Hebrews
Lesson 64
August 24, 2006
NKJ Isaiah 40:31 But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with
wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not
faint.
Starting this week and probably for the next couple of
weeks we are going to start talking about how to be a fruit judge – how
to evaluate fruit – how to evaluate your fruit, not your wife’s fruit,
not your husband’s fruit, not your kid’s fruit, not your neighbor’s fruit, but
your fruit. We don’t want to be fruit inspectors of other people. We will
leave that up to the lordship salvation crowd. They are always concerned
about checking into other people’s fruit. That is the issue in the imagery of
the illustration of Hebrews 6:7-8. So let’s orient our thinking back into the
passage since it has been a week.
This is one of the most significant warning passages
in the epistle. The next serious one comes in chapter 10. Here we
read a passage that many have misunderstood, misinterpreted. It is a
serious warning to every believer that there are serious consequences to
spiritual failure in life and spiritual regression.
NKJ Hebrews 6:4 For it is impossible
for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and
have become partakers of the Holy Spirit,
We studied where that should go and I don’t want to
lose the emphasis of the difficulty of this.
It is not impossible for God; it is impossible for us
as we saw last time in terms of the context of Hebrews. Again and again
there are these reminders that believers are to encourage one
another. When a believer fails and goes negative to doctrine and
entrenches in carnality, it is impossible. You can’t talk to them. I
don’t know if you have ever had a close friend or family member take a nose dive
into the swimming pool of carnality and just enjoy splashing around for a while.
They don’t want anybody to come along and talk to them about doctrine.
They get as irritated as they can be. From a
human perspective it is impossible to get them to recover. It is going to
take an act of God.
That is why in verse 3 the writer says...
NKJ Hebrews 6:3 And this we will do if God permits.
NKJ Hebrews 6:5 and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of
the age to come,
That is how it runs together. It is a whole
series of descriptions of these believers. The very last one focuses on
their spiritual condition.
They have already fallen away. These are aorist
participles, so this is true. They are believers. They are
regenerate. They have been growing. They have been going somewhere in
their spiritual lives. Now they have already (past tense, completed)
fallen away.
NKJ Hebrews 6:6 if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance,
since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame.
The point that I made last week is that these Jewish
believers were aligning themselves with the Pharisees. By rejecting
Christianity they were going back into Judaism and aligning themselves with the
thought process and the belief system of those who crucified Jesus. That is
what he means here. By virtue of their rejection and reverse decision to
go back into Judaism they are in effect crucifying Christ again. This is
an embarrassment or shame.
I concluded with 5 key principles. We have to be reminded
that we can all fail. We can all get involved in carnality. As long
as we are alive, God has a plan for our lives. You can’t out sin the grace
of God. Now you may sin to the point where you go out under the sin unto
death, but as long as you are still breathing you do have a chance to recover.
Five Key
Points
We went over those in conclusion last time. Now we
come to our passage in Hebrews 6:7. This is the illustration.
NKJ Hebrews 6:7 For the earth which drinks in the rain that often
comes upon it, and bears herbs useful for those by whom it is cultivated,
receives blessing from God;
NKJ Hebrews 6:8 but if it bears thorns and briars, it is rejected and near to being cursed,
whose end is to be burned.
It is very important for us to understand this
illustration because there is certain verbiage in this illustration that when
people read it, their first blush interpretation of this passage is that it is
talking about the loss of salvation - if you bear thorns and briars in your
life then you are rejected. You are not going to be saved. You are
going to be cursed.
They go to thorns and briars and say, “See, what are
thorns and briars? Thorns and briars have come into existence because of
Adam’s sin when the ground was cursed. This is talking about a massive curse
for sin like we have in Genesis 3. The end is burning. When do we
have burning in the Scripture? We have burning when unbelievers are sent
to the Lake of Fire. So, that is what this is talking about. This is
an illustration of those failure believers mentioned earlier that lost their
salvation and now they are rejected and sent to the Lake of Fire.”
There are many people who believe that, but this is
not what this is talking about at all. As we have seen in our study so far
that the context indicates that he is talking about believers. They are
expected to be able to recover, to press on. They have had solid food in
the past according to the last few verses of chapter 5. But because of
their rejection, because of their carnality they have reversed
growth. They have regressed.
