Hebrews Lesson 160 May 21, 2009
NKJ Psalm 119:11 Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You!
We are in Hebrews 10 and we are
coming to the end of the teaching section. As I’ve stated, there are 5 basic
sections in Hebrews going back to the outline we haven’t looked at in a long
time. The 4th section began with chapter 7:1 and extends down
through 10:39, the end of chapter 10. This is really the centerpiece of the
book of Hebrews, this whole epistle. If it’s the center that means that that
which the writer is writing to communicate is conveyed most heavily and most
directly in this section. As we come to the end of the teaching section in
chapter 10, he comes to a conclusion. That’s why he has a “therefore” in verse
19.
NKJ Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood
of Jesus,
That “therefore” brings us to the
conclusion of the teaching section in the centerpiece of Hebrews. What this is
going to tell us is that everything has sort of built to these three commands
that you find in verses 19 through 25.
This is going to be followed by a
warning section which many people think is one of the
most difficult warning passages of those in Hebrews. Then we get into the fifth
section beginning in chapter 11 through the end of the epistle. That has two
exhortation sections with it.
Now last time we sort of hit the
last 6 verses here, 7 verses, and did sort of a flyover. Tonight I want to get
into a little more detail and to address some of the specifics that we find in
this particular section.
So he begins with this conclusion.
NKJ Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brethren
He uses an adverbial participle of
cause here, a present active participle of echo
meaning to have or to hold or to have something as your possession. As an
adverbial participle it’s going to modify a main verb; but the main verbs don’t
come until verse 22, verse 23, and verse 24. There are three main verbs. This
is one long sentence from 19 through 25.
As I teach pastors on exegesis what
you look for to get the main idea are the main clauses, the independent clause
or clauses in a sentence. That tells you what the writer is talking about. Even
if you have a long sentence (and there are a lot of additional ideas that are piled
onto that one main idea), it’s important to keep your eye on the ball and
remember that everything else just feeds to and points to those main finite
verbs. Those main finite verbs are the ones that are translated as a first
person imperative.
For those of you who like to learn
about these things, that’s called a cohortative. It’s
a first person imperative. In English we just have a second person imperative:
“You do this.” There’s also a third person imperative. That is the idea: “Let
them do” or “Let him do something.” It’s usually translated with that idea of
“let.” That to me always seemed kind of wimpy. It should be: “He must do this”
or “He should do that.” When you have a first person imperative, it’s: “We
should do this” or “We must do this.” I really like the “must” because it makes
it stronger. It seems have more of the imperatival idea than “let us” because
that seems to communicate a little less strength and power to the imperative. It
is a strong imperative here.
So the participle in verse 19 is
adverbial which means it modifies those three verbs in 22, 23, 24. Let us draw near, or we must or we should draw near, we
must or we should hold fast, or we must or we should consider or think about
one another. Those are the three main verbs in the three main clauses in this
lengthy sentence.
So he starts off with this adverbial
participle of cause and it’s going to have two objects to it because it’s not
stated even though it is in your English. In verse 21 you will have the word
“having” in italics in verse 21.
NKJ Hebrews 10:21 and having a
High Priest over the house of God,
But he’s just going to emphasize
that these two reasons that underlie the three commands. He restates these
reasons and they summarize everything he’s said in chapter 7, chapter 8,
chapter 9, and so far in chapter 10 which focuses on the complete and finished
work of Christ on the cross which fulfills all the typology and all the
symbolism and all the sacrifices that they had observed in the Old Testament. As
he said again and again and again, those were repeated. The high priest had to go through those
sacrifices even for his own sin. They were insufficient, incomplete; but the
death once and for all (which is a word repeated many times in this section)
death of Christ on the cross, satisfied the Father and solved the sin problem
completely for all time.
So he comes to a conclusion because
of that. Here’s how I’ve synthesized or summarized these 7 verses.
Therefore brethren, because we have boldness to enter the holiest (that
is into the presence of God in the heavenly temple) by the death of Jesus by a
new and living way which He set apart for us through the veil that is His
flesh; we must draw near, we must hold fast and we must think carefully about
rousing one another to love and good works.
That’s what he’s saying and it all
flows out of – now that we understand what Jesus did on the cross and all
the dimensions of it. It’s taken us a year to go through chapter 9 and chapter
10 dealing with all of that and see the complexity of what God accomplished on
the cross through the death of Christ and the complexity of the sin problem. Now
there is an imperative that flows out of that for believers in terms of their
spiritual life and specifically for these Jewish believers who are about ready
to abandon Christianity and go back to Judaism. This is his point. This is the
focal point of why this letter to the Hebrews is written is to tell them that
they need to draw near to God in fellowship, in daily fellowship, walking with
Him and holding fast to the truth of God’s Word and not giving up on doctrine,
not thinking that well, doctrine really doesn’t work. They have to think
carefully about how to encourage each other because we’re all in a spiritual
battle. We’re not isolated. We’re not out there as individual soldiers with no
interrelationship and no support team. That’s the background for understanding
this.
