Hebrews Lesson
172 September
10, 2009
NKJ Psalm 119:11 Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You!
In the last couple weeks we've been looking at this
difficult passage; difficult for many because it appears to suggest that a
believer who is disobedient has no recourse in terms of a sacrifice for sin.
That's what it seems that verse 26 is talking about.
NKJ Hebrews 10:26 For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the
truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,
The statement “there no longer
remains a sacrifice for sins” is merely a reminder that all sin was paid for at
the cross. That same statement we find back in the last part of verse 18, i.e.
that there is no longer an offering from sin. There it’s a very good thing. It
is a reminder that Christ paid for all the sins of the world so nothing else
can be done. There's no more offering, no more sacrifice. There's nothing that
needs to be done in addition. So even if there is a willful sin which under the
Mosaic Law had no sacrifice, even if there is willful sin, all sins are paid
for including that willful sin. So there's no need to have an additional
sacrifice.
So the question may come up: if this
is true (if Christ really did pay for all of my sin) and I don't have to worry
about that anymore, what’s to keep me from sinning with impunity? What’s to
keep me from going out and raising hell and doing whatever I want to all the
time and just be grateful that my sins are paid and I don't have to worry about
my eternal destiny?
There are a lot of people who think
that way. This was a problem in the battle over the Reformation recovery of the
doctrine of justification by faith alone. It was Martin Luther who was the
great German reformer who came to a clear understanding of justification by
faith. He didn't come to it in a flash of light which some people think. In
fact even after he nailed the 95 theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg
in Germany. That was sort of neighborhood bulletin board. If you wish to debate
something, then that's where you would put it. So this was just standard
procedure to nail that to the church door so that everybody could see it,
because in those days everybody went to church and if you wanted to spread the
word about something throughout the community you put it on the front door of
the church and then everybody would read it. So that's where you put in. It was
a challenge: ninety five debating points over the Doctrine of Indulgences and
other aspects of salvation doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church.
Now the Roman Catholic Church taught
that if you sin, there are different kinds of sins. There are mortal sins,
which jeopardize your salvation completely and there are venal sins. In order
to make up for these you'd have to go through various penalties: say a certain
number of Hail Mary's, light a certain number of candles, put a certain amount
of money, give a certain amount of money to church. If you were concerned about
your loved ones (your family), after they had died you could buy an indulgence.
The pope needed to raise money to build St Peter's Cathedral in Rome. So he
sent a man named Tetzel out to comb through all the little villages and the
highways and byways to sell indulgences which meant that if you gave enough
money and you bought an indulgence then for every amount of money that you
spent, then a certain number of days to be taken off of the purgatory sentence
for your loved ones. There was a little saying that for every penny in the
coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs. That's what they did.
Luther thought that the most
horrible thing in the world that people were taking what little money they had
in their life savings and they were using that to buy the salvation of their
loved ones. All it was ultimately doing was going down to feed the corrupt
Roman Catholic Church in Rome at the time.
At this time in history the Roman
Catholic Church was not only what we would think of as theologically corrupt, with
a works salvation, but they were morally corrupt. It was not long before that
they had a pope (one of the Borgia’s) who had mistresses and several
illegitimate children. At the lowest point of the Roman Catholic Church this
was sort of standard procedure for several popes in the 10th, 11th
12 centuries.
So Luther had gone through a real
crisis of faith. As he had studied in Galatians and he had studied in Romans,
he came to an understanding that our justification wasn’t based on what we did,
but on possession of Christ’s righteousness.
When he first nailed those 95 theses
to the door of the church at Wittenberg, he was close; but he really hadn’t
tightened up the focus all the way on his understanding of justification by
faith. He had a young man who was allied with him who later became his second
in command, so to speak, in the in the Reformation by the name of Philipp
Melanchthon. Melanchthon had a crisp logical mind, one of the sharpest minds in
theological minds in all of history. Melanchthon really helped Luther
understand that our justification was never based on anything that we did or
did not do.
