Hebrews Lesson 148 February 19, 2009
NKJ John 17:17 "Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is
truth.
Well, I
thought I’d start off with something from current events this evening – a
little current event. This was an editorial that was given to me on
Sunday. It’s the column called Sightings by Terry Teachout. The title
of this is Musical Torture Instruments.
I thought I’d read segments of it; but the whole thing is so good that I’ll
probably bore you by reading too much of it. But it’s kind of fun, especially
if you think of this in terms of what I have taught in the past on music and
worship and that music has and communicates a worldview. There are all kinds of
things we ought to pay attention to in terms of music.
The
problem I think that many of us have is we’ve become so desensitized to our own
cultural taste for music that we have difficulty stepping back and having a
measure of objectivity. All of us here grew up and went through fun times at
wherever we were in junior high or high school and college. And music is such a part of every person’s
experience growing up that it’s hard for us to get passed the deep emotional
connections that we have to music. Most of us can relate. It you hear certain
songs on the radio; you’re immediately transported in time to some place, some
event, some situation – good or bad. Music has that.
So this
is an article that indicates another use for music. It’s written by Terry
Teachout. He’s fairly conservative. He writes in … doesn’t he write also in Commentary Magazine? I know he writes in Higher Critic. No, the New Criterion; no he doesn’t write in New Criterion. He writes in Commentary and a few other things. So he’s worth reading.
He starts:
What do you fear more than anything
else? In the novel 1984 George
Orwell’s 1948 novel about a life under totalitarianism, he described a
mysterious torture chamber called Room 101 where prisoners were exposed to “the
worst thing in the world” in order to make them talk. ‘It might be buried alive
or death by fire or by drowning or by entailment or 50 other deaths”, the chief
interrogator explains. I thought of Room 101 when I read that the United States
military uses loud music to soften up detainees who refuse to talk about their
terrorist activities. Not surprisingly, some though by no means all, of the
musicians’ whose recordings have been used for this purpose want to have it
stopped.
Doesn’t that explain some things;
why you have these liberal left-wing musicians raising cane with the Bush
administration? The back-story is that their music is used to torture the
prisoners. How interesting! Then he goes on to say:
Reprieve, a British legal charity
that defends prisoners whose human rights are allegedly being violated, has
gone so far as to launch zero dB an initiative specifically aimed at
practitioners of what it calls music torture. President Obama’s decision to
close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay and conduct a review of CIA
interrogation techniques will doubtless have some as yet unknown impact on the
use of music for coercive purposes. But speaking strictly as a critic what I
find most intriguing about this practice is the list of songs and performers
reportedly used to “torture” the detainees that Reprieve has posted on its
website.
I will say this slowly because so
many will want to write this down.
It’s www.reprieve.org.uk.
It is an eclectic assemblage of
tunes ranging from A.C./D.C’s Hells Bells, a heavy metal ditty that sounds as
though it had been recorded by an orchestra of buzz saws, to such seemingly
innocuous fare as John McClain’s American
Pie and the Bee Gee’s Staying Alive.
Now I think – no comment.
To be sure most of the records sited
by Reprieve have one thing in common. They’re ear burstingly loud. But the
presence on the list of “I Love You”
the chirpy theme song of Barney and Friends a long time staple of children’s
programming on PBS suggests that the successful use of music as a tool of
coercion entails more that mere volume. I’m also struck by the fact that music
is so far as I know the only art form used for such purposes.
I don’t know if I had to sit in a
room with a lot of stuff like Jackson Pollack I might go crazy after
awhile.
I’m also struck by the fact that music
is ….No doubt it would be unpleasant to be locked in a windowless room that had
bad paintings hung on all four walls but I can’t imagine envision even the most
sensitive of spies blurting out the name of his controller to escape the
looming presence of Andy Warhol or Thomas Kincaid. Yet I have no trouble
imaging myself being reduced to hysterical babbling after being forced to
listen to Shred, Grunge and I Love You for 16 hour stretches, a
technique said to been employed by Guantanamo interrogators.