He says in verse 19:
NKJ Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the
Holiest by the blood of Jesus,
NKJ Hebrews 10:20 by a new and living way which He consecrated for us,
Or as I translated it earlier,
“which He set apart for us by virtue of His death.” That’s the Greek word hagiosmos related
to holiness, sanctification. All of those words indicate being set apart by
God.
…as the
first fruits of His resurrection as well.
through the veil, that is, His flesh,
NKJ Hebrews 10:21 and having a High Priest over
the house of God,
Now what does the “house of God”
mean? Your first blush response to that might be well, house of God –
he’s talking about Church Age believers, so we’re talking about the body of
Christ. Some people think that; but it’s not talking about the body of Christ
here. Actually the phrase “house of God” is used 4 times in the New Testament. It’s
used in this passage, and it’s used three times in the gospels: in Matthew
12:4, Mark 2:26 and Luke 6:4. In each of those other 3 uses, it clearly refers
to the Temple. It refers to the Temple in Jerusalem because it was still
standing at that time. It’s still standing at the time the writer of Hebrews is
writing.
But in the context of chapters 9 and
10, we haven’t been talking about the earthly temple. We’ve been talking about
how the furniture in the Tabernacle reflects the furniture in the heavenly
temple which is the dwelling place of God in heaven and that it is Jesus Christ
as the High Priest who entered into the presence of God in the heavenly temple
and by virtue of His death He has been able to enter into the heavenly temple. So
this is talking about His function as High Priest at the right hand of God the Father
in the heavenly temple. This is not over the body of Christ or the church or
the local church or anything like that. It is that He has now opened up a way
into the very presence of God in the heavenly temple.
Then we come to verse 22, which
brings us to the first of these three present active subjunctive verbs. There
are three of them: let us draw near, let us hold fast and let us consider.
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance
of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies
washed with pure water.
Now this first verb is from the verb
proserchomai
which in its more prosaic use (It’s more common use)
simply means to come to someplace. Erchomai is the Greek verb for coming, and pros has that idea
of to or toward someplace. So it simply means to come someplace or to go
someplace. But it is often used in the New Testament with the idea of closeness
or fellowship or worship. Some of the places where it’s used with a little more
of that idea are Matthew 8:2, 9:20, 26:7. Acts 7:31 and 8:29 have a little more
of that idea of closeness or fellowship or worship.
Frequently in the gospels it’s used
to speak of somebody coming to ask Jesus something. It has the idea of a
teaching situation or a learning situation. Some of the places where it’s used
like that are in Matthew 8:5, 19, 9:14, 28, 13:10, 36;
15:30, 20:20. Matthew uses this verb a lot. It is a long list in a concordance
of all the uses there. There are many, many more. I just selected those few as
representative.
Paul uses the word one time in all
of his epistles. He doesn’t use it but once. There he uses it in a sort of an
unusual sense. The main idea is something comes to something. So he uses it to
talk about someone’s words must conform to truth, to doctrine. That’s the idea
of “must come to the truth.” So he uses it in a little bit of an idiomatic way
in one verse in the pastorals.
But the writer of Hebrews uses the
word 7 times.
This is one of those words that
people would key in on and say, “See, this isn’t typical of Paul. Paul only
uses this word one time and yet the writer of Hebrews uses it 7 times. So this
would indicate that Paul was not the author of Hebrews because you have
different vocabulary in Hebrews than you do in the Pauline epistles.”
So this would be one example that
they might use to argue for their particular case. Of course nobody knows who
wrote the book of Hebrews other than God and seminary students who study too
late at night and stress out and have a little break with reality. That
happened one time a few years before I started seminary. Some student called
Dr. Walvoord up about 3 o’clock in the morning saying
that he had finally discovered who wrote the book of Hebrews. He had the next
semester off for rest and recovery.
Now when we look at the grammar of
this word, it’s important to understand it because a subjunctive mood verb is a
verb that usually emphasizes probability. And yet it is often used as an
idiomatic way of expressing an imperative in the first person. This is called a
hortatory use of the subjunctive.
Hortatory is from the same word as exhort. It
has that idea of expressing a first person command. So it would be translated
we should do this, we must do this. The author sees himself as part of the
group that needs to do this. He’s not saying you need to do this. He’s saying
we all need to do this. There is a danger that threatens every one of us
– the writer himself included - to fall away from the fulfillment of
these commands.
But these commands are essential for
any soldier fighting in a unit in a battle in order to be able to successfully
fulfill the mission – to use a military analogy. If you’re in sports, it’s
a team playing operation and there’s an emphasis on the teamwork that must be
developed by the members of the team in order to win the game. The body of
Christ as we’ll see is not made up of a bunch of individuals who are doing
their own thing.
