Confession, Cleansing, and Inheritance. Hebrews
9:13-15, John 13:1-11
Hebrews Lesson 153
Hebrews 9:13 NASB “For if the
blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have
been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh,
Note that a key word that we find in those
two verses has to do with cleansing—sprinkling the unclean, sanctifying or
setting apart for the purifying. The cleansing in v. 14 is talking about
positional cleansing. We see a couple of different categories of cleansing in
those verses. We see the ritual cleansing category that relates to the Old
Testament sacrificial system and then we see a cleansing that relates to
positional cleansing in. Positional cleansing has to do with what happens to
every believer at the instant of salvation. The work of Christ is applied to us
so that we are positionally cleansed as part of our adoption into God’s royal
family. It is part of the whole package of salvation. We see the imputation of
Christ’s righteousness and we are then justified. We are forgiven positionally
of our sins—the other side of the coin to cleansing. There is another category
to that, and that is that there is a level of forgiveness that is true for
every human being: the cancelling of the debt which occurred at the cross
(Colossians 2:12-14). That is a legal forgiveness. Then there is positional
forgiveness which occurs at the moment of salvation, and that is equivalent to
positional cleansing.
The purpose for that is to serve the
living God. That is important to understand because there has been so much
confusion from different Christians over the years about forgiveness and
cleansing and confession of sin. The purpose for positional cleansing is to
serve Christ, to serve God. The totality of our life is to be worship. This is
what Paul talks about in Romans 12:1—“present yourselves a living sacrifice,
which is your reasonable service.” We are saved to serve.
Hebrew 9:15 NASB “For this
reason He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that, since a death has taken
place for the redemption of the transgressions that were {committed} under the
first covenant, those who have been called [believers] may receive the promise
of the eternal inheritance.” The idea of inheritance is a possession. We have
seen that there are two categories of inheritance for the church age believer.
There is one area of inheritance that is true for every single believer. That
is described in Romans chapter eight as being an heir of God. There are certain
realities that are ours throughout eternity that are true for every believer.
We are going tom have a resurrection body; we are going to be in glory; there
will not longer be a sin nature, and there will be no more sorrow, no more
tears, no more pain, the old things are passed away. Then there is a second
category of inheritance: being a joint heir with Christ. That relates to our
future ruling and reigning responsibilities with Him that are part also of this
category of serving the living God—not just serving today but serving in the
future. And the life we are living today prepares us for the future. What is
important about this is to understand how cleansing fits within this whole
scenario. And that is related to confession of sin.
Some years ago there developed some
confusion over the whole doctrine of confession of sin and 1 John 1:9. There is
an idea that we don’t have to confess our sins, an argument from 1 John 1:7
that the blood of Christ continually cleanses from all sin. But if 1 John 1:7
says we don’t have to confess our sin why does John tells us two verses later
that we need to confess our sins to be cleansed? It just doesn’t make sense.
One argument heard is: if confession is so important why is it only mentioned
one time in the New Testament? The idea of confession using that one word is
only mentioned one time, in 1 John 1:9, but that is not the only time
confession is mentioned. But the significance is not in the confession; the
significance is in the cleansing. When we take the focus in 1 John 1:9 off the
verb to confess and we put it on the forgiving and cleansing aspect, then take
it and plug that idea and the whole flow of biblical teaching in, then we
realise where the pattern is. Confession of sin fits within that. There are
examples in the Old Testament of confession of sin, there are examples in the
Gospels and in the epistles; and throughout all of this runs the doctrinal
thread of cleansing. And that really is the vital thing. When a believer sins
he becomes experientially unclean and there has to be a cleansing that takes
place for restoration to fellowship and the resumption of going forward in the
Christian life. All of this is connected, we see, even in the context of
Hebrews chapter nine with the use of these words that emphasise the importance
of cleansing and perfection.
When Jesus taught His disciples about this He
did it by means of an object lesson. He doesn’t come out and teach them in an
overt abstract doctrine of confession and cleansing, He does it by illustrating
it through something that He does. A lot of times we will hear that the John 13
passage is teaching about being a servant. That is not what it is teaching.
Jesus may exhibit something about being the servant when He washes the
disciples’ feet, but that is not the doctrine that is being taught here. What
we have to understand when we approach John 13 is where this fits within the
panorama and scope of Jesus’ life and ministry and where this fits within the
Gospel of John. And that is not that hard to do. John writes his Gospel and
says, “These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ
[Messiah] and that believing you might have life in His name.” The “these” that
he is talking about in John 20 relates to the plural noun in the previous verse
where the reference is to Thomas’s doubting the resurrection. Jesus appears in
His resurrection body and says to Thomas, “Put your hands in the nail prints
and my side.” John comments in John 20:30 that the resurrection is one of many
other signs that Jesus provided. But “these,” the signs John writes about, are
written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ.
