Hebrews Lesson 73 December 21, 2006
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.
We are still in Hebrews 6. We are in the section from verse 9
to verse 12. Let’s go over these initially to get the flow of thought in this
section. The writer says…
NKJ Hebrews 6:9 But, beloved, we are confident of better things
concerning you, yes, things that accompany salvation, though we speak in this
manner.
Beloved is a term that is used for believers in the
Scripture so we know that he is not addressing unbelievers
NKJ Hebrews 6:10 For God is not
unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His
name, in that you have ministered to
the saints, and do minister.
NKJ Hebrews 6:11 And we desire that each one of you show the same
diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end,
NKJ Hebrews 6:12 that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who
through faith and patience inherit the promises.
We have gone through verse 9. We
have seen that the point is that we can have confidence that despite failure,
God’s grace always provides for recovery.
Remember he has just been giving them a rebuke for their spiritual
sluggishness. He ends at the end of this section at the end of verse 12 by
saying…
that you do not
become sluggish.
But actually back in verse 11 when
he shifted into the warning exhortation, he said...
NKJ Hebrews 5:11 of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain, since you have become
dull of hearing.
That is Melchizedek.
It is the same word that he uses
there. So they have gone into this spiritual complacency where they are
allowing the details of life to distract them. They are allowing the religious
prestige of Judaism where most of these recipients were former priests and they
had all of the pomp and circumstance associated with temple worship. All of
that is part of the pressure on them. They are ready to give up Christianity
and go back into the old legalistic system. So there is this dire warning that
he writes in verses 4 through 6 regarding the dangers of spiritual regression. But
here he returns to a positive note emphasizing confidence that he has that they
can recover and they can go forward.
This word we are confident is the
Greek word peitho which emphasizes
the present results of a completed action. He is confident that because of what
he knows about God, what he knows about God’s grace, because of what he knows
about his readers that they can reverse course. They can recover and go forward
because in God’s plan there is no sin that is too great for the grace of God. No
matter what you have done you can always go forward. You can always press on. So
he is confident that they are not going to remain in this position of spiritual
doldrums, but they are going to press on.
The better things that he is
convinced of are not just the better things in time, but there are some are
associated with their ultimate salvation. That brings to bear a future
orientation as I have pointed out before. This Greek word soteria for salvation in Hebrews is not a word that looks back to
our past justification, but is a word that looks forward and anticipates the
culmination of the whole salvation process – justification,
sanctification and ultimate glorification where we realize our inheritance. If
you look ahead in verse 12, he talks about inheriting the promises. So the
doctrine that ties all of this together, that binds these thoughts together is
this challenge to press on in the spiritual life because only by endurance and
by patience and by consistency in taking in the Word, applying the Word, not
being distracted by the pressures, the vicissitudes, the pains and the problems
and the traumas of life are we going to be able to reach spiritual maturity and
then when the Lord comes back in His kingdom realize the blessings of
inheriting the kingdom. So this is his flow of thought.
In the second verse that we looked
at in verse 10, the emphasis is on God’s justice. We always have to start with
any issue, any problem, and any doctrine with the person of God - with His
character, with His essence, with His attributes. His point in verse 10 is that
God’s justice doesn’t forget or neglect or overlook the spiritual advance that
we have made. No matter how badly you fail, God doesn’t overlook or forget that
divine good that has already been produced in your life. If you have been
growing and maturing as a believer and you have been walking by means of the
Spirit, there is divine good that is produced there and God doesn’t overlook or
forget that. But if you go into spiritual regression, you may lose ground
spiritually. You may lose ground in terms of spiritual maturity. You may go
through some intense divine discipline, but nevertheless God doesn’t forget that
which is already been done. So the emphasis in verse 10 is that God is not
unjust to forget. It is a double negative there. He is not unjust. He says it
with a double negative to emphasize the justice of God.
We looked at the essence of God last
time. The ten attributes of God - His sovereignty, righteousness, justice,
love, eternal life, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, veracity and
immutability. We are focusing on His righteousness and justice.
Psalm 89 says …
NKJ Psalm 89:14 Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; Mercy and
truth go before Your face.