We have a problem in this country
because of our national psyche one might say. We have an emphasis on
individualism. Rugged
individualism is at the heart of Americanism. But rugged individualism is not
at the heart of the spiritual life. Only you can live your spiritual life. You
do not live your spiritual life in isolation from other members of the body of
Christ.
So the first person plural
emphasizes this teamwork which will come to a head in the third command when he
says that we are to give serious reflection to how to stimulate or stir up love
and good works among other believers. So this is a very important term. Well,
when we start off here we read:
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having
our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure
water.
The idea here is very similar to one
we’ve already seen him state in this epistle that we find back in Hebrews
4:14-16. These verses (at least 4:16) are verses that are familiar to you.
There we read:
NKJ Hebrews 4:14 Seeing then that we have a
great High Priest who has passed through the heavens,
The word there for “seeing” is used
sort of idiomatically for knowing: because we know that we have a great High Priest.
Notice the emphasis on Jesus’ role as High Priest.
Jesus the Son
of God, let us hold fast our confession.
See that’s that same imperatival use
of the subjunctive mood.
let us hold
fast
or, we should or we must hold fast….
our confession.
NKJ Hebrews 4:15 For we do not have a High Priest who cannot
sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet
without sin.
Then in verse 16:
NKJ Hebrews 4:16 Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace,
that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
That is the same idea that we have
in verse 22: Let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. Let
us draw near to God, not to one another here. It is drawing near to God. That’s
the same idea of Hebrews 4:16.
NKJ Hebrews 4:16 Let us therefore come boldly
Or we should or we must come boldly.
That’s the idea again that we have from verse 19.
NKJ Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the
Holiest by the blood of Jesus,
We have this confidence because of
the death of Christ and what He did for us. So we are challenged and commanded
to come boldly to God’s throne that...
NKJ Hebrews 4:16 Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain
mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Verse 14 reiterates the same point. He’s
going to state in the second command to hold fast the confession of our hope.
But verse 14 uses a little different word for it.
NKJ Hebrews 4:14 Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the
heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession
It’s the Greek word krateo. Again,
it’s the present active subjunctive. It means to be strong, to take possession
of something, to hold something, to grasp it or to seize it. It is a synonym
for the expression that’s used in verse 23 – in our passage.
NKJ Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who
promised is faithful.
But the word we have is katecho, not krateo. So it’s a different word,
but they have the same idea of grabbing onto something and holding on to it for
all you’re worth and for no reason whatsoever are you going to give it up. No
matter what the pressure is, no matter what the circumstances you face, not
matter how overwhelmed you may be with negative emotions of defeat or
impossibility of the task or the fact that you’re under pressure or
persecution. We are never to give up what we believe and what we are holding on
to. That’s the idea, as we’ll see in the concept of confession. All of this is
predicated upon Jesus Christ’s work on the cross. The idea that we have in the
context is not just justification in Hebrews 4. He’s assuming that. The idea is
that this is related to the ongoing fellowship of the believer after salvation.
We are not to hold on to doctrine; we’re not to give it up.
We are not to think, “Doctrine
doesn’t work so I’m going to go try some other system. I’m going to watch Dr.
Phil and see if I can figure out how to solve my problems that way. If that
doesn’t work I’ll watch Oprah and see if I can figure out how to live my life
that way. If that doesn’t work I’ll go down to the local bar and figure out if
I can solve it that way”
Whatever the solution may be we have
to understand that it only comes from the Word of God and part of the Christian
life is built upon persistence or perseverance. That’s hanging in there and
trusting God even when things may appear to us to be hopeless.
The point is that we understand that
Jesus Christ has provided us with a complete salvation. This is stated in
Hebrews 7:25 where the writer stated:
NKJ Hebrews 7:25 Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those
That’s the same word that we have
here, proserchomai.
who come to
God. through Him,
It’s a word indicating intimate
fellowship in Hebrews.
since He
always lives
That is Jesus Christ.
to make
intercession for them
That word
that’s translated uttermost there is the Greek word pantelos, which sort of has the idea of
the allness. It’s emphasizing the completedness of what
Christ did on the cross – sort of the 'tetelestaiedness' of everything Christ did. We’ve seen
that even in our context here in Hebrews 10 that Jesus Christ after He had
completed the payment for the completion or the maturity of the body of Christ
for the maturity of believers sat down at the right hand of the Father. So these verses emphasize a
post-salvation spiritual life and the importance of fellowship and drawing near
to God.
Hebrews 10:22 emphasizes
that fellowship. But there’s something that is associated. It’s not just sort
of a feel good thing like: “I’m going to go to church and they’re going to play
some wonderful choruses. The music is going to stir me, and the song leader is
going to tell some touching stories and I’m going to start to weep a little
bit. Then I’ll be close to God because that’s what signifies it.”
A lot of people think that. They
think that the emotion is necessary and that indicates that they must be having
a spiritual experience. Now sometimes when we are really impacted by God’s Word,
emotion accompanies that. I’m not saying that’s wrong; but it’s wrong to put it
in the driver’s seat. It stays in the back seat, not up in the front seat. The
emotion can be very much a part of our spiritual life; but it doesn’t drive
it.