There are seven signs that are given in
the Gospel of John that go up through chapter twelve and then there is an
interlude. Then there is the crucifixion and then the seventh sign, the
resurrection. So something different is happening in John 13-17. What is
happening here is Jesus is having His final meeting with His disciples, His
final instructions session, before He goes to the cross and He begins to teach
them about church age doctrine. He is going to tell them a lot more after the
resurrection but He gives them a tremendous amount of information here, and
this is all just the night before He goes to the cross. It begins with the
Passover supper which would be at sundown on and then they have the Passover
meal, the walk to Gethsemane, and then there are the events in Gethsemane where
He goes off with John and Peter and prays, and then eventually He is arrested.
That is the context, and so we must
understand John 13 as it fits within the context of John 13-17. There is a
progression to His teaching here and this whole section is referred to as the
upper room discourse, even though He is only in the upper room in John 13.
John 13:1 NASB “Now before the
Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would
depart…” The Greek word here is katabaino
[katabainw],
the literal meaning of which is to pass over, to go over, or to leave. It was a
sort of play on words here by John that because it was the feast of the
Passover Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should pass over from this
world to the Father. “… out of this world to the Father, having loved His own
who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
John 13:2 NASB “During supper,
the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, {the son} of
Simon, to betray Him…” It is important to understand that John front
loads the teaching session by giving us a clue about the one who will betray
Jesus. We know who that person is going to be and that there is one person
there who is different from the others. [3] “{Jesus,}
knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had
come forth from God and was going back to God,
What is interesting here is the verb that is used for “washing.” It is related to the word that is used for “basin,” and it indicates a partial washing. The Greek word nipto [niptw] is used almost all the way through here for washing. There is one exception and that is in the earlier part of verse10. nipto has the meaning of a partial washing hands or feet as opposed to taking an entire bath and washing all over. It is the noun form of that word that is translated into the word “basin.” So the concept of a basin is something we would use to just partially wash.
John 13:6 NASB “So He came to
Simon Peter. He said to Him, ‘Lord, do You wash my feet?’”
John 13:8 NASB “Peter said to
Him, ‘Never shall You wash my feet!’…” Jesus answered him, ‘If I do not wash
you, you have no part with Me.’”
All through this segment they have been
using this word nipto for partial
washing. “Jesus answered him, ‘If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.’”
When we read this in English and we read
that word “part” we often read that as if what it is saying is, ‘You have no
role, you don’t really have a place, you won’t be able to participate with me
if I do not wash you.’ That is not what this is saying; it is more profound
than that. Jesus is saying, ‘You won’t have an inheritance with me.’ Put that
into what we saw with the joint heirship with Christ in Romans chapter eight:
we can be joint heirs with Christ if we suffer with Him. We saw that that word
“suffering” is the same word that is used in Hebrews chapter two to relate to
the fact that God the Father in the incarnation took the Son through various tests
so that He could learn obedience to the things that He suffered. And we are not
talking about simply going through adversity but every situation we go through
in life is some sort of test that gives us the option to either obey God and do
it His way or do it the way we want to do it. So the suffering there had to do
with living in a fallen world and going through the various tests as we grow to
maturity. And Jesus went through that same process. So it is not talking about
suffering as going through some major sufferings in life, it is talking about
that process of growth through handling the tests of growth on the basis of
Bible doctrine.
Jesus qualifies for His inheritance by
going through this suffering. We do the same thing, and He sets the pattern. So
what Jesus is telling Peter is, if you want to qualify for an inheritance with
me through the things that you suffer, as I have suffered, then there has to be
a cleansing process because you are going to fail at times. There has to be a
restoration, there has to be some way to recover from failure, some way to
recover from sin. Jesus didn’t have to use that because Jesus never failed.
Jesus’ heirship is unique but we become joint heirs if we suffer with Him. When
we fail in that process God has provided a grace basis for recovery. That is
what He is illustrating here in terms of the washing. The washing is critical
for inheritance. Jesus is illustrating confession of sin, because confession of
sin is what gets us experiential cleansing. If we don’t confess our sin we
won’t have the experiential cleansing, we’ll stay out of fellowship, continue
to operate on the sin nature, continue to produce human good, we will not go
forward in our Christian life; all we will be doing is producing a lot of
morality, being obedient morally to the Scripture, but it has no spiritual
value because we are still out of fellowship. Confession is what restores us to
fellowship, and it is only those things that we produce in fellowship and the
Holy Spirit is working in and through us (Galatians 5:17) that become the basis
for the rewards at the judgment seat of Christ. It is not done on our own
efforts.