They have gone from being spiritual adolescents back
to being spiritual infants. They are clearly believers. The list of
descriptions in verses 4-6 describes believers. They were once
enlightened. This comes at regeneration as we have studied.
They have tasted of the heavenly gift. The idea
of tasting if you remember is not a little nibble or just getting a sense of
the impact of the food on the taste buds of your tongue. It is the idea of
completely eating something, of completely taking it into you experience just
as Jesus tasted death for everyone. He didn’t just nibble at it around the
edges. He fully experienced spiritual death for everyone. So this idea
of tasting has the idea of fully experiencing something. So they fully
experience the heavenly gift, which is salvation.
They have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, another
key word. They have become partners with the Holy Spirit, which is what happens
to every Church Age believer. At the instant of salvation you entered into
a partnership with God the Holy Spirit. Think about that. You are in
a partnership with God the Holy Spirit. The job of your partner is to make
you a mature believer and conform you to the image of Christ. Now He is
not going to stop that job. He is going to keep working at that whether
you want Him to or not. So even when you take a swan dive into the pool of
carnality and just want to swim around and sin for awhile, the Holy Spirit is
not going to go sit in a lounge chair somewhere and passively watch. He is
going to be involved in getting your attention through divine discipline and
reminders of doctrine and other things to get you back on track. It may
take awhile but nevertheless the Holy Spirit doesn’t quit working. He is
quenched in His sanctifying or growth-producing ministry. Now he is in a
rebuking and recovery ministry to get you back in shape. He is your
partner and you can’t get away from that. You can’t get a divorce from
that partner.
The age to come refers to the Millennial
Kingdom. The key power in the Millennial Kingdom is that the Holy Spirit
will indwell all believers. They will all know the Word of God and they
won’t need to teach one another his neighbor because this inherent knowledge of
Scripture that every believer will have. That is according to Jeremiah 31
and the description of the New Covenant in the kingdom. We have
foreshadowing of that in the indwelling and filling of God the Holy Spirit for
the believer in the Church Age. So all of these descriptions in verses 4
and 5 describe a genuine believer.
Last time we looked at parallel passages that used
various forms of the word pipto for
falling away. Here it is peripipto. In
Galatians 5:4 it was ekpipto. In
Revelations 2 where it talks about the Ephesians who have fallen away from
their first love, it was pipto. These
words describe believers who are born again and leap into carnality and quit
walking by means of God the Holy Spirit. So here you have a specific
teaching regarding this in these two verses. Then to make it clear like a good
preacher he is going to use an illustration. The illustration comes out of
an agricultural background. If you are not familiar with agricultural
standards in the ancient world, then you might miss what some of this is about
which happens to a number of people and they misinterpret the passage. So
we need to look at it very carefully and we need to understand what the symbols
are in the illustration in verses 7-8.
First of all we have the earth. The earth is the
believer. It is out of the earth that fruit is produced. The earth
represents the believer.
The second element in this illustration is rain. We
all know that in order for things to grow they have to have rain. Your
grass isn’t its normal brown in the middle of August like it typically is in
Houston because we have had a lot of rain this year – at least
here. Now if you go up to the northwest, it is still dry there. Here
everything is nice and green. It doesn’t look like the typical lawn in
August. But rain is that which nourishes the soil and provides the
nutrients in the soil for it to grow. So that is comparable or analogous
in this illustration to the Word of God and to the Spirit of God. It is the
Spirit of God working in tandem with the Word of God that produces spiritual
growth and fruit in the child of God.
So the earth is the believer. Rain is the
provision of God.
The herbs that come forth in verse 7 are
useful. This talks about the production of good fruit which is divine
good. So verse 6 focuses on the production of fruit in the life of the
believer – that which is useful. Useful for whom? This is where
it gets interesting. It is useful for those by whom it is
cultivated. So you have to understand that. You have thorns and
thistles that represent the production of evil, sin and human good.