So this is the foundation of
understanding the character of God. He is absolutely correct in all that He
does. The righteousness refers to the absolute standard of His character and
justice refers to its application. So whatever God does is just. We go through
a lot of injustices in life. A lot of times we wonder where God is. If God is
really paying attention, then why does He let so-and-so get away with
such-and-such? It just seems like
there are some people who never get punished and everything they touch turns to
gold. Everything is wonderful. We wonder where the justice of God is. David did
the same thing in the psalms.
He said, “How long O Lord, how long
will the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?”
There are two or three different
psalms where he vocalizes that very thought. Yet God says that eventually there
will be justice either in time or in eternity. A lot of times we just don’t see it. We aren’t there to
watch what happens. It is like when the Israelites were in the wilderness. They
grumbled against God because they didn’t like the food. They were eating manna
every morning and every noon and every night. After two or three months they
got tired of eating those hot fresh Shipley donuts every morning for breakfast
and lunch and dinner. It was boring and they wanted to go back to that great
cuisine of Egypt. So they grumbled
and complained about the food. God sent the quail – this huge number of
quail flew in. They threw out nets and they captured all the quail. They ate
quail until they got sick and died from it.
The psalmist says that God answered
their prayer, gave them the desire of their heart; but He sent leanness to
their soul.
There are people in life. That is what
God does. He blesses them to a point to show how absolutely miserable they are.
We don’t see the inner soul misery that a lot of people have when the lights go
off at night and they are there by themselves. They have to look at the mirror
and we don’t recognize what is going on. Now we would like to. Now that is the
problem. We would like to see some people and understand their pain and misery
and watch God discipline. That is part of our carnality and our old sin nature
trend. So the Scriptures emphasize the fact that God is always just. He is
always fair. This is what Abraham said back in Genesis 18.
NKJ Genesis 18:25 "Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the
righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far
be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
No matter what happens God is the
one who has all the facts, all the data, all the information. He is the only
one who can treat man collectively or individually with absolute justice and
righteousness. So the writer of Hebrews says…
NKJ Hebrews 6:10 For God is not
unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His
name, in that you have ministered to
the saints, and do minister.
He is not going to forget what has
gone on. There are three things that are mentioned there related to the verb. The
verb is epilanthano which means to
forget or to neglect or overlook. In a sense it is an anthropopathism related
to God because God isn’t concerned with memory. So we have to always go back
and remember our definitions for anthropomorphism and anthropopathism.
Now we just did this Tuesday night
in a different series.
You see the trouble when you are
doing different series and you do the same thing is that everybody was here on
Tuesday night and says, “Oh, we know all this.”
But the people who are listening out
there in – what do we call it?
They don’t listen to tapes anymore. It’s MP3 land or DVD land, out
there in media land and the universal electronic church. They are just
listening to Hebrews. So they need to hear this.
So anthropomorphism is a figure of
speech where there is an ascription. The language ascribes to God human
physical characteristics which He doesn’t actually possess, (like eyes, ears,
nose, fingers, toes) to explain His essence, policy, acts and decisions in
terms of human anatomy. So He is using human body parts to help us understand.
It is language of accommodation, language of a common frame of reference to
understand God’s work.
An anthropopathism is the same
thing. Instead of ascribing physical characteristics to God, emotional characteristics
are ascribed to God. You may not realize this because most of you have heard me
teach this for so long, you have heard this taught. When I went to seminary I
was surprised when we got into Psalms that second semester or second year of
Hebrew when you are dealing with Hebrew poetry and you go through figures of
speech. One of the first books you have to buy is a big 3-inch book done by E.
Bolinger on figures of speech used in the Bible. Now I was an English major and
I would suggest that most of you who were English majors that are here (I think
there are one or two here) never heard of 90% of these figures of speech. He traces them all the way back to
Greek. He gives you the Greek names, the Latin names for them, all the examples
in Scripture. It is a fantastic book. He does have anthropopeia in there which is the Latin form for anthropopathism. You
have anthropopathism.
But today we live in a world where
people reject the notion that there is real anthropopathic talk. In other
words, God really does feel all of these emotions. What is interesting (and just to make a little connection
with something I talked about on Tuesday night) remember on Tuesday night I
talked about guilt and shame and how our understanding of guilt and shame has
changed in the last 30 or 40 years. Ultimately this is all part of personality.
We live in a world where we worship personality instead of character. If you go back before 1900, you won’t
find works or people talking about personality. They were focused on character.