This is the difference between the way we
experience sanctification, spiritual growth, and the way it is presented in a
lot of forms of Christianity and Christian theology. If we go to many churches
we are told to pray, to be involved in Christian service, to memorise Bible
verses, to read our Bible, to witness, and to come to church to worship and all
of these things. But we are never told how to do that in a way that really
pleases God, that it is a production of the Spirit and not a production of our
own flesh and our own natural ability. A Christian who is a believer in the
Lord Jesus Christ, justified, adopted into God’s royal family, can do all of
those things and be out of fellowship. He is doing it in His own power and not
in the power of the Spirit. It is the power of the Spirit that energises the
Christian life. So we have these various commands in the New Testament to walk
by means of the Spirit and it is the Spirit that produces this in us, we are
being filled by means of the Spirit, so that the Spirit becomes the unique
empowerment for the Christian life.
That is what Jesus is teaching His
disciples. At any moment in our life we are either walking by the Spirit or
walking by the flesh. Jesus uses a similar setup in the upper room discourse in
John 15 when He talks about the true vine, about abiding in Him. The concept of
abiding is related to fellowship, and staying in fellowship. The word
translated “abide” is a word that means to stay or to remain. John 15:4 NASB
“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it
abides in the vine, so neither {can} you unless you abide in Me.” We can’t bear
divine good (gold, silver and precious stones) fruit of ourselves, out from the
power of our sin nature. We can’t just go out and do it by being moral. That is
how Christianity is wrongly taught from many pulpits, i.e. you just need to go
do these ten or twenty things, or the disciplines of the Christian life,
whatever they may be. And they are never taught about the power of God the Holy
Spirit that makes the difference between praying by means of the Spirit where
it has real spiritual values and praying that is just in the power of the flesh
that just doesn’t go anywhere and doesn’t have any eternal value whatsoever
because it is fruit that is produced of itself.
John 15:5 NASB “I am the vine,
you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit,
for apart from Me you can do nothing. [6] If anyone does not abide in Me, he is
thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into
the fire and they are burned.” There are consequences. This is not talking
about loss of salvation, it is talking about using the analogy of the pruning
process for a grape vine, about the fact that as a young vine grows the vine
dresser will come along and cut off the little sucker vines that distract away
from the main vine. It is a picture of divine discipline in the life of the
believer. As the vine dresser prunes the plants then the energy is able to go
into the fruit production. So in verse 6 when Jesus talks about someone not
abiding in Him and is cast out as a branch He is talking about divine
discipline. Gathering and throwing into the fire is just what they would do in
the process of pruning the vines.
John 15:7 NASB “If you abide in
Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for
you.” Notice the connection there with God’s Word. It is not just the Spirit of
God; it is also the Word of God. “My words abide in you,” i.e. you are
operating on the Word of God in the framework of fellowship. [8] “My Father is
glorified by this [process of abiding], that you bear much fruit, and {so}
prove to be My disciples.” In Galatians 5:15 the command is: “Love one
another.” Are we able to love our neighbour as ourself? Verse 17 says that this
is done by walking by means of the Spirit, and then in v. 21 Paul talks about
the fruit of the Spirit, and the fruit of the Spirit is love. That is the first
thing he mentions because that is what the context is. The fruit of the Spirit
is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. What is Jesus talking about in John
15? “If you abide in me you will bear much fruit so that you will be my
disciples. What is the characteristic of the disciple? Well, let’s look back at
the context. In chapter 13 Jesus told the disciples, “By this all men will know
that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” It takes us back
to the principle of the foot washing. The foot washing has to do with
forgiveness.
John 13:9 NASB “Simon Peter
said to Him, ‘Lord, {then wash} not only my feet, but also my hands and my
head.’”
This is what Jesus is saying, “He who has bathed,” i.e. the one who has already been bathed (perfect tense, it is completed). That is describing the person who is already saved, positionally cleansed. “… needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean…” And then He shifts to the second person plural. “… and you are clean, but not all {of you.}” He is addressing the group of disciples: “you all are clean”—katharos [kaqaroj]. What He means by that statement is that eleven of the twelve are saved, positionally cleansed, including Peter. But onto all of them are positionally clean because one of them, Judas Iscariot, is an unbeliever and he is about to be possessed by Satan. So Jesus is saying that he who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean. That is that restoration to fellowship that is pictured there.
John 13:11 NASB “For He knew
the one who was betraying Him; for this reason He said, ‘Not all of you are
clean.’”