You couldn’t look at a person's life
and say, “Well, that person said this or that person did that so how can they
be a Christian?” because salvation or justification was based on possession of
Christ’s righteousness – His goodness not our goodness or lack of it in
any way affected it just by faith alone.
That was the great cry of the Reformation - Sola Fide in the Latin.
Luther nailed those 95 theses on the
door of the church at Wittenberg in 1517 on October 31, 1517. It wasn't for
another decade or so that there was a young French lawyer by way of Strasburg
and Geneva by the name Jean Cauvin (We anglicize that to John Calvin). When
Calvin first began to write his Institutes, his famous work that he wrote in English
it’s two large volumes (The Institutes of
the Christian Religion) it was addressed initially to the king (I think
King Francis I of France) to convince him of the truth of Protestant theology.
I don't remember exactly how many editions the Institutes went through, but it’s
somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty or forty. So when he rewrote it
initially it wasn't very long. It was forty or fifty pages, very short, and as
the years went by he added to it and added to it. He built on it as his
understanding of the Scriptures developed.
When Calvin started he had a clear
Lutheran view of justification. That's clear in the early editions of Calvin’s Institutes.
But the Protestant reformers ran head on into this objection that was raised by
the Roman Catholic theologians.
“Well if salvation’s free, people
don't have to do anything for it and they have to believe in Jesus and they’re
justified instantly; then what's to keep them from sinning? How do you keep
them under control? How do you keep them from living immoral, licentious lives
if they're going to go to heaven because of what Jesus did and it doesn't have
anything to do with their morality, with their behavior, with how good they
are, with how bad they are. It just has to do with Jesus.”
So Calvin waffled in the later
editions of his Institutes
as the Counter Reformation (which is the Roman Catholic reaction to the
Protestant Reformation began and emphasized this particular question.
We still have this battle going on
today. This may seem like ancient history because it was 500 years ago; but
it’s not. The same questions, the same issues come up today and we can learn a
tremendous amount by going back and reading how people at that time went
through what their missteps were and what their problems were. So that's the
same problem that is being addressed in this in this chapter. It is not that if
you commit certain sins you can't recover, you can't - you lose your salvation
or you weren’t really saved to begin with. It is that if you treat the grace of
God with contempt and you treat Christ with contempt; then there are consequences
not in terms of where you end up, but in terms of the of the rewards at the
Judgment Seat of Christ, responsibilities, positions that go with the New
Kingdom when Christ comes into His kingdom. That is the focus of this section
from 26 to 39 calling these Jewish priests, formerly Jewish priests, who are
now believers but who have come under significant persecution and attack and
loss of personal property and security. As they have come under this attack,
they're questioning whether it’s really worth it to believe that Jesus is the
Messiah. Many of them have already faded out. They have given up and they've gone back into the Second
Temple Judaism. They've given up on Christianity, on the idea that Jesus Christ
was the Messiah.
That's what's happening here.
NKJ Hebrews 10:26 For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the
truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,
In context the willful sin is to
just kiss the cross goodbye and to forget that they were Christians, just to
reject Christianity completely and go back to their former state. Today it
would be the same kind of thing.
Somebody who says, “Well, maybe I'm
saved; maybe I'm not. I trusted Christ when I was a kid, but I'm not sure I
believe all of this. It doesn't really matter anymore, and I'm just going to
live my life however I want to.”
There are consequences to that. Or,
the believer who thinks that he's somehow covered by the grace of God and so it
really doesn't matter what I do and I can live this way during the week and I
can go to church on Sunday, and I can just use 1 John 1:9. That always wipes
the slate clean, and I have all basically a license to sin.”
They treat it that way. There are
consequences and that's the point that is made in verse 27. There's a certain
fearful expectation of judgment, not Great White Throne, Lake of Fire judgment;
but the Bema Seat, the Judgment Seat of Christ: the loss of rewards, the
burning up of all of your works and there's nothing left because it was all
wood, hay and straw. So that’s the focus of that judgment.