No wonder the liberals want to get
rid of the place.
Donald Vance who was imprisoned for
97days at a United States military detention center in Iraq is now suing the
United States government claims that interrogators there subjected him to a not
stop barrage of recorded music that made him suicidal. It sort of removes you
from you, he told an Associated Press reporter. You can no longer formulate
your own thoughts when you’re in an environment like that.
Music really does affect your
thinking and your ability to concentrate on what you’re doing. That’s why I think it’s so important
what you do before you study God’s Word. All I ever talk about is the kind of
music you use as a preface to the study of God’s Word. What you do at a
Christian camp when you are singing fun songs or what you do in other contexts
there can be appropriate music for those kinds of settings. But it still ought
to be good and it ought to be tasteful. I was at an event not long ago and I
thought the two people singing some contemporary Christian piece of music was
caterwauling.
Anyway Teachout goes on to say:
I think I know what Mr. Vance means,
sort of. I’ve gone to a lot of terrible plays in my capacity as a journal drama
critic; but I’d much rather squirm through a bad play than a bad musical much
less a bad opera or symphony. No doubt this is partly because I’ve had musical
training. But I’m sure that it has more to do with the fundamental nature of
the musical experience. Music after all is the most enveloping of the arts, only
one that creates the illusion of occupying both time and space. Live theater
comes close but it lacks music’s all encompassing quality. To enter into the
presence of a piece of music be it a Schubert sonata or a single by Metallica
is to be surrounded and permeated by its essence. The air is full of it and the
plot is ruled by it. You can’t get away from music which explains its
unparalleled power to disorient and disturb. This power it seems is not limited
to any one kind of music. Anyone who has paid a visit to New York’s Penn
Station in recent years knows that chamber music is regularly played over the
station public address system. What most commuters don’t know however is that
this innovation was introduced in 1995 as part of the stations homelessness
program.
I love it.
The purpose of the music as an
Amtrak official explained at the time was both to calm the frenzied traveler
and to displace the negative element.
Translation Mozart drives away
vagrants.
Similarly a number of high school teachers
have experimented in recent years by all accounts successfully to playing Frank
Sinatra albums to miscreant teenagers during after school detention
periods.
That begs for a comment, but I’ll
move on.
I nevertheless find it significant
and not a little comforting that the titles on Reprieve’s list of music (music
to confess by) includes Hells Bells, Nine
Inch Nails, March to the Pigs rather
than say In the Wee Small Hours of the
Morning. Nor is this coincidental. As an interrogator for the U. S. Army’s
361st Psychological Operational Company explained to Newsweek:
“These people haven’t heard heavy
metal. They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours your brain and body
functions start to slide. Your train of thought slows down and your will is
broken.”
See everything has a purpose.
The day anyone feels moved to say
such things about the Marriage of Figaro
is the day I’ll apply for early retirement.
We have to think a lot more about
music and what it does. It’s very important.
We are in Hebrews 9. We came to 9:15
last time. It brings us into a doctrine that we have looked at here and there
as we go through Hebrews. I went back on previous lessons where I’ve looked,
taught on the doctrine of inheritance and realized that I have taught different
things at different places depending on the context. I’m not trying to give an
exhaustive review on the doctrine of inheritance here because that would
probably entail the next four weeks. So I just want to hit some of the high
points for us so that we can all be reminded of what inheritance is all about.
Hebrews 9:15 says:
NKJ Hebrews 9:15 And for this reason
That is relating to the previous
verse and the work of Christ on the cross.
He is the
Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption
Redemption always emphasizes that
word purchase (or payment of a price.)
of the
transgressions under the first covenant,
The word committed is in italics.
It’s not in the original, but the idea is there.
that those who
are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.