The problem that you get in a lot of
the contemporary ideas on worship is that they try to keep manufacturing this
same emotive state because that’s how they define being close to God. Whereas
what we’ve seen again and again, being close to God in the Scripture is
primarily judicial. Now that doesn’t sound like it’s always that warm and fuzzy
to define it as a judicial issue. But the problem that we’ve had with God is a
judicial problem. It’s not an emotional problem. So God has separated us from
Him because of sin; and Christ’s death on the cross solved
that problem. Sins are cancelled. That is such a wonderful thing that the issue
of sin just isn’t a problem. That is grace! That is what grace is all about is
that God did it all; and we don’t have to do anything in order to add to that.
Jesus Christ cancelled out the problem of sin on the cross. We still sin, but
we’re always going to sin because we still have a sin nature.
The regeneration doesn’t cancel the
sin nature. There are a lot of people who teach that today. The problem with
teaching that is every time you sin after that you’re saved is, you run around wondering if you’re really saved or if you
lost your salvation (if you’re an Arminian). But the
Bible says that God has dealt with the sin problem and we’re born again. We’re
new creatures in Christ. We’re babies, and babies do all kinds of nasty little
things and have to be bathed and washed and cleaned up after for a long time
before they start to get any level of maturity to be able to take care of
themselves.
Unfortunately if people aren’t
taught the Word of God so that they can grow up, then they’re going to run
around in spiritual diapers for most of their lives. The only way to control
them is through a lot of legalism.
So the passage talks about the importance
of that fellowship. We’re to draw near with a true heart in full assurance of
faith.
Now it’s very interesting how we
should understand this particular phraseology. The preposition that’s used here
is the Greek preposition meta
which means something that’s in the midst of something or among something. It’s
a preposition that indicates close association. In this case it’s the idea of
giving the circumstances that accompany the action. So we don’t draw near on
the basis of emotion or feeling good. We draw near in association with the
reality that we have a heart that is conformed to the judicial demands of God
and that we have been cleansed from the judicial guilt of sin. That’s his
point, because that has already happened.
What we’ve discovered in this
passage is that the participles that are used here are in the perfect tense.
Perfect tense always emphasizes completed action. The verb is in the present tense.
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,
Let us now draw near because
something has already happened and has been completed. That’s the idea of the
two participles here. It’s because we have this full assurance of faith and
because:
having our
hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
…because
that talks about what happened at salvation. So now that you have this judicial
cleansing and sin isn’t the issue anymore, now you can have fellowship with
God. So that’s the focus of the command.
So he says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with
...or in
association with.
a true
heart in full assurance of faith,
The word that’s translated true is
the Greek word alethinos, which means something that conforms to
reality, conforms to truth. It’s something that’s in conformity to the truth of
God’s Word – that no one can have fellowship with a perfect righteous God
unless they are also perfectly righteous. So our heart which is a term for our
inner being, everything that we are spiritually—it’s just a sum total
word that summarizes everything that it’s at the core of our being—has to
be in conformity to God’s demands of righteousness.
So he says we draw near. We could
even say on the basis of or because this has happened,
Then we have to say, “How do we get
that true heart?”
Do we go out and sort of gin up our
own morality and we have to clean up our lives and stop doing all kinds of sins
that are in our lives? That’s such a popular message in so many churches is
that before you can have a relationship with God; you have to repent from your
sins. You have to turn from your sins. It’s all about repentance and remorse. That’s
not the biblical message of grace at all. The way we know we have a true heart
is because of these participles that are given in the second part of the verse.
So I’m going to skip there before we come back.
These two participles are "sprinkled".
Sprinkled is the verb. It’s from the Greek word rhantizo meaning simply to
sprinkle and because it doesn’t have an article with it, it’s an adverb. So it
modifies that command to draw near. It has the idea because it’s a perfect
tense. It’s an adverbial
participle of cause.
Let us draw near with a true heart because we have already had our
hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience.
That happened at salvation. I have talked
about the fact that sprinkling the blood on the articles of furniture in the
Tabernacle was what Aaron did when he initially set the furniture in the
Tabernacle apart. Then he splattered the blood on the people. Everything got
splattered with blood to show that it was all positionally
set apart for the service of God. That didn’t happen again. That only happened
once at the beginning. That’s tantamount to what happens to us at the instant
of salvation. Because Christ’s death is applied to us, we are positionally forgiven and positionally
cleansed when we are justified. And it’s not on the basis of any good that
we’ve done. It’s not on the basis of any morality that we have.
It’s totally on the basis of the
fact that it is Jesus Christ’s righteousness that the Father looks at and says, “You have a relationship with Me because of Him and
His character. It never will be on the basis of you and your character.”