I believe that a lot of that is the result of Freud. I have done a study. I
haven’t been able to do an exhaustive study. I haven’t been able to go up to
the Dallas Theological Seminary library or to any other library, but I have a
fairly decent library on my own in print and on my computer. I have looked and
looked and looked. You will find that often among contemporary conservative
theologians, they will talk about the image of God in Genesis 1 that God is
intellect, will and emotion. That is what personality is. Notice that word. But
you don’t find theologians like Calvin or Luther or Jonathan Edwards or WGT Shed or any of these earlier conservative theologians ever talk about
personality. Never do they break down the image of God in terms of mind, will
and emotion. Emotion isn’t talked about. You don’t find people starting to talk
about emotion in the Christian life and God until after the midpoint of the 19th
century.
Years ago I thought, “Hum. I wonder
if that means anything.”
What happened in the middle point of
the 19th century? That is when you have the introduction of
psychology and Freud and all this other stuff. That just shows an example of
how worldly thinking, the philosophical concepts of the world put pressure on
the church. The church always struggles with the garbage from the world
outside. So there is a lot of debate here.
In fact there was a time when
theologians believed in what was called the impassability of God. Break that word down
etymologically. That middle
syllable “pass” derives from the same word where we get passion which was a
word that was typically used in the Middle Ages to talk about human emotions.
They were passions. They were fleshly passions that needed to be controlled. So
when you talk about impassability, you are talking about not having the passion
and that nothing man did would enter into and change the passions of God. He
was impassable. Now you will find that very few conservative theologians will
agree that God is impassible. God has emotions. Like I pointed out the other
night that there is one who will remain nameless because he is near and dear to
many people in congregation, a theologian who wrote a paper not long ago on the
emotions of God and had it published.
I challenged him on it.
He said, “How can you say these are
figures of speech?”
I went to Exodus and said, “If you
look at Exodus where it says that God got angry with Israel. In the Hebrew it
literally says that God’s nose burned.”
In other words you do have a figure
of speech there. It is an anthropomorphism. But the anthropomorphism is an
anthropopathism. So it is a double figure of speech.
He went “Hum. I hadn’t thought about
that. Maybe I need to go back and think about that.”
“Yeah, you do.”
So, what does God remember? See God
doesn’t forget things because God is omniscient. He always knows all of the
knowable and nothing changes. So there are three things that God remembers. He
remembers your work. He remembers your labor of love. He remembers your
ministry. Now if you look at your text if you are using the New American
Standard Bible, an NIV Bible, (God forbid) the Message, or the Living Bible
or some of these others – the contemporary English Version, The Revised
Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, any of these contemporary
versions; it doesn’t have labor of love there. But that is in the Majority Text
and majority of documents. Labor should be there. There are other passages that
use that same terminology, specifically in I Thessalonians 1:3 which we will
look at in a minute.
So God remembers work, labor of love
and ministry. I pointed out last
time that among most conservatives and evangelicals we don’t like that word
“work” because we think of works of the law. We think of works of morality,
doing something to try to impress God except that the word work really has two
basic ideas. One is negative work that is done in the power of the flesh and
that which is positive, work that is done in the power of the Holy Spirit. So
that is what we are focusing on here – the divine good that has been
produced in the person’s life. So when we talk about work we are talking about
divine good. When we talk about labor of love, it is actually the labor that
comes from the source of love. You see it is the love for one another motivates
that labor and then Christian service. That is what ministry is. It is diokonia here. It means Christian
service. We are going to look at what all that means in just a minute.
So we looked at a summary of what we
did on the doctrine of work last time. Work comes from the Greek ergon which refers to any kind of
performance, doing something. It can be meritorious. It can be activity. It can
be thought. It has a broad range of meanings – any kind of
accomplishment. It is a value neutral word in and of itself. Context indicates
whether it is bad or good. As I pointed out a minute ago some versions remove
the word labor, but it is found in a majority of documents. It should read…
Literal translation: For God is not unjust to forget your
work and labor of love.
Make sure you have that in your
text. Write it in if it is not there.
Now we looked at the whole concept
of work. I just want to review a couple of verses we had up on the screen last
week to emphasize the positive value the Bible has on work in the Christian
life.
NKJ 2 Corinthians 9:8 And God is able
to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in
all things, may have an abundance for
every good work.