The phrase “those who are called” is
simply used as a circumlocution or idiom for believers. I talked about this
last time in case you missed it. There is controversy over this because the
word is often used in conversations in theology within the context of the
Calvinism-Arminianism argument. Calvinism roughly is a position that emphasizes
God’s predestination, His eternal decree made before time of who would be
saved. Sometimes it’s articulated who would not be saved. That’s called double
predestination. Not all Calvinists are double predestinarians. It is associated
with the doctrine of Unconditional Election: that God chooses who will be saved
on the basis of His own will. The way Calvinists articulate unconditional
election, God’s omniscience is not part of the information God uses to make
that choice. Now that runs counter to I Peter 1:2 which states that:
NKJ 1 Peter 1:2 elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in
sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of
Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace be multiplied.
But they don’t want to include
knowledge as part of that decision making package because they think that
implies that God is then simply being manipulated by human decisions. That of
course is Arminianism.
So if you don’t agree with Calvinism
they always says, “Well that means you’re an Arminian.” It doesn’t. That is
just an older debater’s ploy that if you don’t agree with me then you must be with
the bad guys on the other side. Arminianism on the other hand believes in total
human ability as if sin has no impact on man’s thinking, volition or on his
soul and that man can not only choose all on his own apart from God to be saved
but he can then choose to not to be saved anymore. And he can lose his
salvation. That’s it in something of a nutshell.
Calling is used theologically by
some to indicate unconditional election. Actually the word refers to an
external call or simply what we would call the gospel invitation so that if
someone is invited or asked to trust Christ as their savior (offered the
gospel) that is the gospel call. It’s simply an external offer of the gospel
and not all will respond to that.
Jesus said:
NKJ Matthew 22:14 "For many are called, but few are
chosen."
Chosen there is the same word that
is used. It’s a word for election. So it’s used of that external call which
goes to saved and unsaved (those who will reject it) alike. But then it is also
used in other passages to refer exclusively to those who have responded to that
gospel invitation. So it becomes a synonym for those who are believers. So the
verse says that those who are called (that is those who are believers, those
who have responded to the gospel call) may receive the promise of eternal
inheritance.
I pointed out last time that several
places in Hebrews we see this connection between a promise which focuses on a
future plan and future fulfillment and inheritance; that these terms pop up
together quite frequently. So the bottom line here is that because of what
Christ did as mediator of the New Covenant, we have on the basis of His
sacrifice a new promise. A promise is associated with the covenant. That
promise relates to our future, our eternal inheritance.
So I retranslated the verse because
of some technical problems in the Greek:
So that those who are called (that is, those who are believers) may
receive the promise of the eternal inheritance, a death having come about for
the redemption of the transgressions of the first covenant.
So the focus here is on “we’re
saved”, but for a purpose. You’re not saved so you can go to heaven. You’re not
saved so that you can be saved in time.
Those are secondary. There is a future plan that God has for us and that
all of human history is moving toward the Millennial Kingdom which is really
the first 1,000 years of eternity. We’re moving towards this future fulfillment
in the kingdom but as God is taking us in the direction of ultimate
fulfillment, it’s not just sitting on a cloud somewhere with angel wings
strumming a harp and that somehow for millions and millions and billions of
years that’s all we’re going to do. I think that what we’re going to see when
we hit eternity is so far beyond anything that any human being could possibly
comprehend. We are just not told because human vocabulary can’t grasp it.
But when we look at what we see when
we look at how God created man in the perfect environment of the garden is that
man is given responsibility. He’s given an entire planet with all these natural
resources to learn about, to develop. Man is a creature designed to think,
designed to learn, designed to interact with the environment around him. I
think that tells us something about what eternity is going to be like.
So we are being prepared today for
that future that God has for us. So we constantly need to remember that we’re
living today in light of eternity, which means the decisions we make today
develop our capacity and ability for what we’re going to do in the future.
Now how many of us have thought back
to when we were in junior high or high school or college or for some of us even
after college and said, “You know, I just didn’t realize what life was all
about. I somehow woke up when I was 28 or 30 or 35 or 55 and realized what life
was going to be all about. I was just there through junior high or high school.