What this is teaching is the whole principle
of confession of sin. We confess our sins (not for salvation) because after we
are saved we continue to commit sin. This is one of those things that has
plagued Christianity since the beginning of the church: what do you do with
sins after salvation?
Jesus is giving the disciples an object
lesson of a very important truth. It has to do with the necessity of partial
cleansing. There are other allusions to this in the New Testament. James
chapter four is dealing with those who had become involved with mental attitude
sins, and so James confronts them with all of this division and strife within
the congregation. In verses 1-6 he deals with this and points out that this is
the result of friendship with the world and arrogance. Then in verse 7 he begins
the solution.
James 4:7 NASB “Submit
therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Before we
confess our sin there is a recognition that we need to get right with God
again. This is basically what James is talking about. We need to submit to get
back under God’s authority. [8] “Draw near to God and He will draw near to
you…” Well how do we do that? “…Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify
your hearts, you double-minded.” This is the same principle, the same verbiage:
cleanse and purify. There needs to be this post salvation purification and that
is what restores us to fellowship with God. This is what is meant by humbling
ourselves under the hand of God.
The whole idea of inheritance fits into
this because as a believer we can do good things—moral things, spiritually
obedient things—all in the power of the flesh. We can read our Bible, memorise
Scripture, go to Bible class, witness, etc. in the power of the flesh. But it
has no eternal value because it is something we are doing. As Jesus said in
John 15 the branch cannot produce fruit of its own, it has to abide in Him. So
when we are out of fellowship, when we quit walking by the Spirit and start
walking according to the flesh, how do we recover? There has to be a way of
going from not abiding to abiding, and from not walking by the Spirit to
walking by the Spirit; and there has to be something that deals with the sin
that occurs that got us out of fellowship. And that is the principle of
cleansing, of confession of sin which means only to admit or to acknowledge our
sin to God.
The point in the Christian life isn’t to
confess our sins. So many people have this misconception that somehow the key
to spiritual growth is confession of sin. The key to spiritual growth is abiding
in Christ, walking by the Spirit; not confession. Confession just gets us back
to abiding, to a place where we can abide, to a position of walking by the
Spirit.
Two things tend to take place with a
person. You have a licentious person who doesn’t want to admit that gossip is
really a problem for him, and even if it is he gets a lot of joy out of gossip.
He says, Oh well Jesus paid for it on the cross, I’ll just confess it later.
That is the kind of person who is just flipping the light switch all the time,
in and out of fellowship. Then there is another kind of person whose area of
weakness is worry. They know that their job might be on the line and they have
already seen their retirement plan go to almost nothing, and they are worried.
That is the area of weakness of their sin nature. So one minute they are
worrying, and then they say, you know I have to trust God. They confess their
sin, and then two seconds later they worry again. Mechanically they are no
different from the gossip, but the difference is that the licentious person
just keeps flipping the light switch and never realises that the purpose is to
leave the light switch on for a while; whereas the person who keeps getting
overwhelmed or tempted with the sin of worry is fighting it. Maybe after some
time they reach a point where they say they are going to put it in the Lord’s
hands and leave it there. And five or six seconds goes by before they get their
eyes back on the worry and flip the light switch off again. But there is
progress. It takes time. It may take weeks, months or years but it demands the
discipline of learning how to recover and how to walk by means of the Spirit.
It is that walk by means of the Spirit that provides that real ongoing
production that is the basis for inheritance.
In Revelation 2:11 there is a warning to
the second church, the church at Smyrna. “He who has an ear, let him hear what
the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt by the
second death.” He who overcomes is a reference to the believer who is growing,
who overcomes in the area of spiritual growth. It is very clear from other
passages, for example in Revelation chapter twenty, that the second death is
the lake of fire. As a believer you will not end up in the lake of fire but you
can be hurt by the second death. That is what we have seen in Revelation 21:7,
8 NASB “He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be
his God and he will be My son.
When we put all of this together we
realise that confession of sin is not just something we do before Bible class.
That is merely a pedagogical tool to reinforce for everyone in the congregation
the importance of confession of sin. It is not just some mechanistic thing. It
is a vital part of our relationship to God where we are admitting to God where
you have sinned, recognising those sins were paid for by Christ on the cross so
that now I am cleansed again, I recover the filling of the Holy Spirit, am
walking by the Spirit, so that I can move forward and can grow. Because without
that we can’t serve God. Just as the Old Testament priest couldn’t serve
without that experiential cleansing we can’t serve. And we are saved to serve;
we are not saved to confess sins. So the issue is growing, abiding, walking;
not just confessing.