
the people with in I Kings 18:21.
NKJ 1 Kings 18:21 And Elijah came to all the people, and said, "How
long will you falter between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow Him; but if Baal, follow him." But the people
answered him not a word.
Most Christians never reach the
point that they fully make the decision and decide to stick with it.
What are they dynamics of a
backsliding believer?
NKJ Galatians 5:16 I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of
the flesh.
Ou me, the double negative plus the subjunctive verb is the
strongest negation is the Greek. So there is always a decision to stop walking
by the Holy Spirit. So the default position for everybody is the flesh. You
don’t have to decide to sin, you just have to decide to stop walking by the
Spirit and you automatically default to walking by the flesh.
You hear women in marriage counseling say, “He doesn’t pay attention to
how I feel.”
The man comes in and he expresses it the same way. “Well, I have got
this and I have got that.”
Everybody is the same way. They are focusing on their own world and
their own life and their own feelings and their own agendas. They are not coming out of
themselves. It is just arrogance, arrogance, and arrogance. Arrogance is
tenacious folks if you don’t realize that. Self-absorption leads to self indulgence. The more you are absorbed with your own
problems, your own heartaches, your own issues, the more begin to indulge
yourself in that.
I remember when I was a kid and used to get sick my mother would say,
“Don’t indulge yourself in that. Get up, get dressed and go to school.”
“Ah, but my throat hurts.”
“Get dressed and go to school. Don’t give into it.”
That is what happens. The more you become self-absorbed, the more you
give into it. You indulge your arrogance and eventually that leads to a
distortion of reality, self-deception. As you go through self-deception, you
begin to justify that self-deception. You build rationalizations that make a
lot of sense to us. We justify our carnality. We justify our behavior. Deep
down we know this is wrong. It is not what the Bible says. But, it is
comfortable to us so we build these rationalizations that keep us in our
comfort zone. After all, God understands. We are sinners. He understands,
doesn’t He? Then what we have done is replace God with ourselves. That leads to
self- deification. This is an ongoing cycle that keeps going and going and
going until ultimately we end up in self-destruction.
As soon as they started hitting hard times, they rejected doctrine and
they said, “I don’t want God’s wonderful provision of manna.”
Manna was a supernatural food, the angelic bread so to speak, that God
provided for the Jews to give them complete sustenance as they were going
through the wilderness. Every morning there it was – manna from the
Hebrew word men, meaning what?
They looked at it and they went, “What it is.”
It tasted like Shipley donuts. I am convinced. Hot Shipley donuts every
morning. What a deal! They got tired of it after a while. You can get tired of
anything. They had the same thing morning after morning after morning. But they
got tired of God’s grace so they said “We want the leeks and garlics of
Egypt.
“We want to go get Mexican food – something with a little spice in
it. We are tired of this. We want to go back and get the good Mexican food or
Cajun food that they had over in Egypt.”
NKJ Psalm 106:15 And He gave them their request, But sent leanness into their soul.
Now that is a powerful verse. They got what they wanted, what they thought
would make them happy. And it didn’t. He sent leanness to their soul. They were
empty. It is soul poverty. It reinforces unhappiness and then they have to go
back on that frantic search for happiness and find something else. The more
arrogant you are, the more carnal you are, the more
you deteriorate in this downward spiral.
Remember when you were an adolescent and you threw a temper tantrum and
your mom said, “Quit acting like a baby.”
She didn’t mean you were an infant chronologically. She meant you should
have been acting more mature, but you were still acting like a baby. It was an
insult. Of course the only words we have in the English for baby are baby and
infant and maybe one other word and that is pretty much it. In the Greek there
were four or five other words, which we will get into as we go through this
passage.
“I am not happy. I need some help. Let me turn on Dr. Phil.” So you
watch Dr. Phil or you go down to the bookstore and you get “I am Okay, You are
Okay.” Or you decide to keep up the Christian façade and you go to the
Christian book store and you get the Christian version of “I am Okay, You are
Okay.”
You go read Robert Schuler who said, “Your problem isn’t sin. It’s self-esteem.