I wish I could go back and really learn what I was being taught because I
wasn’t mature enough or hadn’t snapped to the fact that this was preparing me
for the future and I sure wish I had learned that better when I had the
opportunity.”
That’s sort of the way our Christian
life is. We are going through this training process to learn the Word now to
let it become so much part of our souls that it dominates everything that we
think about and all of our decision making so that we’re in this training
process so that we pop out the other end after the rapture, resurrection
whatever occurs and we’re able to live, function, decide, operate in the
Millennial Kingdom because our soul has been trained for the way God does
things. We don’t want to end up being disappointed by it.
“I just wish I had spent more time
going to Bible class instead of staying at home doing whatever or working but
my emphasis was on the Word of God and getting trained”, which is the focal
point of the local church ministry.
One of the key verses that people go
to and that you frequently find in every doctrinal statement you read from
almost every church two key verses. One is Matthew 28:19-20, which is the great
commission.
NKJ Matthew 28:19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all the
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit,
NKJ Matthew 28:20 "teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you;
and lo, I am with you always, even to
the end of the age." Amen.
Then the other is in Ephesians
4:11-12 dealing with the purpose of the church that gifted men (men with
spiritual gifts)…
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,
Now that phrase is really important.
That word to “equip” the saints for the work of the ministry is a training
term. To equip somebody for a task means to educate them, to train them, to
prepare them so that when they are not in the classroom anymore, they can then
engage in the realities of life on the basis of what they have learned in the
classroom. So that the role of the pastor is not the role of the CEO, which is
one of the models that you see out there that is typically taught in seminaries
today. It’s not the role of the grand encourager who is always there to smile
and encourage people. These may be parts of the mosaic that makes up a pastor’s
mission, but his primary mission is to train, to equip, to prepare people for
the issues of life by drilling them on the doctrines of the Word of God so that
they think differently from the way they did before they were saved so.
So the role of the pastor is to
equip, to train people. A lot of folks just don’t want to be trained. They want
to come to church and they want to feel good. They want to hear positive-motivational type messages; but
they don’t want to be trained. It’s a lot easier to go to a pep rally than it
is to go to football practice. It’s a lot easier to sit in the stands and to
watch the military parades go by and to cheer the troops than it is to go
through boot camp, Airborne School or Ranger School. It’s that old Marine Corps
ad – the Few, the Proud, the Marines. That’s what God is looking for as
the cadre of believers is this unique group of people who He has saved and
sanctified and given everything for that are going to become the cadre of His
ruling administration during the Millennial Kingdom. That’s what we’re being
trained for. That’s what we’ve been called for. That’s why you were saved. Not
just so that you don’t go to the Lake of Fire, not just so God can have the
wonderful joy of your wonderful beautiful personality in heaven for eternity;
but so that you can serve Him and carry out all of those responsibilities that
God is going to have for us in our post-rapture, post-resurrection life.
So when we get into this issue of
inheritance that’s what that focuses on is that future inheritance that we
have. But there are problems with understanding this that people have because
there are those who on the one hand think that the Bible says that everybody
gets the same inheritance. Then there are those on the other hand who say, everybody
is going to have certain things in common. Everybody is going to have a
resurrection body. Everybody is going to have a perfect happiness. There’s not
going to be any sorrow, tears, pain all of those things will have passed away.
There’s no disease. You’re going to have a unique resurrection body. You’re
going to be in the presence of God and have access to Him. You’re going to be
in heaven and you’re not going to be in the Lake of Fire. What could be wrong
with that? I used to always cringe when I would hear people say, and I had
several who said this in my first church which was a good learning experience
for a young pastor: “Oh, but I don’t care if I’m in the slums of heaven as long
as I’m there.”
In other words I’m going to justify
being lazy, unmotivated and not positive to God’s Word because I’m going to be
in heaven so I’ll just go the ghetto.
Thank you as long as I’m in heaven.”
It shows a complete unwillingness to
recognize what God is saving us for. It’s absolutely no capacity, no
understanding. It’s not even rising to the level of mediocrity. It’s the
expectation of the lowest kind – as long as I’m there.