In other words God gave all of those
spiritual assets - the problems solving devices, a completed canon of
Scripture, a pastor-teacher, a local church where you can learn the Word of
God. All of this is driving you to a point of production in terms of Christian
service, in terms of Christian work, whatever field that may be in. The trouble
is that when most people talk about Christian service, they have been exposed
to too much legalism and they have this narrow view of what Christian service
is. It is teaching Sunday school, working as an usher, being a deacon. Here it
is baking cookies for church which I think is a very fine occupation. But Christian service can involve all
manner of different things. A lot of it is unseen. It can involve prayer for
people, prayer for the sick, calling people and encouraging them, helping out
you know who are going through some kind of difficulty. A lot of this is unseen
and it should be. It is not the job of the deacons to make sure (or Sunday
school teachers or whatever else they have.) or of the leadership of the church
to make sure that everybody is out there doing Christian service. Christian
service is a result of spiritual growth, not the cause of spiritual
growth.
My philosophy of ministry is that
you teach the Word, people respond and grow. As they grow the Holy Spirit is
going to bring into action their spiritual gifts, their talents, whatever it
may be. It will flow naturally as time progresses. If they sit out in the pew
and take notes and have volumes of notebooks and twenty years go by and you
don’t see any Christian service then you have to start wondering if they are ever
really in fellowship or if the Holy Spirit is doing anything because that
should be the ultimate result.
In Ephesians 2:10 following a great
passage on having a by grace through faith salvation Paul says that...
NKJ Ephesians 2:10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus
for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
The role of the pastor and teacher
is found in Ephesians 4:11-12.
NKJ Ephesians 4:11 And He Himself gave some to be apostles,
some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers,
NKJ Ephesians 4:12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of
ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,
So the teaching ministry of the
local church is training, to teach you how to think and to understand the
assets that God has given you – how to live the spiritual life so that
the outworking of that is in terms of Christian service. Negatively it is used
for example in Ephesians 5:11.
NKJ Ephesians 5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather
expose them.
So you have deeds of the darkness
which would be sin and you have works of the law which would be morality,
neither of which would have any kind of spiritual value.
He told Timothy to instruct his
congregation to do good and to be rich in good works and to be generous and to
be ready to share. He also told him in II Timothy 3:17 that the man of God was
to be prepared for every good work. Verses 16 and 17 deal with the inspiration
of Scripture.
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,
NKJ 2 Timothy 3:17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly
equipped for every good work.
In Hebrews 10:24 we are to stimulate
one another. We are to encourage one another.
NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up
love and
good works,
In other words, Christians will get
together (I know you do this) and talk.
“How can we help that person? What
can we do over here? How can we
make this better?”
That is the interaction of people
coming together and talking about how they can take things to a new level in
whatever the issue is whether it is helping somebody or helping a missionary or
being involved in prep school or whatever it is. There are all kinds of
different areas, areas that we can’t even approach here.
Let’s look at this in terms of a
flow chart. The Word is taught. You listen to a pastor. You listen to a Sunday
school teacher. You listen to somebody on a tape. You hear the Word being
taught. Under the filling ministry of God the Holy Spirit that goes into your
soul as epignosis doctrine. Now we all
know the dynamics of that. That is the process of divine viewpoint truth going
in and hopefully human viewpoint kosmic
thought being flushed out. That is the whole learning process. It is Romans
12:2.
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.
That comes from coming to church.
That is why church is foundationally in the Scripture based on an educational
model and not a fellowship model.
Somebody was showing me right before
church a little flyer. You know we have these little things that you can pass
out. You can use them to give the gospel. How many Scripture references are on
here? 8? There are 8 Scripture references on this 3 x 5 card. There is a big
flyer that they got in the neighborhood. A new church is going up.
There is a picture of Mexican food
on the front and it says, “It is NACHO Mama’s Church.”
Not a single Bible reference in the
whole thing. They could have put 30 in there. Not a single reference to the
Bible, to Scripture, to Christ, or to salvation. Oh, we live in such great times. What they have got is a
church where kosmic truth is being
reinforced and reemphasized and there is no biblical truth whatsoever. But they
operate on this assumption that the church is a social institution.
Now when I went to university, I am
sure that the leadership at the university had some concept of social life
among the students - like keeping it down. But the main focus of the board of trustees of that that
institution had to do with making sure that the students that came there would
get a good education and that they would maintain their accreditation. Now even
though that was the focus and objective of the school, there was a lot of
fellowship going on. There was a
lot of social life. It is a by-product. Whenever people get together there is
social life. Just look at what happens here in the kitchen every time before
class. You can’t stop it. Some people try, but you really can’t stop it. They
are going to get to know each other.