NKJ Hebrews 10:27 but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and fiery indignation
which will devour the adversaries.
…which as we saw last time is a
quote from the Old Testament that focuses us. It’s from Ezekiel 36:5. It
focuses our attention on the fact that God was going to judge Israel for their
disobedience. Even though they didn’t lose their covenant standing in terms of
being the chosen people of God, they would be punished as God's chosen people
for their disobedience.
Then there was an illustration given
in verses 28 and 29. This illustration that’s set up here is based on a form of
logic called an a
fortiori argument. The Latin a fortiori means from the stronger. The way
this works is if something is true in one case and then you have something
similar - but usually greater - if it's true in case A and case B is similar
then maybe even to a greater degree; then it is true about that in a greater
degree. If you're confused now, let me explain that a little better. It's the
idea that if a sin under the Mosaic covenant is worthy of divine punishment (so
if you break the Mosaic covenant), if that sin is worthy of divine punishment;
how much more severe the punishment will be for treating the work of Christ on
the cross in a contemptuous manner. If God instantly disciplined the Israelites
in the wilderness – some He took immediately out under the sin unto death
– for an infraction of the Mosaic covenant (which we've already studied
as a lesser covenant) then when you come to this greater covenant of the New
Covenant which was established (The sacrifice of Christ on the cross
established it); if you treat that contemptuously; if you treat the blood of
the covenant that is the death of Christ in a contemptuous disrespectful manner
by just rejecting it, then there's going to be an even more severe punishment
than what you have for infractions under the Mosaic Law.
So when we look at the verse 29 we
read:
NKJ Hebrews 10:29 Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy
who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by
which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?
And the word that’s translated “trampling under foot”
there means to treat something with scorn or contempt of the most extreme kind.
It's not that they're simply rejecting it, but there's a hostility toward it.
There’s a disrespect toward it; an act of contempt toward it so they are being
contemptuous toward the Son of God and counting the blood of the covenant (that
is the horrible, horrible death that Jesus Christ went through on the cross
when He was separated from God the Father for those three hours and God the
Father poured out upon Him the sins of the entire world; so much so that never
before in all that physical pain that He went through did He utter a sound) with
contempt.
NKJ Isaiah 53:7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He
was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is
silent, So He opened not His mouth.
So He's quiet. But the pain of the sin when it hit Him
on the cross was so great that that's when He screamed out, “My God, my God.
Why have you forsaken me?”
He screamed that out as He went
through the agony of being identified with our sins on the cross. So when
someone rejects Him or just treats grace lightly, it is an act of contempt
toward the death of Christ on the cross.
So the writer of Hebrews says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:29 Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy
who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by
which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?
It’s an insult to God the Holy
Spirit who is the one who regenerated us, the one who indwells us the one who
fills us. It is to insult to Him. So the writer is pointing out that if there's
a degree of punishment for breaking the Mosaic Law, it’s even worse subsequent
to that.
Then we have another verse that
states the principle again from the Old Testament in verse 30, which states:
NKJ Hebrews 10:30 For we know Him who said, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,"
says the Lord. And again, "The LORD will judge His people."
Now we know Him. We know the character of God. We know
the essence of God. There is an awareness of His righteousness and His justice.
His righteousness and His justice will always work in tandem with His love
because it is a righteous love. It is a just love. It is a love that is always
consistent with His righteousness and always works with His justice. So because
we know Him, we know that He is bound by His own character, His own
righteousness to bring about divine discipline, to bring about justice. There
is a quotation here from the Old Testament passage, Deuteronomy 32:35-6.
NKJ Deuteronomy 32:35 Vengeance is Mine, and recompense; Their foot shall slip in due time; For
the day of their calamity is at hand, And the things to come hasten upon them.'