But we are to move towards
inheritance. So we’re going to get into the Doctrine of Inheritance. A key
verse for this is Colossians 3:23-24 which is a great verse to understand. Paul
says:
NKJ Colossians 3:23 And whatever you do,
Now “whatever” is one of those broad
terms that doesn’t leave anything out. Whatever you do – that includes
how you work at the office, how you work at home, what you do in your free
time, what you do at church, what you do when you’re all by yourself, what you
do when you’re in school in the classroom.
do it heartily,
Whatever you do, work it with all
your heart. That means focus on it and do your best.
as to the Lord and not to men,
Don’t think about the fact that
you’re doing this for that lousy boss who always takes credit for what you do
and who never gives you any credit or any praise. You’re working as unto the
Lord and not as unto men.
NKJ Colossians 3:24 knowing that from the Lord
This is a causal phrase –
because you know something. I ought to go through this sometime and figure out
how many times you have a causal participle or a causal knowledge clause in the
New Testament in the epistles – because you know something, because you
know something not because you feel something; not because you’ve been
motivated for something, but because you know something. You have to learn
something before you can apply it. To learn things takes time. It takes effort.
It takes discipline. It takes commitment to the process.
you will
receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.
Now an inheritance that’s a reward
is different from salvation which is a gift. Salvation is a free gift to people
who simply believe in Jesus as their Savior. They don’t do anything for it. They simply believe that Jesus
died on the cross for their sins and they are given eternal life. They are
given this package of grace blessings,
NKJ Ephesians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in
the heavenly places in Christ,
We haven’t even begun to touch on
all of the things that God has blessed us with. But those were all given to us
as a free gift. We didn’t do anything to earn them or to deserve them. That’s
different from an inheritance. An inheritance comes as a reward to those who
work, to those who do all things as unto the Lord, to those who mature in their
spiritual lives. So this sets the stage for understanding that part of
inheritance is not a free gift but is something that is given on the basis of
our maturation, our growth, our capacity to use it; to experience it and to
carry out those responsibilities.
So we’ll start looking at the basic
words that are used.
I’m going to look at three verses to emphasize a couple of points. All
of this is all under point 1, trying to understand the basic meaning of the
vocabulary. Exodus 34:9 - Moses is speaking and he is speaking to God.
NKJ Exodus 34:9 Then he said, "If now I have found grace in Your
sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people; and pardon
our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your inheritance.
So if God is going to take Israel, take the Jews as His inheritance,
does anybody die in order for Him to get the property? No. That’s where you see
the root meaning of this word as a possession, not involving the death and
transfer of property from one person to another.
Now the next verse to look at is Numbers 14:24. To understand Numbers 14
we have to understand the background for this. This comes right after the event
that’s described in Numbers 13 related to the Jewish failure at Kadesh-Barnea. Kadesh-Barnea
was located south of Israel, south of the land of Canaan. It was to have been
the original jumping off spot for the conquest of the land after the Exodus
generation came out of Egypt. After they came out of Egypt, they spent the
first year at Mt. Sinai which is somewhere I believe in the center part of the
Sinai Peninsula, not the traditional site down on the southern tip of the Sinai
Peninsula which is too far from Kadesh-Barnea to fit the biblical guidelines
for how long it took that number of people (3 million people) to travel at the
rate of about 8 to 10 miles a day. It was too far away. So they made it in a
rather short time.
They came to Kadesh-Barnea and God said: “We’re going to send out a LRP
(That’s a long range reconnaissance patrol) into the land in order to see the
layout of the land.”
They weren’t going to find out how or if they could conquer the
land. They interpreted the command
wrongly, which is a great passage for teaching the importance of correct
interpretation. Eight of the spies interpreted the command wrong and so they
responded in fear. Two of the spies recognized God had already given them the
land. They were just to check it out and to see what the layout was so that
when they went into the land they would be able to understand where they were
going and what the disposition of the enemy was. That was Caleb and Joshua. They
trusted God.