But when you put the focus on
fellowship and on social life, then what falls off the table is learning the
Word of God and growing. So the emphasis has to be on learning the Word,
putting divine viewpoint in your soul and getting rid of kosmic thought. When you walk by the Spirit, as you apply the Word
and go forward that leads to spiritual growth. As you grow spiritually, this is
going to impact two areas. First of all there is going to be spiritual
production in the sense of the fruit of the Spirit. This is character
transformation. These are the biblical virtues of love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, gentleness – all that in Galatians 5:21-22. That is Christ-like
character that takes place. Then there is this second area of production. That
is Christian service. Now Christian service is part of two aspects – our
royal priesthood which is toward God. This is prayer, giving, reading the
Scriptures, and learning the Word.
All of this is part of our priesthood. Then there is our ambassadorship
which has to do with witnessing, teaching in Sunday school, living our life as
a witness or testimony before unbelievers and before the angels. There are a
lot of other different dynamics for both royal priesthood and
ambassadorship. That is what
Christian service really is. It is the function of our royal priesthood and our
ambassadorship. The ambassadorship works in outward toward human beings and the
priesthood is toward God.
So that chart shows the role of work
- going to Bible class, studying your Bible, thinking about it, learning it,
memorizing Scripture, memorizing promises, claiming promises, being
conscientious when you are driving down the freeway rushing to get that last
minute Christmas present. Some illegal alien cuts you off because they don’t
know how to drive in American traffic and you get mad and angry. You have to
exercise work to think about the fact that you are to respond differently. Sometimes
that takes work.
Then we have the labor of love. That
is the outworking of the love that is the Christ-like character, the love that
is produced by God the Holy Spirit and then that becomes a motive for labor in
terms of service. So that is how these three aspects work out as they are
emphasized in verse 10.
NKJ Hebrews 6:10 For God is not unjust to
forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name, in that you have ministered to the
saints, and do minister.
The focus is on His character. Whenever
you see the name of God in Scripture that emphasizes His character, His person.
That is our motivation. We learn who God is and that drives us to serve Him. Romans
12:1 talks about that being our reasonable service toward God. It is part of
our personal worship. It goes in the direction of ministry, diokoneia. That is service to the
saints. There are a couple of other passages that reinforce that same
idea.
One is I Thessalonians 1:3. There
Paul says in his opening salutation to the Thessalonians, he reinforces the
idea of his prayer and what he is praying for and what he is giving thanks for.
For them he is giving thanks for their work of faith, their labor of love and
their steadfastness of hope.
NKJ 1 Thessalonians 1:3 remembering without ceasing your work of faith, labor of love, and
patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in the sight of our God and Father,
So you have these three things
emphasized there. There are three virtues that are mentioned – their
work, their labor and their steadfastness. They are each linked to something by
a genitive construction. That genitive should be understood as a source. The
work comes from their source of their faith as they learn to trust God and as
they are trusting in God they are willing to put forth the effort needed to
concentrate on learning the Word of God, studying the Word of God, memorizing
the Word of God, applying the Word of God. So that is called the work of
faith.
Secondly, there is the labor of
love. This is the Greek word kopos
meaning to engage in an activity that is burdensome. So it goes beyond work to
labor. It is going to take time. There may be self-sacrifice. If you decide to
go to seminary, it is going to mean sacrifice at a certain level –
staying up late at night. It is
intense. If you decide to teach in prep school or if you are going to help out
in different functions around the local church, it is going to take time. It is
going to take energy. There are things that are going to have to say no to so
that you can do a good job in those particular things. But it is a labor that
comes from the source of love.
Notice the faith rest drill
characterizes that spiritual growth in infancy. The labor of love is a more
mature love. Then the steadfastness of hope focuses on that personal sense of
destiny. That is the third area.
The word there for steadfastness is
that very important word hupomone
which means perseverance, hanging in there under trial. That is what James
talks about in James 1: 2.
NKJ James 1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into
various trials,
NKJ James 1:3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces
patience.
Endurance has its maturing result.