If you ever get a hold of that, that
will change your whole understanding of salvation, the Christian life and
you’ll quit trying to impress God and start realizing that we live our lives in
gratitude to what He has done because we could never do that on our own. But
most Christians out there never come to grips with that. They’re are trying so
hard to please God and they’re trying so hard to repent of their sins that they
get all wrapped up in guilt and failure.
Every time they turn around they do something that shocks or surprises
them, they think that God hates them again, they’ve lost their salvation or
they weren’t ever saved. They can’t ever relax and enjoy the Christian life and
enjoy life.
So we have these two perfect
participles here that are adverbs of cause that tell us that because we had our
hearts sprinkled and because we had our bodies washed (Notice the combination
of hearts and bodies is the totality of man.)
When it says:
our bodies
washed
That’s not talking about baptism. It’s
talking about the fact that the whole man, material and immaterial, is cleansed
by what Christ did on the cross when we believed in Him. That’s the idea going
back to the first phrase:
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart
That refers to the seat and center
of human life, the very core of our being.
in full
assurance of faith,
Now before we go on let me
retranslate this for you. What the writer is saying is:
Because we have confidence to enter (back in verse 19) and because we
have a great High Priest (back in verse 21) we must draw near already sprinkled
clean and washed with pure water.
It’s because we understand who we
are in Christ that we can have fellowship with God and that’s the key to living
the Christian life; it is that walk with God. When we fail we confess our sin. That’s
experiential forgiveness. Then we can move forward.
So the writer says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance
of faith,
This a Greek work plerophoria which indicates perfect certitude. We’re 100%
sure. We’re confident. It’s not arrogance that we know we’re going to go to
heaven. It’s confidence because we know the Truth. So we have a full
conviction. It’s a state of complete and total certainty. We’re convinced of
the truth that we have access to God. So because we have that and the idea of
full assurance of faith… Faith is the source. Faith is used here not the act of
believing, but it is viewed as what we believe. Faith can mean the act of
believing.
“I need to have more faith.”
In other words, we’re saying we need
to trust God. But sometimes we use faith as a term referring to a body of
beliefs. We may talk about different denominations or sects as that faith. What
is your faith? Are you an Episcopalian? Are you a Presbyterian? Are you a Methodist?
What is your faith? What is the doctrine, the body of beliefs that you have?
Another word that we’ll see in this
same passage in the next verse (verse 23), the word confession, is another word
that means that same thing. We often talk of doctrinal statements or doctrinal
beliefs of denominations as their confession. Instead of saying a doctrinal
statement, churches used to have confessions of faith. It meant the same thing.
That was the idea there.
So the full assurance of faith is
the confidence that we have from the doctrine that we believe. That’s why he
has labored from chapter 7, 8, 9 and 10 to make sure we understand all that
Christ did. Once we see all of that and see all the dimensions of it, then we
can have true confidence and we can relax because we know that nothing can
happen. We can’t do anything to lose our salvation. We can’t do anything to
jeopardize that relationship with God. Jesus Christ did everything at the cross
and He’s provided everything for us in the spiritual life so that we can face
anything that we have in life on the basis of what He provides. So we have that
absolute confidence.
So going back to our understanding
of salvation, we have the three senses of salvation.
We’ve talked about these and we’ve
seen these on Sunday morning recently. At the cross we talk about being saved
from the penalty of sin. So we were saved. We talk about the spiritual life in
the sense of “being saved” from the power of sin. And in a future tense sense
as you will be saved. What this passage is talking about in terms of having our
hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water
is this occurred at phase 1. It is also called positional sanctification. We
are positionally set apart in Christ.
Now when we are living our Christian
life and we grow that’s called experiential sanctification. When we are
face-to-face with the Lord, that’s referred to as completed sanctification. But
we are positionally set apart in phase 1. So that is what’s
being talked about here, what’s pictured in the sprinkling of the blood on the
articles of furniture and on the people and on the covenant in Exodus 24:6, 8
and Exodus 29:16, 20, 21 – positional sanctification.
This is also parallel to the idea of
washing which is what occurred as we’ve seen when Aaron was first dedicated,
consecrated, set apart as the High Priest. He was washed fully. That’s the Greek verb louo, which has the idea of taking a bath as
opposed to just washing your hands or washing your feet.
Then in verse 23 we get to the second
command: "let us hold fast". The first command is "let us draw
near" or we should draw near or we must draw near. Now it’s we must hold fast. We can’t
give it up. This is vital; this is important. This is critical. You can’t give
up what you believe no matter what happens.
See that was the situation in the
first century. These Jews that he’s writing to were under pressure from the
authorities in Judea and from their friends to give up their belief that Jesus
was the Messiah and to give up their Christianity and go back into Pharisaism and Judaism. So that would mean giving up what
they believed about Jesus. So the belief system of Christianity is referred to
here by the phrase “confession of our hope.” It’s the word confession used as
an admission of what you believe. So the command there is, “Let us hold fast
without wavering.”