NKJ Deuteronomy 32:36 "For the LORD will judge His people And have compassion on His
servants, When He sees that their power is gone, And there is no one remaining, bond or free.
Now the verb that is translated vengeance here is a
word that emphasizes justice. If you look at the Greek word there I’ve
underlined in the transliteration the root word, the root lemma is dike. That is
the core word for righteousness, dikaioo, dikaiosune. These are all the words
that are built off of that root – righteousness, justification, to be
justified all come off of that same root. So ekdikesis means to execute justice and
it refers to the execution of right, righteousness or justice. It's not caring
out a personal vendetta.
Now the word vengeance in English has that connotation
and a lot of people think that it has that notion of a personal vendetta. But
it is the execution of justice and therefore the conclusion of verse 31 that it
is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God. See God’s not just
some abstraction out there.
Unfortunately we live in culture today where too many
people because of the secularization of the world in which we've grown up and
we've been influenced by; we have an abstract view of God that isn't
necessarily a personal and the real view of God. The same thing has been true
in ages past because it's easy for us to sort of put God off in a box somewhere
where He's not personal, He's not really involved, He's busy somewhere else in
the world with somebody else.
The writer of Hebrews reminds them of this principle
that we fall into the hands, i.e. the power (hands always refer in terms of the
imagery to the power of God) that He's a living God. This is the second time in
Hebrews that the writer has emphasized the fact that God is a living real God.
NKJ Hebrews 3:12 Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief
in departing from the living God;
Now he called them brethren. Now remember what we
covered the last few weeks is that brethren in Hebrews always refers to those
who have that same vertical relationship with God. It's not a horizontal term
for others who have the same ethnic relationship, meaning Jews. It's always in relation
to those are in the family, the family of God. So he is addressing them as
believers and says that it is very real possibility that some of you sitting
here tonight will wake up one morning and you're going to start making
decisions based your sin nature. You're going to let emotions start reining in
your life and the next thing you know you're going to have an evil heart of
unbelief and you're going to be moving away from the living God in the Bible to
worshipping some sort of emotional idol that you’ve generated out of your own
soul. This happens time and time again with believers. Sometimes it’s a short
departure and sometimes it's a long of departure. But we all have that trend
and that is a very real temptation in the culture in which we live. So the
emphasis is on the fact that there is a living God to whom we are accountable.
Now how do we go forward? What is to
get us through the really tough times? We've had tough times. We’ve had tough
times personally. I look out over the congregation. I could a look at almost
every one of you and I could list five or six times, situations, circumstances
in your lives where it was hard for you to get up everyday. It was hard for you
to get up and face the circumstances in your life and if it weren't for the
fact that you were just hanging on for dear life by your fingernails with just
a few promises that you just kept claiming over and over again; you never would
have made it through those tests and through those circumstances. And those are
pretty tough and I know how tough some of those were for you and you know how
tough some have been for me. But what these believers went through was much
tougher I think in many ways than most of the things that we have gone through
because they were in a very tight social ethnic community as Jewish priests and
when they turned and accepted Jesus as Messiah in this latter part of the first
century, they were ostracized by many people, many of their loved ones, many of
their family members. It wasn't just a social rejection, but they also went
through tremendous physical persecution, which is what is outlined in the next
couple of verses.
Yet they survived. How did they
survive? They survived the same way you survived and the same way I survived.
They had promises from the Scriptures that they claimed – mostly Old
Testament promises because they didn’t have a written canon in the New
Testament yet. But they clung to those promises; they clung to that doctrine
that was in their soul. They clung to truth of the cross and the truth that
Jesus Christ was their Savior. But eventually some of them just caved in. They
just didn't want to go through it anymore. They didn't have the mental
fortitude and the mental stamina to stand firm against the social pressure that
came from the culture around them. It's very difficult to do that and in a lot
of circumstances today we see that with so many Christians.