Paul talks about it in Romans 5 that endurance produces character and character
hope. Hope is linked to endurance again in here in I Thessalonians 1:3. So the
work comes from faith as you learn to trust God. Work comes from the source. Labor
comes from the source of your love for God and motivates labor. Your hope that
is your confident expectation in your future destiny - hope is always a future
word. It is not this sort of wishful optimism that you have.
“Golly I hope that maybe we will
have a White Christmas. We had one two years ago. Maybe it will happen
again.”
No, that is wishful optimism. It probably
isn’t going to happen. It most likely isn’t going to happen. But the hope in
Scripture is a confident expectation. It is a certainty. We know what our
destiny is. Because we know that, from the source of our confidence we are able
to endure the difficulties, the temptations, the tests, the vicissitudes, and
the problems of life and go forward in spiritual growth. So that is what Paul
is praising the Thessalonians for and giving thanks for in his prayers. It is
because of their work of faith, their labor and the steadfastness of hope.
Now do you notice anything
interesting in that passage? We have three things: faith, hope and love. Do we
run into those three anywhere else in Scripture? Sure we do. In I Corinthians 13:13 at the end of that famous
chapter that gives us the characteristics of the love that the Holy Spirit is
producing in us, at the end of the section that deals with the temporary nature
of certain spiritual gifts specifically knowledge, prophecy, and tongues - at
the conclusion the writer of Corinthians Paul says…
NKJ 1 Corinthians 13:13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the
greatest of these is love.
This is really an interesting
passage. In fact this passage is one that really opens up the interpretation of
the last part of chapter 13 and drives a stake in the heart of the whole
Pentecostal false teaching on tongues. There are a lot of non-charismatics who
believe that this chapter is talking about the fact that when the perfect comes
and that which is partial will be done away back in verse 10 that the perfect
has to do with something in the future. It has to do with being in a perfect
environment in heaven, being in a state of perfection before Jesus. So they tie
it to either death when we are face to face with the Lord or the rapture when
we are face to face with the Lord or the Second Coming.
I always love those articulate
theologians who want to sound so erudite and say, “This refers to the eskaton.”
Oh really! What is that? It is just
indefinitely out there in the future somewhere. So you have said something erudite, but you haven’t said
anything. The problem with all of those statements is that according to verse
10 that says …
NKJ 1 Corinthians 13:10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will
be done away.
Really we should translate that the
completed thing.
There is a contrast going on here. If
you look at verse 12, in the English it says…
NKJ 1 Corinthians 13:12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to
face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
The word there for “now” is not the
same word Greek word that you have for “now” in verse 13. The now in verse 12
is the now arti- now, generally
speaking. Now we live in an age where we have a nation that promotes the
liberty and freedom of the individual. See that covers the period of the existence
of the United States. That is 200-300 years. It is a broad now. But the nuni that is used in verse 13 emphasizes
a right now like this year, this week, this immediate time frame.
What Paul is saying is that in
contrast to that which is partial and will be done away with, what continues
now are faith, hope and love. So if then faith, hope and love continue after
the perfect stops; then the perfect is somewhere off when we are in heaven then
faith, hope, and love would continue beyond that. Right? We have a problem with that because II Corinthians
5:7 says that when you walk by faith and not by sight. But when I die and I am
face to face with the Lord I am going to quit walking by faith. So are you. We
will be walking by sight. So if the doing away of the perfect in I Corinthians
13 has to do with coming into the presence of God, then faith won’t be
continuing beyond that. So that means that the cessation of the perfect has to
be in time not in eternity or in heaven or something like that. Furthermore
Romans 8:24 says…
NKJ Romans 8:24 For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen
is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?
In other words, hope is going to
stop when you are face to face with the Lord. When you are face to face with
the Lord, faith and hope are not going to continue. Faith and hope are going to
cease. The only thing that continues after you are face to face with the Lord
is going to be love. That tells you right away that in I Corinthians 13 that
the tongues, knowledge, prophecy and everything had to cease in time because
the perfect had to come in time, not in eternity. In eternity there is no faith. And there is no hope
continuing.
So we have these three things
emphasized in I Corinthians 13:13.
The “now” there is emphasizing the fact that it is now in this immediate
Church Age, this post completed canon, post tongue, post Church Age, post
miraculous period what is going to continue is faith, hope and love. These are
the dynamics that drive spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. As I pointed
out in II Corinthians 5:7, we walk by faith. That means there has to be an
object of faith. There isn’t a Kierkegaardian existential leap of faith.