“Let us hold fast” is the command
again. It’s a present active subjunctive indicating a first person plural
command. We must hold on to this confession of our hope. Hope drives us to the
future. Remember, from the very beginning of Hebrews 1, I pointed out that the
focal point of Hebrews is on what Christ did in the past and its impact on us
in the present; but it drives us toward what He’s preparing us for in the
future - to reign as priests and kings. That’s the focal point of these
warnings that if we give up, if we fade out, if we don’t persist – what we
jeopardize is our future position, future rewards to rule and reign with Jesus
Christ.
If we can’t make it through boot
camp, we’ll never make it to the Super Bowl. I don’t know how that’s going to
communicate to some people; but that’s the idea. If you can’t make it through
the beginning stages in the training procedure, then you’re never going to be
able to compete for the main prizes because you haven’t prepared yourself. You’ve
given up. You’ve faded out. It doesn’t mean you’ll lose your salvation. You’ll
still be in heaven. You’ll still have some rewards, some presents there. But
it’s not what it could have or should have been.
So he challenges them:
NKJ Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He
who promised is faithful.
This is the Greek word aklines meaning
steady, unwavering. You’re not going to falter. You’re not going to fade out or
wimp out. You’re not going to give up just because things get a little rugged
sometime – and things might get real rugged for us in this country as Christians.
The tide has turned in this country and the thrust of the leadership in this
nation is against Bible believing Christians. There are many people who think
they are Bible believing Christians, and they don’t even have a clue because
they are so mired in legalism and liberalism.
If you want to see a real mess, you
just figure out a system of thinking that is characterized by legalism and
liberalism. What you get is a self-righteous intolerant person who preaches tolerance.
But that’s the kind of culture that we have developed. The liberal leftist in
this country just wants everybody to say everything is okay. That’s what they
want.
Right now we have a President whose
very election is sort of personified or pictured as: we’ve gotten rid of the
parents and we’ve elected a new parent who isn’t going to tell us that
anything’s wrong. And he’s not going to discipline us, and he’s going to bring
all the cookies and candy that he can and cakes and ice cream into the house so
we can have all we want. We’re going to print all the money we want and we’re
going to bail everybody out because this new parent read Dr. Spock. He’s now
going to apply the principles of Dr. Spock’s child-raising
to government.
“We’re not going to let anybody
suffer any consequences for stupid decisions or irresponsible decisions.”
If they’re operating on irrational
thinking like the State of California has for the last 40 or 50 years and spend
money on all these ridiculous social programs like money just grows on trees and
there’s no accountability. The Federal Government is going to bail them out.
Mark my words. We’re going to see the Federal Government come in and bail out
California and bail out New York. And they’re going to print more and more
money. We’re going to end up with a dollar that’s not worth anything. It’s not
worth much now anyway. But it’s really not going to be worth anything in
another 3 or 4 years when we end up having to pay for all of this. The result
of this is there’s going to be more and more problems.
But when you get fallen man who is
frantically searching for meaning and happiness in life, so much so that they
think that this little Ida fossil this 25 million year old monkey is something
to do with the missing link. If your head is so darkened and you’re
so irrational and foolish the Bible says that you can believe that and anybody
who comes along like me and says you are foolish and stupid and idiotic for
doing it, all their anger, all their bitterness, all their hatred that’s been held down is going to come pouring
out on somebody like me. They’re just going to squash us. Everybody who
believes that they’re wrong - because that’s the last thing they want to hear
is that they’re wrong.
It was interesting this week; actually
it came out last week. The American Psychiatric Association or Psychological
Association (I can’t remember which one it is; but it’s the national body of
psycho-crazies) finally admitted that after 20 years of intense study and
research that they can’t find a shred of evidence to indicate that a person’s
sexual behavior is influenced by material causation. That means there is no gay
gene. You’d be amazed how many people think there’s something to that gay gene
thing. There was one study done in the early 90’s that was
later proved to be flawed. The results could not be duplicated by
anybody else. It said that this might be – notice that word might. Always
circle that. If you read the articles on Ida – the missing link. But they
even published a book. I went into Costco yesterday and looked at the book
table. Wednesday they announced this find. They were ready. They had published
books and articles. Everything was ready to go. This was an orchestrated effort
to overpower everybody in America with the brilliance of evolution on this anniversary
of Darwin’s birth. We’re going to prove Darwin was right. The next day they had
stacks of these books on Ida. Doesn’t it just bless your heart? They are just
all wrong.
NKJ Romans 1:22 Professing to be wise, they became fools,
They’re suppressing. Look how much
money and energy and effort has been put into proving their position because if
there’s no God, there are no absolutes. If there are no absolutes, there’s no
morality. If there’s no morality, then you can’t tell me that anything I’m
doing is wrong. That means that parents can’t be parents and I don’t need to
have a president that can tell me it’s wrong. We can have a whole culture of
permissibility and we’re all going to do whatever we want to do. It’s all going
to work out. We can print all the money we want to and do of all the projects
we want to do to save the planet. We can legalize everything we want to
legalize.