On of the reasons we’ve had the rise
up the so called Church Growth Movement, the rise of the prosperity gospel churches,
the Word of Faith Movement – all of these huge, huge charismatic churches
that are just filled with nonsense. They're filled with a lot of the
pseudo-spirituality and a lot of emotion and a lot of the trappings of religion
and spirituality. But there's no knowledge of the Word. There's no real Bible
study. They talk about it a lot. They go through certain motions and jump
through certain hoops so that it looks that way; but it's not that way. They
succumb to the pressure of the mystical postmodern worldview that we have
today.
Then there are others that also
succumb to that don't go quite as far, and we succumb to it in many ways; in
many ways we’re not aware of every single day because sometimes we just get
tired of being different. We get tired of always trying to stand against an
onslaught of pagan ideas, pagan opinions, and pagan viewpoints. We’re bombarded
with policy after policy that’s handed down from the Board of Directors, from
the CEO, from
the managers at our company. We
know that if we could do it the way that Scripture says, we wouldn’t do this.
We all have faced this. There are policies that we have to enforce that we know
really run counter to Scripture. They may not be immoral; they may not be
wrong; but we know that they do not come out of a sound biblical way of looking
at life.
We work. You can work for oil
countries. Companies run on geological studies and those geologists are not
Christians. They're running many of their studies. They operate off of
evolutionary presuppositions. Now they can still find the oil. But
nevertheless, it is part of that culture, the mentality within these
corporations, corporations who have certain views on the role of men and women.
They are being pressured to recognize the legitimacy of same sex unions for the
purpose of giving various benefits: health benefits and retirement benefits and
other things of this nature. That’s just flat wrong. We know at the bottom of
our soul that all of this is working against the health of this nation because
we're eating away bit-by-bit that biblical foundation of absolute truth. But
we're part of that culture and it's difficult to stand against that. You know
that the instant you do, you lose your job. Then what are you going to do?
Well, this is the same kind of thing
that they faced in the early church. So the writer of Hebrews says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:32 But recall
Remember something. This is
something we find all the way through Scripture: emphasis on memory,
remembering certain things.
It's not a bad idea at times when
you have gone through spiritually challenging times to perhaps write down some
of the things that you learned. You can put in a journal. You can put it in
just a file. You can put it in your notebook, whatever it is. But to remember
what you thought, how hopeless and helpless and distraught things appeared so
that when things get better and the Lord has delivered you; you can go back and
remember how you went through that, how the Lord was faithful to His promises,
what promises you claimed, what those spiritual lessons were. So this is what
the writer of Hebrews says.
the
former days
You have the same emphasis on memory
in the Old Testament when the Israelites go into the land and they first cross
the Jordan and that magnificent ceremony and pageantry where the priests go
forward to the river Jordan and it's flowing quickly passed them. It’s in the
spring. They just had Passover. You've got the water is running high because of
the snow-melt off from Mt. Hermon. The water’s not going to stop. God’s not
going to split the Jordan like He did the Red Sea and then have them walk
across. They have to demonstrate that faith and start to step into the moving
water. As their foot goes down, the water does just below it. That's a
tremendous act of a faith, trusting in God. Their feet never touched the water.
It hit dry ground. God stopped the Jordan River, and they walked across on dry
ground. All twelve tribes when they got across to the other side God told them
to build a rock cairn out of 12 stones (one for each of the twelve tribes) so
that in future generations when they would walk passed this, their children
would say, “Daddy, what’s that pile of rocks doing over there?”
Now those of you who’ve been over
there, you’re thinking: how do you distinguish that pile of rocks from all the
other piles of rocks? I know what you’re thinking. But they did it in a special
way so that it would signify something and stand out. When the children asked
that would give the parents an opportunity to rehearse for them all the work of
God in delivering them through the wilderness, bringing them into the Land and
the conquest to pass on from one generation to the next a memory, a national
memory of the grace of God and the deliverance of God. There's a great lesson
that you can learn if you’re a parent or a grandparent in building those kinds
of benchmarks in your own family in order to perpetuate an understanding with
your children and grandchildren of the way God has provided for the family in taking
care of the family through difficult times.