Jesus didn’t die for sin. That is an antiquated concept. You need to have your self esteem
pumped up. Jesus died to give you self-esteem. You knew that didn’t you? Sin is
not a problem. You need self-esteem.”
The vacuum in the soul starts sucking in surrounding paganism.
Now pagan degeneracy or cosmic
degeneracy manifests itself two ways. Of course this relates to the trends of
the sin nature. On the one hand it is related to immoral degeneracy. This is a term
everybody can understand. We all know immoral degenerates. If you don’t I can
take you down to Montrose after class and I can show you a lot of them. They
are involved in all kinds of things. It can be immoral degeneracy. It can be
sexual immoral degeneracy. It can be ethical immoral degeneracy. Nobody has a
problem with immoral degeneracy. It is the rejection of absolutes. It rejects
the absolutes of reason and empiricism. It leads to irrationalism and
mysticism. You get a rise of irrationalism and mysticism that dominates the
culture at large. It sneaks into the church in all kinds of different ways.
This leads to licentiousness. It is a rejection of values.
I was thinking in the Bible today,
“What is a group would be a good illustration of this? A good biblical group
that pictures licentiousness and immoral degeneracy.” You have to go to the Old
Testament.
On the other side you have moral
degeneracy. Most people don’t put those words together, moral degeneracy. How can
you be a moral degenerate? We think of a degenerate as some kind of homosexual
perverted deviant. But there are also moral degenerates. Moral degenerates
operate on autonomous reasoning and empiricism. They have a lot of order and
structure in their lives. They can be very moral. They trend towards asceticism
and self-righteousness.
Who are the two groups in the
Scriptures that manifest these two characteristics? The immoral degenerate is
picture by the fertility worshippers in the Old Testament. These were the ones
going down to the temple of Baal and Canaan and they got involved with ritual
prostititutes in the ritual temples. What were they worshipping? They were
worshipping fertility and productivity and prosperity. We have the same thing
today. It may not be as sexual, but it is prosperity theology. It is the health
and wealth gospel. That is just the modern version of the old fertility
worship. Go down to Lakewood and
you will find all kinds of fertility worship there. That’s what it is. It is
the health and wealth gospel. They are immoral
degenerates.
“Oh, but they are such good people.”
But they combine it with moral
degeneracy like the Pharisees.
Jesus said, “You are just a whitewashed
bunch of sepulchers. You have whitewashed the outside so you look good, but
inside are dead men’s bones.” It’s rotten. You have all kinds of maggots crawling
around inside of you. On the outside you look real good. But on the insides the
soul is just a mess.”
So a backsliding believer can
imitate this because he as he deteriorates he picks up the paganism of the
culture around him. Paganism always tends (just like the old sin nature) to go
to either one of these two trends.
So the result that the writer of
Hebrews says is, “I can’t talk about what I want to talk about now because you
have become lazy and hard of hearing spiritually.” This is the dynamic that
produced this.
He is going to go on to say in verse
in verses 12 -13.
NKJ Hebrews 5:12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first
principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid
food.
NKJ Hebrews 5:13 For everyone who partakes only of
milk is unskilled in the word of
righteousness, for he is a babe.
He uses the word napios. If you go over to I Corinthians
3 he uses the word napios for a babe
there. Most people want to take that as an infant Christian. But in both
passages you are dealing with a group of believers that should have been more
mature but have reversed course due to carnality. Instead of portraying their
adolescent status as a believer they are acting like a baby. That Greek word napios was often used as an insult, as a
pejorative, as a form of ridicule. It is somebody who had been more mature and they
are acting like a baby. It is not talking about being a baby in terms of
spiritual infancy. It is talking about somebody who should have been older and
was more mature, but they are acting like a baby. Why? Because
they are walking according to the sin nature and have reversed course in the
spiritual life.
So here we have a description of
what happens when you have a sluggish backslider. You fall apart in your
priorities and your value system.
The Word of God is no longer the centerpiece of your life. It may take
ten, twenty or thirty years before it gets exposed; but it always gets exposed
and it always destroys your life.
Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.