Who is doing the cultivating work? It’s
God. It is God the Father. If the rain represents the Holy Spirit,
then this is God the Father. I think this is analogous to God the Father
who is the vinedresser in John 15. We may not get there tonight, but we
are going to go into the vine analogy in John 15 in order to tie these things
together. These are some of the most crucial images that are used in
Scripture for understanding our spiritual life and how it works. This passage
here, John 15, Galatians 5, Ephesians 5 are the key chapters in the New
Testament to teach on the mechanics of spiritual growth and fruit production
which is something that is not very well understood at all by many churches
today, many theologians. So the cultivator is God.
When the believer bears fruit, it is useful. It
is useful for whom? It is useful for God. God uses that when you are a
maturing believer and producing fruit. Then you become useful to God in
terms of Christian service. That is what this is ultimately going
toward. It is not just about you and your spiritual life and your
relationship to God. Don’t get involved in a self-centered, self-absorbed vision
of your Christian life. When you look at the ultimate value, character
quality in the Christian life it is love. Love involves relationship with
other people. It is not about you going home and listening to a tape
recorder and reading your notes. It is about you and your relationship to
God. That is a means to an end. That end is your service within the
framework of the body of Christ. The trouble is that most churches get
those things flip-flopped. As soon as somebody walks in the door they want
to get them involved in some kind of Christian service. They don’t know
anything about the Bible. They don’t know anything having a relationship
with God. They don’t know anything about spiritual dynamics. They
don’t know anything about the filling of the Holy Spirit. Consequently they
end up producing a lot of wood, hay and straw. That is a typical modus
operandi.
I remember when I was a young pastor. Some older
man in the church came up to me and said, “Pastor, what you need to do is get
these visitors that come to church and give them a job to do and get them
working in Sunday school or get them working in this or working in
that. That is how you build a church.”
I said, “I don’t think so. I appreciate your
insight and advice, but I am not convinced that is how things work. I think
you have things backwards.”
There are always folks who operate that way and that
is how most churches operate. They don’t understand the difference between
the result and what causes the result. As we grow and mature as believers,
it is to serve one another in the body of Christ. That is part of our
responsibility – to function in terms of our ambassadorial responsibilities
and our royal priesthood. All of that comes under the category of
Christian service.
I hear too many believers say, “I just want to listen
to my tapes, go over my notes, study and they don’t get involved in any kind of
life with anybody else. That is not what Hebrews is talking about. In
fact Hebrews is very much against kind of solipsistic (meaning to be isolated within
yourself) action. There are too many solipsistic believers running around
because we live in a worldly culture that promotes individualistic
isolation. You go home to your apartment complex or your home and you
probably don’t know the names of more than two or three people on your
street. I can still drive down my parents street and tell you the names of
the people who lived in each house when I as a kid. I can’t do that on my
street now. Of course there is new construction and half of them are
empty. We live in a world that promotes this kind of isolationism.
That is not the genuine Christian life. We have
to remember the difference between spiritual dynamics and ultimate
production.
The cultivator is God. He is the one working the soil
to produce the fruit. This gives us the elements, the symbols that are in
the passage. Now it is clear from the passage that the subject is
judgment. When I use the word judgment I don’t just mean something
negative – harsh in terms of judgment, casting people into the Lake of Fire. It
is evaluation.
There are different kinds of judgments in the
Scriptures. We are going to have to decide which judgment it is. So
the first point is to recognize that this is an illustration that relates to
judgment. But which one are we talking about? Is this the Great White
Throne Judgment? If this is talking about the Great White Throne Judgment,
that is for unbelievers only, Revelation 20. Only unbelievers show up at
the Great White Throne Judgment. This would be talking about the
difference between believers and unbelievers. I don’t believe that is what
this passage is talking about at all. Is it talking about the judgment at
the end of the tribulation – the separation of the sheep and the
goats? I don’t think so. It is not talking about believers versus
unbelievers. So that leaves the third option, which is the Bema
Seat.
We have a time chart. The Great White Throne is
at the end of the Millennium. There is a judgment at the end of the
tribulation. Tribulation unbelievers are sent to a holding place
(Tartarus) until the Great White Throne Judgment. Then during the
tribulation there is an evaluation of all believers in heaven. This is the
Judgment Seat of Christ. The word used in the Greek for that is the Bema
Seat. We will study that as we go through our study. It is a vital
part of understanding this passage.