But every now and then, somebody
runs into something called a terrorist and a little reality has to enter
in.
It’s interesting how at least the
President seems to have to back up a pace or two on several of his campaign
promises as he got into office and realized that there were some actual bad
people out there that might want to do us harm.
Every now and then these fantasy
worldviews that the carnal mind comes up with to get away from God run into the
hard reality of that rock wall of reality. When that happens the Christians are
going to get blamed. Christians got blamed in Rome. Christians have been blamed
by all kinds of people down through the ages and Christians will get blamed
again. Just like these Christian Jews who were under persecution from their
unsaved Jewish brethren in the 1st century and were under the
pressure to give up Christianity, we’re going to go through the same kind of
thing.
So that command is very much pointed
toward us. We must hold onto the confession of our hope. Notice, it’s hope. This
is the only thing that gives hope to us. No matter how dark the days may get,
no matter how difficult the challenges may be, no matter how defeated it may
seem that we are; there is always hope. There is confident expectation because we
know that God is in charge. So we hold onto that without wavering.
NKJ Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He
who promised is faithful.
Notice how he drives our focal point
to God. He is faithful: the character of God, the essence of God. He is always
going to do the same thing the same way every time. He is always true to His
Word. He is never going to fail us. He is always on our side. It doesn’t matter
how dark the days may come. It doesn’t matter how weak the dollar gets. It
doesn’t matter how empty our 401K’s become. God is faithful and He will always
take care of us. So we need to get our eyes off of all the problems that are
going on in the world around us politically and economically and put our focus
on the one place that we have certainty. That’s the Word of God and on God
Himself. He is the one who is faithful.
Then we come to the third command,
which is in verse 24.
NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider
“Let us” should be translated we
should or we must.
one another
in order to stir up love and good works,
Now all we’ll have time for this
evening is just to get into the exegesis a little bit, understand what he is
saying; and then we’ll have to come back next time and unravel some of the
implications of this because they are extremely important for understanding the
role of the body of Christ. All those other believers that are fallen sinners
that we associate with that are also believers that they do have a role to play
in our spiritual lives.
So he starts off:
NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider
This is the Greek verb katanoeo. Now nous is the Greek word for mind. Noeo is the Greek verb for thinking. Katanoeo
emphasizes or stresses the main idea of the verb to think. So it has the idea
of thinking carefully about something, considering it. Not just saying. Consider
for us sometimes has the idea of “Well, I’ll consider that.”
Kind of like when President Obama
was running for office last year, and people would make certain suggestions
about not raising taxes. He would say, “Well, we’ll consider that.”
That’s a nice way of saying we’re
not going to do that. But we’ll make it sound like we are. This isn’t what it
means to consider. It means to think about something, to think deeply, to think
profoundly, to contemplate, to even brainstorm something in this context. What we’re
to think about - we are all to think about this –not meaning that all of
us get together in one big holy huddle and think about it. But groups of
believers are to think about things.
Let us carefully reflect on
something. Let us carefully think through something. Let us give careful
thought to a course of action. Let us consider. Let us carefully think. Or
better translated, we must carefully think through how to stir up love and good
works in one another.
“Wait a minute. I thought the
spiritual life was all about me going to Bible class and studying the Word so
that I could grow spiritually and that was all there was to it.”
No, that is a means to an end. Unfortunately
when you think that the spiritual life is about you taking in doctrine so you
can grow spiritually; you have succumbed to a worldly idea coming out of the
American culture. It’s not all about you. It’s all about serving God. But
before we can serve God, we have to rethink. We have to have our thought life,
our mentality, overhauled so we’re no longer trying to do things the way the
devil does things, the way the world does things. We’re going to do the things
the way God does things. So we have to have training. We have to go through a
form of boot camp called local church and teaching. But that’s not what it’s
all about. It doesn’t end with going to church, filling up your Bible notebooks
with all kinds of doctrines, going home, learning a lot of terms and being able
to talk the vernacular.
NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider one
another in order to stir up
Or stimulate…
love and good
works,
…in others.
It involves other people.
“That gets kind of nasty because
other people are just dirty rotten carnal sinners too, just like me. I’d rather
sit at home and listen to the tape recorder all the time. The Christian life is
really easy when it’s just me and my MP3 player.”
Maybe we can have a song – Me and My IPOD. That’s all you need
– you and your IPOD and God.
But what that does is that creates
an isolated Christian. When you carry that to its logical extent what you have
is a whole bunch of isolated Christians. You have one here and one here and one
here; but there’s no connection. In philosophy they call that atomism. Everything
is broken down into different parts, but there’s no whole. That’s not what the
Bible talks about. Again and again, in 1 Corinthians, in Romans, in Ephesians
Paul says we are members of one another. There’s no atomism in the Christian
life. We are members of one another. There is an organic unity in the body of
Christ from believer to believer. We’re not just a bunch of individual heroes
out there leading the charge against Satan without having a relationship to other
believers. It’s a team action.