When they got back from exploring the land going throughout the land ten
of the 12 came back and said, “Well, we can’t do it. There are too many people.
There are giants in the land. They live in these tremendously walled cities. We
just don’t have the resources to conquer.”
But two of the 12, Joshua and Caleb, said, “It doesn’t matter how many
people there are or how big they are or what kind of military technology they
have; all we need is the Lord. The Lord is on our side, then we’re going to
win.”
They understood the principle that the battle is the Lord’s. So God is
going to reward Caleb and Joshua. But there is a loss of reward for everybody
else. They don’t enter the rest. We went through this in Hebrews 3 and 4. They
gave up their inheritance when they disobeyed God and God prohibited them from
entering into the land and taking possession of the land. This is how God
expresses it in regard to Caleb. He says in Numbers 14:24:
NKJ Numbers 14:24 "But My servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit in him
That’s not saying that the Jews were demon possessed and he’s got the
Holy Spirit in him. Here the word spirit has the idea of an attitude of a way
of thinking, a mentality.
and has followed Me fully, I will bring into the land
where he went, and his descendants shall inherit it.
That’s that idea of possession. They own the land. They will dispossess
the Canaanites, and they will inherit it.
Now the next passage we’re going to look at is a passage in Lamentations
5:2. Here’s the historical background. In 586 BC the Chaldean army, the
neo-Babylonian empire under Nebuchadnezzar, invaded Israel or the Southern
Kingdom of Judah rather for the third time. They had done it in 605. They invaded again around 592. In 586
he’s now going to crush these rebellious stiff-necked Jews in Judah and he’s
going to defeat them and when he does he conquers Jerusalem and destroys the Temple.
After this Jeremiah writes the book of Lamentations where he laments, where he
grieves over the loss of the land and the fact that they no longer have a
temple and they no longer have possession of the land that God gave them. He
expresses it in Lamentations 5:2.
NKJ Lamentations 5:2 Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens
Not Star Trek type aliens, but foreigners.
And our houses to foreigners.
This shows that inheritance can be lost. Inheritance can be taken away.
Just because something is an inheritance (A possession is promised.) doesn’t
mean that it can’t be lost or jeopardized by disobedience. We have two
examples: the Exodus generation and the generation of the Babylonian captivity
jeopardized and lost their possession through disobedience to God.
So we can say four things about the meaning of the concept of keronomos or nahala in the Old Testament.
1.
First of all
it’s a birthright which one enters into by virtue of sonship. A couple of
passages, Galatians 4:30 and Hebrews 1:4.
2.
It’s property
that’s received as a gift in contrast to a reward. Now the point that I’m making
in both of these is that there are aspects of our inheritance that are ours by
virtue of regeneration alone. By virtue of birth we have access to a certain
possession, a certain inheritance. Now sonship (it’s terrible we live in a time
we have to say this is not a sexist term) is a legal term under inheritance law
in the Roman Empire and that a first born son is the one who gets the blessing
and the one who has the greatest position in law in relationship to
inheritance. So it doesn’t matter in terms of the application of this whether
you are male or female. We all have access to this kind of sonship.
3.
It’s property
that can be received on condition of obedience to certain conditions. You see
the last two points here shift the emphasis to something that is earned or
something that is given as a reward that is not just automatically received by
virtue of birth. It can be property received on condition of obedience to
certain conditions.
4.
Reward based on
meeting certain conditions and following certain activities.
NKJ Hebrews 1:2 has in these last days
spoken to us by His
Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made
the worlds;
So Christ is the heir of all things and that is His future role. What we
learned when we studied Hebrews 1 is that when Jesus Christ in hypostatic union
by virtue of His humanity when He lived His life in obedience to God He then
qualified for this inheritance. It wasn’t simply a birth issue. It is a qualification
and reward issue because this isn’t something - the inheritance to all things
isn’t what He gets because He is the Second Person of the Trinity. It’s what He
gets because of His fulfillment of His mission as the greater Son of David.