The next thing that we have to recognize is that the
first word here in verse 7 (for) shows that in verses 7 and 8 are connected
grammatically to verses 4-6. It is an explanation of the dynamics of verse
4-6. So that means if verses 4-6 is talking about believers, then 7 and 8
must also be talking about believers. We don’t have any unbelievers in
this passage at all. So that tells us that we have to be talking about the
Judgment Seat of Christ.
When we look at the passage, we start breaking the
illustration down. The earth represents the believer and the rain represents
the divine grace provision, which God gives equally to every
believer. This is the Word of God and the Spirit of God. At the
instant of salvation every one of us got the Holy Spirit to the same degree, to
the same measure. Some of you didn’t get a little more; some of you didn’t
get a little less. If you were part of a charismatic Pentecostal group, they
would teach you that some of you didn’t get the full gospel. You only got
part of the gospel. It wasn’t until you learned that you have to lay it
all on the altar or submit yourself or yield yourself or something like
that (some kind of vocabulary like that) that you get the second
blessing. Then you get the full gospel. That is what they mean when
they talk about – full gospel. You have the Full Gospel Men’s
Fellowship and other groups like that. That is what they are. They
come out of Pentecostal backgrounds. Every believer gets the same degree
of the Holy Spirit. Every believer has access to the Word of God. We live
in an era today where God is judging this nation by the proliferation of
biblical truth today.
You may turn on the television and say, “Where is the
biblical truth?”
I am not talking about that. If you go to a
decent Christian bookstore or get on the internet and go to Christianbooks.com
or any of the other good publishing website like Zondervan or any of the other
websites there is more Biblical knowledge available today for the average
believer than at any time in history. There are more Christian books being
published today. Since the 70’s there has been an enormous growth in the
reprint business. They have been going back and reprinting the classics of
theology and biblical commentaries and devotional books from the 17th
and 18th centuries. It is unbelievable how much doctrine is
available to you. Not only that but you have the internet, MP3’s, DVD’s. I could name probably 20 solid doctrinal
pastors that have internet ministries that you could go home and listen to
everything every one of those men has taught in their entire ministries and
listen from now until the day you die and never sleep and never do anything
else but listen to doctrine.
There is so much available. You can get computer
programs that are so sophisticated. You can’t even imagine all that you can
do in terms of Bible study. Yet we live in a culture that is headed
spiritually downhill faster than any culture in history just about. They
have rejected all of this spiritual truth that is available. Most
Christians, genuine regenerate believers, reject it too. They would rather
go to church and sing and clap and feel good and have a little sermonette for
Christianettes and then go home and think that they are actually having an
experience with God. They are just having an experience with the god-idol
they have created in their own minds. They are worshipping that and they
are not going anywhere. So we live in a world today that is being judged
for its failure to utilize what is being given in terms of the Word of
God. The Word of God is the primary growth agent in the Scripture.
NKJ 1 Peter 2:2 as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word,
that you may grow thereby,
That is a command. We are commanded to desire the
pure milk of the Word like a newborn baby. Have you ever heard a newborn
baby when they are hungry? What do they do? They scream. They
cry. They throw a tantrum. That is how believers should be if they
are not being fed the Word of God. Yet most believers don’t do
that. They don’t have any appetite anymore.
The basis for growth is the Word of God. It is
not hymn singing. Hymns are wonderful. Hymn singing is a production
of the Holy Spirit. It is part of corporate worship. It is
valid. It is important. It is significant. It should be done
well. But, it is not part of spiritual growth. It is a part of our
spiritual priesthood. But we grow by the study of the Word of God.
NKJ 2 Peter 3:18 but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the
glory both now and forever. Amen.
This is how we advance. It is through the
knowledge of the Word of God. When Jesus was talking to Peter in John 21
after the resurrection…
He says, “Peter, do you love me?”