So he says:
in
which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with
sufferings:
Now this phrase “after you were all
illuminated” is a key phrase that means that they were saved. It indicates that
they were saved. Unbelievers are not illuminated. You have the same kind of
phrase in Hebrew 6 indicating that these are believers.
NKJ Hebrews 10:32 But recall the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you
endured a great struggle with sufferings:
…with adversity. For them it was all
of the adversity that came from rejection by their peers, rejection by their
family, rejection by their nation because they had identified with Jesus as
their Messiah.
This is explained more in the next
verse (verse 33):
NKJ Hebrews 10:33 partly while you were made a spectacle both by reproaches and
tribulations, and
Now that word spectacle is an
interesting Greek word, theatrizo. Guess what English word we get from there. So it’s the
public display of something. That's the root meaning. The idea originally was
to put something to shame, to expose it publicly for embarrassment, for
reproach and for affliction. They were made a spectacle. They were to be
publicly humiliated for their identification with Jesus as the Messiah. They
were made a spectacle both by reproaches and tribulation. It involved physical
suffering.
partly
while you became companions of those who were so treated;
They identified with others as they
were being persecuted and that brought them into public attention. Then they
were ridiculed, and they lost property.
They lost position. They lost money. This was taken from them.
We all recognize that a very
important part of freedom is property ownership. At the very core of freedom is
that we have the right to own property and to dispose of property. Property is
the basis for all wealth.
Originally when the Declaration of
Independence was written, it wasn't life, liberty, and happiness. It was life,
liberty, and property. You read through the writings of the Founding Fathers.
They understood that that property was the basis for growth, for developing
personal wealth and stability to build for future generations. Without that
freedom to buy and sell, to own property, to develop property, to have access
to the natural resources that were on the property and to develop that for the
development of wealth and all of the things that money could buy; there was no
real freedom.
This is one of the problems with
property taxes. There is no such thing as a property tax in the Mosaic Code.
Property tax treats the property as if you don't really own it. You’re just
sort of leasing it from the government. It is not a tax that supports the
accumulation of wealth from generation to generation. So their property was
taken from them; property they had a legal right to, that they had owned and
that they had a legal right to.
In verse 34 the writer says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:34 for you had compassion on me in my chains,
So he went through this as well.
and joyfully accepted the plundering
of your goods, knowing that you have a better and an enduring possession for
yourselves in heaven.
Now look at that: joyfully accepted the plundering of
their goods. When the Roman soldiers or the Jewish Temple guards came and threw
them out of their houses (Remember they were priests) and confiscated their
personal possessions, they joyfully accepted that. They weren’t standing at the
door with their Roman machaira and their spear to protect their house and their
hearth and home from the government troops coming in to take possession. They
recognized that they were living in the devils' world and that if they were
going to take the stand for the Lord Jesus Christ, then they had to take that
stand. They were going to lose earthly possessions and earthly goods and so
they joyfully accepted the plundering of their goods. They lost everything they
had. They lost their homes. They lost their possessions. They lost what money
they had. Everything was gone because they had a focus on something even
greater. That was that you can live through the most horrendous circumstances
and the loss of everything because your focus is on the fact that your mission
as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ (as an ambassador for Christ) supersedes
any other mission that you can think of in life, any other purpose. So that's
the focus.
They joyfully accepted the plundering of their goods
because they knew something. They knew that this earth was not their home. We
are transient. This property is here today, gone tomorrow. We may work hard for
it, but ultimately we can’t take it with us. It isn’t our own. But there is an
eternal possession in the heavens reserved for us, which is based on our spiritual
life and our walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.
So they had their focus on that eternal possession.