Well, wait a minute. In Your deity, you’re omniscient. But He’s not
talking as God there. He’s talking as man and in His role as the Son of
Man. So Jesus is qualified because
He’s impeccable in His humanity. He never, ever sinned. He never relied upon
His deity to get through the problem.
He never disobeyed God. He was 100% obedient.
This impeccability is developed. It is a process. He goes through the
same learning process that you and I go through. He had to learn
Scripture. Luke 2:52 says that He
grew in wisdom and in stature with both God and men. He goes through the basic
growth process that we all did. He had to in His humanity learn the Scriptures.
He had to memorize the Scriptures. He had to learn how to pray. He had to learn
how to talk. He had to learn how to walk. He had to learn how to eat. He had to
learn how to do all of those things just as we do. He had to learn how to apply
the Scripture. The only difference
is He didn’t have a sin nature sort of gumming up the works and making it
difficult to learn. He goes through that whole process and He has to go through
the same testing, suffering, and adversity as everybody else.
I would think (but this is probably my sin nature) that if I had 8 or 9
brothers and sisters that I had to put up with and I didn’t have a sin nature
and they did, that it would be a pretty difficult thing to deal with. Of course
it was probably hard on their side to because their mother kept saying, “Why don’t
you do it like Jesus did. He’s perfect.” Maybe you were a third or fourth child
and you had a perfect older sibling and it really wasn’t perfect. But in this
case you have an older sibling that is perfect. So Jesus had to learn obedience
through the things that He suffered. He had to go through the learning process
and He had to go through adversity where He learned to apply the Word. He
learned to rely on the Holy Spirit and He learned to follow God’s pattern. This
is seen in a couple of verses. Hebrews 2:10 and Hebrews 5:8
Hebrews 2:10 says:
NKJ Hebrews 2:10 For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are
all things,
See that emphasizes His deity.
in bringing
That’s His ultimate destiny.
many sons
There’s that term again. It refers to male and female.
to glory,
Phase 3.
to make the captain of their salvation perfect through
sufferings.
I do this every time I read this verse out of context.
The “Him” there isn’t the Son. The “Him” there is the
Father.
NKJ Hebrews 2:10 For it was fitting for Him,
The Father.
for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to
glory,
That’s God’s plan of salvation.
to make the captain of their salvation perfect.
That is to bring to maturity. That’s Jesus.
through sufferings
So God’s plan was to take the Lord Jesus Christ in His humanity through
various stages of adversity so that He could learn to apply the Word.
NKJ Hebrews 5:8 though He was a Son, yet He
learned obedience by the things which He suffered.
So He had to go through all of this to be perfect, to be sinless, to be
living in the midst of all the arrogance, all of the stupidity, all of the
legalism, all of the distortion of the Law, all of the illiteracy about the
Scriptures that He about the Scriptures that He had to deal with just shows how
patient and gracious He really was. He had to handle all of that by relying
upon the Holy Spirit.
NKJ Psalm 2:8 Ask of
Me, and I will give You The nations for Your inheritance,
Now nobody had to die for Jesus to get that
inheritance.
“I know He had to die.” I know somebody’s thinking that. Jesus died and
He gets the inheritance, but you don’t die to get your inheritance. That’s the
wrong way of looking at this. There is a death there, but that death is not
what transfers property.
And the
ends of the earth for Your
possession.
Of course Hebrews 1:2 which we looked at already that He’s appointed
heir of all things.
Now we’ll stop here and we’ll come back next time to continue to look at
this and to pull this Doctrine of Inheritance together because once we get
through this there is a key problem that we’re going to have to address and
that really helps us understand the mission that God has for us. Just as Jesus
had a mission and Jesus’ mission was to grow in His maturity so that He would
be qualified, we are to grow in our maturity through learning the Word,
learning to rely upon God, trusting in Him so that we then become qualified for
our inheritance and to rule as joint heirs with Christ in the kingdom.
Let’s bow our head in closing prayer.