Peter said, “Oh yes Lord. I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”
How do you feed the sheep? You teach them the
Word of God. He didn’t say administer the congregation. He didn’t say
focus on leadership skills and leadership dynamics and be a good
facilitator. You may not know this because some of you are isolated, but
that is what is coming out of too many seminaries today – men who are
administrators and managers and CEO’s of a corporation. When you watch what is going on in the media,
they are just businesses. They aren’t ministries anymore. It is all about
money and production and selling tapes and selling books and selling prayer
cloths and selling holy oil to be anointed with and all of this other
stuff. It doesn’t have anything to do with biblical Christianity
anymore.
The focus should be on the Word of God. That is
the only thing that we are going to grow with. It is the Holy Spirit who
enacts that, who makes that happen, because the Christian life isn’t just a
matter of academics. It is not just a matter of learning doctrine. If it
were just a matter of studying and learning the Bible, then there would be a
lot more mature believers. You can go to a lot of Bible colleges and
seminaries and people are learning all kinds of stuff. But, there is no
spiritual growth. There is a spiritual dynamic created by God the Holy
Spirit who is the fruit producer. He is the one taking the doctrine and
producing growth and maturity in our lives. If we aren’t in right
relationship to Him or if you don’t know how to be in right relationship with
Him, then you are going to try to grow spiritually. All you are doing is
pulling yourself up by the human good of your own spiritual boot straps, and it
isn’t going to get you anywhere. You may have a moral life. You may have a
good life. You can have a decent family life. You can become
successful in business, but it doesn’t have anything to do with God the Holy
Spirit because you don’t know how that works. It is the tandem production
of God the Holy Spirit working with the Word of God. That is the tool that
the Holy Spirit uses to produce spiritual growth.
Now let’s go on and develop our illustration a little
more.
This is one of the things that we used to fight like
crazy (and we still do). It started back in the 70’s when I was in
seminary. The big rage was to go into Christian counseling because so many
pastors have all of these people coming to them with marriage problems,
problems with their kids, problems in their lives or whatever it may be and
they want counseling. I can’t tell you how many guys I knew who went to
seminary for a couple of years and then they would shift and go to some school
to get a degree in psychology so that they cold help people. What we are really
saying here is that knowing the Bible really isn’t enough to help
people. You have to have to have all of this methodology that comes out of
humanistic psychology. In other words up until Freud you couldn’t really
help people. What did those people do in the early 1800’s for a Christian
life? Those poor people were miserable. They didn’t know anything
about psychology. They didn’t know anything about personal
counseling. They didn’t get into all of this stuff about self-image. Gee,
we didn’t even have this vocabulary until the middle of the 20th
century. Now we are so far advanced beyond these other believers.
“We don’t need the Bible. We just need a couple
of master’s degrees in psychology and counseling then we can help
people.”
No! The Scripture says the Bible is the source of
help. No matter what you have gone through in life the Word of God and the
grace of God are all you need to solve the problems of life. The trouble
is that most people are not willing to trust God and not willing to do what the
Bible says.
So they end up saying, “Well, doctrine doesn’t work.”
It’s not that doctrine doesn’t work. It’s that
you didn’t work the doctrine. You aren’t getting anywhere because you
still want God to help you do it your way. Until you realize that God
wants you to do it His way, you won’t get anywhere in the Christian life.
In the old days, do you know what they used to call
pastors? Pastors were soul doctors, doctors of the soul because it was the
Word of God that would heal the problems of your soul. I thought that was
great. Now you have to have a doctor in psychology to help people and if
you aren’t certified by the state, you can’t do counseling or you might be open
to a lawsuit. Do you see where we have gone? We live in a lovely
world.
Every believer has these same assets. The Word of
God, the Spirit of God, the grace of God and the cross of Christ are
sufficient. They are all you need. Isn’t that wonderful? That’s
all you need. But the trouble is you have to learn about all of those
things. You have to learn about those assets. You can’t just sit at
home with your Bible open and get it all. You may get a little of it but
you aren’t going to get most of it. You have to go to church. You
have to go and listen to somebody who knows the Word of God, can study the Word
of God and can teach you the Word of God so that you can gradually learn all of
these magnificent promises that God has given us. You can learn all about
these assets and learn how to grow and mature as a believer.