Now we're going to see some great illustrations of that in the next chapter as
the writer of Hebrews focuses on how these Old Testament saints had that same
eternal perspective. They weren't focused on what they had here. Abraham owned
only one small piece of land. Of all the land God promised him, he only owned
the cave at Machpelah where he was buried. All he owned
was his gravesite.
Go down to Forest Lawn or to Earthman’s and buy
yourself a couple of plots at the local cemetery and you're ready to go. That's
all that all that Abraham had was a couple of cemetery plots.
The writer of Hebrews then says as a result of
understanding this and thinking back over where you've been in your spiritual
life, why you gave all that up and how you endured all of that. And that was
much worse than what they're going through now. But when it goes on and on and
on and on and we don't get back to a point of stability; it's easy to think,
“Well, maybe it's not true. I’ll just give up and go back.” That's exactly what
they have done.
So in verse 35 he says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:35 Therefore do not cast away
The idea there in the verse is, just don't throw away
the garbage.
your confidence,
Literally, the word there is their endurance.
which has great reward.
Don’t give up. Don't ever let the circumstances so
overwhelm you that you're willing to give up your eternal rewards and your
eternal destiny and sacrifice that just as Esau gave a up his inheritance for a
bowl of lentil stew. That illustration is going to come up as well in the next
chapter.
NKJ Hebrews 10:36 For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of
God, you may receive the promise:
So don't cast away your endurance,
which has great reward for you have need of endurance so that after you have
done the will of God you may receive the promise.
In Hebrews the promise is always
future. The promise has to do with that reward. It has to do with what is distributed at the Judgment Seat
of Christ. The promise isn’t the promise of justification. That’s passed.
That’s secured. It is the future fulfillment of what God has promised for those
who are obedient to Him.
Then we come to verses 37 and 38. In
these verses, we have a quote from the Old Testament. Again it's a quote
dealing with believers and how believers can give up by failing to endure,
failing to trust in the Lord can give up and come under divine discipline. This
quote in verses 37 and 38 comes out of Habakkuk 2:3-4.
NKJ Hebrews 10:37 "For yet a little while, And He who is coming will come and will not
tarry.
...will come and will not tarry.
This comes from a combination of quotes from Isaiah as well as from Habakkuk.
The Isaiah quote is just the first section, "for yet a little while",
which is just sort of a paraphrase as the writer combines a couple of things as
we've seen him do before. Then the rest comes out of Habakkuk 2:3-4.
NKJ Habakkuk 2:3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak, and it
will not lie.
“It hastens toward the goal and will not fail.” In
other words we’re moving towards the direction, an irrevocable direction in
God's plan though it tarries. It may seem like it takes forever. It may not be
our generation, maybe the next generation or maybe a hundred generations from
now.
Though it tarries, wait for it;
Because it will surely come, It will not tarry.
The writer changes a couple of pronouns in here
because he's focusing not on the destiny of Israel, but on the one who provides
that destiny, the Lord Jesus Christ. He changes it from an impersonal to a
personal: He who is coming, will come and He will not tarry. You can count on
it.
NKJ Habakkuk 2:4 " Behold the proud, His soul is not upright in him; But the just
shall live by his faith.
So verse 38 the writer of Hebrews
says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:38 Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no
pleasure in him.
Or, the righteous will live by faith. He will continue
to endure and persevere even in the midst of a hardship, even in the midst of
opposition. No matter how much he wants to give up, he's going to develop the
mental-spiritual toughness in order to stick it out and go forward. That's
what's needed today; we have too many believers who have this pabulum, cotton
candy Christianity thrown at them.
We're coming on very difficult times in this nation
and it's going to get much worse before it gets a lot better. There are many
things that are on the horizon that are very negative. By the grace of God we
may not see them, but we have to be realistic that these are very likely coming
our way. The tide of anti-Christianity is increasing. People are bolder now. I
think we have reached a point of no return. We've reached a point of critical
mass where people are now coming out of the woodwork and saying things that
they never would have said 10 or 15 years ago.