Now you get into some cultures,
everything is teamwork. There’s nothing individual. You go to some tribes in
Africa, some other cultures like that, and everything is about the collective
whole. They can’t think. It’s very hard for them to think or operate as an
individual without thinking how it affects everybody else. In America, we’re
just the opposite. We’re so individual-oriented that we have a hard time
sometimes thinking about the organic unity of a team.
See both of those extremes are wrong
when you’re talking about the body of Christ. It’s not just this corporate
unity; but neither is it individual isolationism. It is about learning the Bible,
living your spiritual life. But that’s only a means to the end; and the end has
to do with serving the body of Christ.
Now if you don’t go to church
anywhere – and a church can be 5 people in a house somewhere.
Somebody asked me the question last
time: "Are you telling me that if all I’m able to do because I can’t find
a local church; all I’m able to do is sit and listen to my live stream that I
need to quit doing that and go to some local church?" No, I’m not saying
that. I’ll tell you more about what I’m saying next time, but I’m not saying
that. But neither am I saying that if you have an option to be involved in a
local church that you should make it an either or. You can do both.
There are all kinds of great stories
about people who have gotten involved in local churches. They get all of their
feeding and their spiritual growth and their teaching from listening to me or
one of the other doctrinal pastors where they can get fed, and then they go out
and they get involved with some group of believers and God opens up all kinds
of doors and ministry for them. It’s just remarkable how God can use somebody
in that kind of a situation. It starts with understanding this command that we’re
to consider one another. We’re to think about each other and how we can
stimulate one another to love and good deeds.
I’m just going to close with one
little anecdote before I get on to some more significant things in the exegesis
here. One of the things that I’ve seen happen several times is what happens
when a group of people go on the mission field for a short term missions
project. You take a group of high school kids or college kids or 20-somthings
over to Kiev or to Africa or Mexico on a real mission’s trip where they’re
actually talking to people, teaching Bible classes. You know there are a lot of churches and church groups who
have mission’s trips and they go hammer some nails or they go on a tourist trip
to Spain or Africa and they hear somebody preach somewhere and that’s the
extent of it. But when you go on a real short term missions trip where you’re
actually going and teaching kids in a summer camp or you’re teaching veterans
in a veteran’s home or you’re teaching kids with cancer in a cancer ward and
you come back and all of a sudden it changes the way you look at what we’re
doing in America.
We have such a truncated view of
church. We just go to church on
Sunday morning and then we go on Sunday night. That’s sort of the extent of it.
Then, I’ve got to work and I’ve got to raise my kids and all these other things
that we have going on.
I remember when I first went over to
Mogilev in Belarus. A number of people had gone over there right after the wall
came down. The wall came down in ‘92 so this was in January of ‘94. When they
went in they had all kinds of doors that were open. Now we don’t have as many
opportunities here. But they had all kinds of open doors where they were
invited to come into an English class in a school (elementary, junior high or
high school) and teach whatever they wanted to because they had never heard a
native English speaker. So they would go in and teach them Bible stories. There
was an orphanage and a hospital for children. A lot of these kids the cloud
from Chernobyl had come up over this area of Belarus. There were a lot of
children who had horrible health problems.
I remember going out with Phyllis
Myers several times in the two weeks I was there to teach these kids. Just Good
News Clubs and different things like that. About 7 or 8 years ago Dan Inghram
took 3 or 4 people from Preston City and went over and went over to help work a
camp that Myers was running over in Kiev.
All 4 of them camp back and said,
“This was great. How can we do here the kinds of things we did there? “
The problem was that the four people
that went – Dan lived in Washington DC. One of the ladies lived up in
Boston. Two months later or about a month later one of the college age boys
that went his family moved to Missouri. So they couldn’t coalesce in an action
plan. But they came back and what are they trying to do? They are trying to
stimulate one another to love.
“What can we do?”
They were excited. That’s what that
word stimulate means. It’s the Greek word from which we get our word paroxysm.
It has that idea of really stimulating. You see this with some people.
They get an idea and they say,
“Okay. What can we do?”
They get together and they huddle up
and they think what are some ideas that we can come up with to develop some
kind of outreach or ministry on our own?
This isn’t something that’s lead by
the deacons of West Houston Bible Church, or by me, or any…
It’s just people saying, “What can I
do to go out and find some area of ministry where I can get involved teaching
the Bible or going to a hospital and visiting with people who are there who
have nobody there and giving them the gospel, leaving a tract, praying with
them, just coming up with ideas – not necessarily for trying to get
people to come to church but to develop ministry in peoples’ lives –
applying the Word beyond just coming to church, filling up your doctrinal
notebook and then going home and going about your life.
We’ll come back and talk about more
ideas next time. Let’s close in prayer.