So the rain represents all that God gives us. He
gives the believer everything he needs.
Now there is some work going on here. But you are
not the one doing the work. Remember the illustration? The earth is
the believer. The believer is receiving the rain. The earth is passive to
receiving God’s gift of everything it needs in order to produce fruit. But we
are introduced to this character in the analogy who is called the cultivator,
the one by whom it is cultivated. So somebody is working the soil in order
to produce fruit. Guess who that is. That is God the Father. He is working
in every believer’s life through God the Holy Spirit to produce spiritual
growth in the life of the believer. It is the result of His work on the
soil that eventually fruit is produced. But you see the other soil has
nobody tilling it – not because they aren’t saved, but because they are
not in right relationship to God the Holy Spirit. That tilling work only
happens when you are in right relationship with the Holy Spirit – when
you are walking in the Holy Spirit, when you are being filled by the Holy
Spirit, and when you are abiding in Christ. All those terms are synonymous
terms in the Scripture. So it is God who does the work. Isn’t that
great?
That is what grace is all about. God provides the
means, God provides the work, and God provides the production. All we have
to do is exercise our volition to be willing to do what God says to do in terms
of learning the Word of God. God does the rest.
The difference between these two soils is not a
difference in capability. It is not a difference of potential. It’s
not a difference of IQ. It
is not a difference of family life. It is not a difference of Bible
translation. It is a difference of volition. What makes the
difference between the two is that the soil that produces fruit is soil that is
willing to do what God says to do and to implement the procedures and is
positive to the Word of God. The soil that produces thorns and thistles is
soil that is not willing. What makes the difference is volition. Your
volition is so important. Your volition has made you the person that you are
today – good, bad, or indifferent. You are today the product of your
volition. Your volition, your will is what is going to determine what you
are going to be in the Millennial Kingdom and in eternity. You are
becoming today what you will be character wise in the Millennial
Kingdom. Now in the Millennial Kingdom you will be in a resurrection body
and you won’t have a sin nature. But the capacities that you have, the
responsibilities that you are going to be able to handle are determined by your
spiritual advance and growth today. So the decisions you make today will
determine who you will be and what you will do in the Millennial Kingdom and on
into eternity. So the key issue between the two is the individual’s
volition.
Now let’s look at the two divisions again. In
verse 7, the earth is the believer. It drinks in or takes in the rain that
is provided for by God. It produces divine good. Notice that divine
good is produced by the One who cultivates it. It doesn’t have anything to do
with you and your works. It has to do with God and His works. In
contrast the soul of the unbelieving believer as it were (the believer who is
not trusting God who is relying on his own abilities) bears thorns and
briars. So it produces human good, not fruit. There is nothing of
value to God or anybody.
It is rejected. That is really a bad
translation. The Greek word is adokimos.
The a at the beginning is a
negative. It is called the alpha privative if you know Greek. It is
like the prefix un in
English. It negates the word. The word dokimos is a noun meaning to be qualified, to be worthy, to pass
the test. The verb form is used in James 1.
NKJ James 1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into
various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces
patience. 4 But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking
nothing.
So what we have here it is that the negative soil
bears thorns and thistles. It is rejected. Adokimos means to be unapproved, to be unqualified or unworthy. In
a passive sense it means to be disapproved, discredited, rejected or cast
away. Probably the best translation is discredited. It is discredited
because it is failing to grow. As we will see this word is used in a
number of passages. I Corinthians 9:27 is a good passage. We will look at
that in a minute. II Corinthians 13:5-7 is another one. A form of
this word is used in I Corinthians 3 at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
Believers who produce wood, hay and straw don’t pass
the test. They fail to dokimazo. They
have a verb for evaluation. They fail that. That is what it is
talking about here. The believer produces wood, hay and straw. What
happens to the wood, hay and straw in I Corinthians 3? We will go there.
If you remember, that is where the believer’s works are all piled up –
good works, bad works, and divine good, human good.