“Well I am just going to believe it
because I ought to believe it.”
God never asked anyone to put their
brain in neutral and believe a bunch of irrational nonsense. That’s why in Acts
1 Luke tells Theophilus that Jesus appeared to them after the resurrection and
gave them many convincing proofs. You see you don’t put your brain in neutral
when you trust Christ as Savior.
There are rational and empirical evidences throughout the Scripture for
the doctrines that are contained in the Scripture for the resurrection of
Christ, for the miracles for the work of Christ on the cross, for creation,
everything. In fact you have to put your brain in neutral to be an
evolutionist. You have to put your brain in neutral to be an atheist. You have
to deny so much to reject God and to reject the Scripture. You have to buy so
many lies and so many fabrications. In fact it is nothing more than
intellectual and moral laziness to take up the position of agnosticism or
atheism or postmodernism. It is another way to suppress the truth of God in
your own life so that you don’t have to deal with the fact that God has a claim
on your life as an individual created in His image for a purpose.
So we walk by faith. That means we
trust in an eternal authority who gives us comprehensible information. We have
to understand it and trust it. We don’t walk by sight. It is not something that
is rationally or empirically discerned because rationalism and empiricism
always break down. It is too limited.
Romans 8:24 talks about the fact
that we are saved by means of hope. Turn in your Bibles to Romans 8 because
this is a very important passage for understanding the spiritual life. There is
so much in Romans 8. If we go back to verse 17 just to pick up a little context
where it is talking about spiritual life and inheritance, we studied this not
long ago and I want to remind you of this. There in Romans 8:17 we read…
NKJ Romans 8:17 and if children, then heirs -- heirs of God and joint
heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him,
that we may also be glorified together.
The context brings in the idea of a
future inheritance. Now the trouble that we have with this verse as I pointed
out before (I just want to make sure you remember this) is the punctuation. The
way it is normally punctuated, it looks a though you have two different things
going on here that are the same – heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ
- and they are identical. But the way I have punctuated it on the screen is to
show that there are two different heirships. The one is heirship of God. It is common to every believer. We
inherit eternal life. But the second is being a joint heir with Christ, but
that is conditional. It is if we suffer with Him.
I gave you this fun little
illustration to punctuate the sentence.
Woman without her man is nothing.
Remember that? Everybody gets a good chuckle out of
this one. Women are going to punctuate it the first way.
Woman, without her, man is nothing
Men will punctuate it the second
way.
Woman, without her man, is nothing.
See, it is where you put the commas.
You have two completely different statements there depending on where you put
the commas. In the first example you end up saying that man is nothing. In the
second example because of where you put the commas, you end up saying that
woman is nothing.
So the translators of Romans 8:17
put the commas in the wrong place. There are two different heirships there. One
is a common heirship, common to every believer. The other is a joint heirship
– “if we suffer with Christ.” That is not some masochistic sort of thing
where you are going to go up and experience all of the sufferings of Christ so
you were some kind of a goat hair shirt inside out or you go out and you live
in a cave somewhere and you beat yourself in some kind of self flagellation. Or
you go sit on a pillar in the desert like the pillar saints did in the 4th
century with Simon Stilletes and a number of others. This was the path to spirituality.
What is so bizarre today is with the
rise of the New Age movement back in the 80’s and the shift away from the
bankruptcy of enlightenment rationalism that really fragmented in the 60’s and
70’s and the rise of postmodernism, everything is subjective. t is all about
the self. It is all about what I experience because after all that is so
important. So what you see in the church - remember what I said earlier that
the church always imitates the world. Well, as the world has become more and
more subjective. So have Christians.
Since the early 80’s I have seen a rise in the popularity of the books
from the mystics of the early church.
You couldn’t even find some of this stuff in print 40 years ago. Now you
go to the local Christian bookstore and you can buy books by Theresa of Abila.
You have never heard of them, all of these different kinds of medieval mystics.
They are so popular. In fact one of the big trends that has come out in the
last 20 years is contemplative spirituality. It is promoted by all kinds of
conservative evangelicals. It is just subjectivity. Let’s just contemplate our
navels and call it God talking to me.