Some of you know that a couple of years ago when we
went to Israel there was a documentary film crew that went along with us and
filmed us and interviews with many of us on that particular trip. They have
produced that documentary and it has been shown to have a few film festivals;
but it makes us look like we’re anti-Semitic that we just want all the Jews to
get back in the Land so that Jesus will come back. When Jesus comes back, in
Armageddon, He’ll kill all the Jews. Now that's really what happens in Moslem
doctrine, but that is the way that we’re portrayed.
I'd never been aware of this before; but I have become
aware of it since. Then this last spring when I went to the AIPAC conference in
Washington DC, I became aware that this has been a tactic on the political left
in the US for about ten years now in order to separate the alliance of
evangelical pro-Israel Christian Zionists from the Jews by creating an attitude
of hostility, suspicion in the minds of Jews.
“The only reason they wan to give this money to help
us is to proselytize us to get us back in the Land so their Jesus can come
back.”
And it goes much beyond that. In reading some of the blogs
and reviews and there aren’t too many of those online. There some pretty
strange things said about us. But one of the things that stuck out in my mind
was that one writer who was very hostile to us said, “There are many of you who
have this crazy idea that if we just got rid of the Christians we would have
universal health care and everybody would have a livable wage and we would not
have any problems any more. “
That really hit me that there are beaucoup people in
this country who think that the only reason we don't have universal health care
and the only reason that we don't have a successful communist state is because
of evangelical Christians. We are being blamed more and more for everything and
people are saying this in the public square in ways that they never would have
said it before. And this is just the beginning.
So we have to be prepared not to be distracted by
these issues. It’s important to be involved in politics. It's part of our
responsibility as citizens of this country. The Scripture says we are to do all
things to the glory of God and that's part of the all things. But that's not
our primary mission. Our primary mission is that we are to be proclaiming the
gospel and that we are to be functioning as salt and light in the nation. That
also involves the political dimension.
But we
are to live by faith. If we don't do it the right way, in a way that honors
God, and we fail— we bug out, we bail out, we don't stick with it—then
the Scripture says, quoting the Old Testament:
NKJ Hebrews 10:38 Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no
pleasure in him.
There is
divine discipline. God is not going to be pleased with us if we are disobedient
to Him or if we don't hang in there.
But the writer of Hebrews doesn't end on a negative
note. He ends on a positive note. He says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:39 But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who
believe to the saving of the soul.
We’re not of those who bail out and can’t stick with
it. We are of those who believe to the saving of the soul. Now this isn’t
justification salvation, this is spiritual life growth salvation. This is the
deliverance of our soul over and in the midst of these hostile circumstances of
oppression and persecution and the loss of property.
I always thought this was a great verse to summarize
the problem solving devices: that we have what it takes in those problem
solving devices to face the challenges of life and that is what saves the soul;
not in the sense of justification salvation, but in this sense of deliverance
from the power of the sin nature so that we can experience the joy, the
happiness that God has for us. No matter what happens in the world around us,
our mental attitude, our stability, our security is not threatened because we
know that God is still on the throne even if we go to a martyr’s death as many
of the writers of Scripture did, as many of the disciples did. They still have
that joy like many of the martyrs in the Reformation who were tied to stake
especially during the reign of Mary Tutor. There were over three hundred Protestants who were burned at
the stake in England. Many of them as the flames begin to lick and burn their
legs; they would sing hymns to the glory of God keeping the focus on the Lord
Jesus Christ and on trust in God and on His provision.
I wonder how many of us if we were taken out today and
tied to a stake and burned could sing through a single hymn. They often were;
they didn’t know how to build good fires then and often they were in pain for
several hours before they died. They would sing hymn after hymn. It kept their
mind focused on the Lord Jesus Christ and they could recite the Scripture. That
is what gets us through even something like that.
Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.