At the Judgment Seat of Christ the production of your
life is piled up. The image is that now we are going to purify it. We
are going to burn off all of the garbage. So a fire is lit and all of the
wood, hay and straw is burned up. Whatever is left is the basis for
reward. What is left is divine good – gold, silver, and precious
stones. At the Bema Seat (the Judgment Seat of Christ) there is this
purification process. All of that which is unworthy is discredited and
burned up or cast away. That is the imagery here of this burning. It is
not the burning of hell; it is the burning of purification and judgment that
will take place at the Judgment Seat of Christ. So the second category isn’t
talking about the unbeliever; it is talking about a believer who has not
responded to the grace of God and produces wood, hay, and straw.
There are a couple of good passages that indicate the
use of the word adokimos. The LXX which is the Greek translation of
the Old Testament uses it in Proverbs 25:4.
NKJ Proverbs 25:4 Take away the dross from silver, And it will go to the
silversmith for jewelry.
It is the picture of refining the silver. In any
kind of metal there are various impurities. It is through heat that those
impurities are burned away so that what you are focusing is what is left
– gold, silver or whatever. That is what the focus is. At the
Judgment Seat of Christ, the focus is not on how you fail. There are so many
folks that worry about that. They think the focus will be on how many
times they failed Jesus. But that is not where the focus is going to be.
The focus is to burn away all of that so what is left that is visible is what
you did positively in terms of walking by the Spirit and the fruit the Holy
Spirit produced in your life.
I Corinthians 9:24 expands on this in the New Testament. So
we will look at this. Paul uses the metaphor of the Olympics. I love
how the Scripture uses these everyday illustrations that people were used
to. Jesus talks about fishing. He talks about feeding the sheep to men who
have an agriculture background and understand what that is all about. Paul
talks about the races, the Olympics. They were as aware of the athletic
contests in their day as people are in our day. Sports have been around
for a long time. So Paul uses an analogy of an Olympic race to talk about
the spiritual life. This is a short race. He says…
NKJ 1 Corinthians
9:24 Do you not know that those who run
in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may
obtain it.
The idea of running is the idea of going forward with
speed. That should be a fact in every believer’s life. We should be
pressing on – running forward in the Christian life - not just kind of
skipping along like Prissy in Gone with
the Wind. Remember when she is just dawdling along running her hand along
the picket fence. Some of you need to watch Gone with the Wind.
A stadium runs about 192 meters. It is one-eighth
of a mile so it is a short race.
He uses an illustration from the Olympics in Ancient
Greece. There were Olympics held in Olympia, in Nimia which was to the
southwest of Corinth, in Isthmia which was very close to Corinth right there at
the Isthmus of Corinth which goes from the Peloponnese Peninsula on the south
to mainland of Greece. Athens and Delphi is where they had the Olympics in
Ancient Greece.
The games were as big an event in their day as they
are in our day. You read the writings of the Ancient Greeks. They
used to complain about all the people who would come into the city. They
would set up all of their tents and they didn’t have good sanitation. They
had to worry about digging latrines and all of the other things that that go
with having 20,000 or 30,000 people descend on a small village of a couple of
thousand for a couple of weeks to run the games. You have the same
logistic problems today.
Paul is writing in I Corinthians to the
Corinthians. These are the games that were held outside the town of
Corinth.
Every Greek understood exactly what was under
discussion.
We live in a world today where people don’t like to be
winners. They don’t teach their kids to win. Everybody is going to
play T-ball and everybody is going to win. They don’t teach these
lessons. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. In the Christian
life you want to be a winner. You want to do what you have to do in order
to grow so that you can gain the prize. The prize is a reward for
faithfully serving the Lord. There is nothing wrong with being motivated
by that. Paul is using that to motivate people right here.
I have heard Christians say, “I am so
spiritual. I am just going to serve the Lord and I don’t care about
reward. That is so carnal.”
Wait a minute. Paul said to compete for the prize.
NKJ 1 Corinthians
9:25 And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all
things. Now they do it to obtain a
perishable crown, but we for an
imperishable crown.