That is not what we are talking about
here – suffering with Him. If you are dedicated to grow as a believer,
you will put yourself in right smack dab in the middle of the angelic conflict
with the bull’s eye on your spiritual hind end. You won’t have any trouble
figuring out where the suffering is coming from. There will be all kinds of suffering for blessing, suffering
for training, and adversity. In
fact the Apostle Paul tells Timothy that those who desire to live a godly life
will be persecuted in one form or another. You can just count on it. So you
don’t have to go out and try to manufacture suffering to become spiritual. It
will happen. Trust me. Just study the Word, apply the Word and it will happen. So
we go on in chapter 8 and Paul says...
NKJ Romans 8:18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present
time are not worthy to be compared with
the glory which shall be revealed in us.
What is he talking about here? To
put a category on it, he is talking about that personal sense of destiny. When
you realize how great the glory is that we are headed to and what we are being
trained to accomplish and what God wants us to do in terms of that future reign
as kings and priests in the Millennial Kingdom; then Paul says that when that
becomes more real to you than your present problems, then you are going to
begin to understand what this is about.
NKJ Romans 8:19 For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly
waits for the revealing of the sons of God.
That happens when Jesus Christ
returns. So the focus here is on the future return of Jesus Christ.
He goes on to say…
NKJ Romans 8:20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not
willingly, but because of Him who subjected it
in hope;
There is a key verse for
understanding that when Adam sinned that sin was not something that just
affected him. I have heard this so much lately. This idea that you come up with
that I am known for arguing that you can’t have an old earth because if
anything dies (not plant life because that is a different kind of life in
Genesis 1) but animal life, human life if anything dies before Adam sins then
it negates the whole death penalty for sin. Right? Well, people try to squirm
out from that all the time because the implications are that you really have to
get serious about the Bible. If that is true, the Bible saying that the earth
as we know it is only about 6,000 years old. What about all of this science? There
are a lot of conflicts there. So let’s figure out a way to make everything
billions of years old because those atheist scientists have to be coming up
with the truth.
They want to say that spiritual
death only affected Adam. No, Adam’s sin affected the whole creation. That is
what Paul is saying in Romans 8:20 - the creation was subject to futility. Adam’s
sin didn’t just separate him from God. It was like an enormous shock wave off a
nuclear bomb that reverberated through every system - physical, immaterial,
angelic, everything got impacted by Adam’s decision in some way or another. Everything
got impacted. It changed lions from being grass eaters to carnivores. It
created innumerable problems. Nobody wanted to sleep with cobras anymore. Things
got dangerous.
All of that is going to change when
the Millennium comes back. All of a sudden Jesus is going to come back and
almost instantaneously lions are going to eat grass and they are going to sleep
with babies. Kids can put their hands into cobra dens. All that happens as soon
as Jesus comes back. It is going to go right back to the way it was. So the
creation – all the death that you see evidenced in the fossil record is a
result of a post fall sin, not anything that could have happened before. If any
of those fossils were laid down prior to the fall, then you have a major flaw
in the whole atonement theology because you have death before there is sin. It
just can’t happen.
So Paul goes on to say….
NKJ Romans 8:21 because the creation itself also will be delivered
from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of
God.
NKJ Romans 8:22 For we know that the whole creation groans and labors
with birth pangs together until now.
NKJ Romans 8:23 Not only that, but we also who
have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves,
eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.
That is about the third time we have
had the word “waiting.” That is hope. That is that eternal sense of a personal
destiny.
NKJ Romans 8:24 For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen
is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?
NKJ Romans 8:25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait
for it with perseverance.
See the connection between hope and
endurance? If you want to develop biblical hope in your life, then that relates
to endurance and hanging in there.
What gives us that ability to endure is that we understand the future
destiny, what the training is all about.
Let’s go back to our verse in
Hebrews 6:10.
NKJ Hebrews 6:10 For God is not
unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His
name, in that you have ministered to the
saints, and do minister.
Hebrews 6:10 ends with the fact that
we go through all of this and we are involved in ministry, service to the
saints. This should be understood as a causal participle. It is an adverbial
participle of cause that should be translated…
Literal translation: Because you have served the saints and
you continue to do so.
So they have been in spiritual
regression, but they haven’t totally gotten rid of Christianity. They are still
involved in Christian service and Christian growth.
We will stop there and come back and
look at 11 and 12 next time. We have an understanding and flowchart to work
with and we will develop that as we go forward.