That means that you have to set a plan. You have
to realize that there are some things that you can’t do. It is great to eat
whatever you want to eat, but if you are in training for an athletic contest
you can’t eat certain things. Not if you want to win. That is a
principle that every believer has to learn. It is not that some things are
wrong. It is that they are a distraction. They won’t allow you to
accomplish the goal of growing and maturing as a believer. You could be at
home or you could be out doing all kinds of things. You could be going to
night classes. You could go out and take dancing lessons. You could
be doing all kinds of things. You could be working out at the gym
tonight. You could be doing all kinds of things that aren’t immoral or
illegal. But they would be a distraction from your spiritual
growth. So you have come to understand the importance of getting rid of
certain things in your life that you enjoy doing simply because it is a
distraction to your spiritual life. That is what Paul is talking about
here.
He says that they do all of this and the prize is
nothing more than a perishable wreath. For some contests it was just a
laurel wreath and for others it was a wreath of withered celery
leaves. How would you like that for a prize? You are going to spend a
year in training to win the race and you aren’t even going to get a
T-shirt. All you are going to get is a wreath of withered celery leaves.
In others you got regular celery leaves, but it wouldn’t be long before they
withered.
But Paul says, “They do it to receive a perishable
wreath.”
That which we get is going to last for an
eternity. It is the only thing that we are going to take with us. Yet
more people are consumed with all the material gains in life. What the
Scripture says is that you can’t take any of that with you. But what you
can take with you is the spiritual growth that you produce in this
life. That is going to be determinative at the Judgment Seat of Christ and
in the Millennial Kingdom.
The word there for wreath is stephanos. We will run across this in Revelation 5. This
is the crown that is earned. It is not the diademos, which is a crown of royalty, but this is a crown that is
earned. It is a prize or a reward.
NKJ 1 Corinthians
9:26 Therefore I run thus: not with
uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who
beats the air.
Why? Because we have the certainty of
Scripture.
“I am not just shadow boxing.”
NKJ 1 Corinthians
9:27 But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have
preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.
That is the same word that we have over in Hebrews 6:8
– disqualified (adokimos). The
Apostle Paul realized he cold still blow it. He could still decide to go
negative. He could get involved in extended carnality and sin and it would
disqualify him from the prize. If that is true of Paul, how much more do
you think it is true for the rest of us? We have to be diligent and watch
over our spiritual lives so that we are qualified to win the prize. The
Judgment Seat of Christ is where we are going to be evaluated.
I have one last phrase to comment on.
NKJ Hebrews 6:8 but if it bears thorns and briars, it is rejected and near to being cursed,
whose end is to be burned.
That is the Greek word eggus. It is close. It is expected. It is not
cursed. Let’s talk about this word curse for just a minute. A curse
in Scripture is not some kind of black magic. It is not some sort of an
evil eye or cult malediction. It is an expression of the justice of God. It
is an expression of the judgment of God. So that when the earth is cursed
in Genesis 3 because Adam sinned, it is a judgment on the earth from the
justice of God. It is not some type of cultic curse. So what we are
talking about here is someone close to judgment. It doesn’t mean that they
lose their eternal life; it just means that they are close to significant
divine discipline. If they don’t recover, then the end result is that they
are going to have everything burned up which is what happens to all human good
at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
As we look at this whole illustration it builds on an
agricultural reality.
Pliney the Elder was a Roman natural scientist who
lived during the 1st century AD – from about 16 AD to the late part of the first century. His life
span overlapped that of the New Testament. He wrote in his book of natural
science regarding agriculture. He said,
Some
people also set fire to the stubble in the field. The chief reason however
for this plan is to burn up the seed up the weed.
In other words burning is not just a picture of
judgment, but it is a picture in the life of removing the impurities. It
is divine discipline to get straightened up to produce that which is
good. That is an important thing to understand here because the writer of
Hebrews is not just talking about the eventual judgment at the Judgment Seat of
Christ but also a temporal discipline. He is warning them that if they don’t
recover then they can face serious divine discipline in time. This is
related to God’s attempt to make them more productive. We need to
understand that because this helps us to see the whole mechanics of the
spiritual life. This same imagery is used in numerous passages which I
have referred to already – John 15, Galatians 5, and Ephesians 5. We
will come back next time and look at how this imagery is used by the Lord Jesus
Christ in John 15 to teach about how we produce fruit in the spiritual life.