Hebrews 6:13-20

The Certainty of God’s Promise

13 When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, 14 saying, “I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.”[d] 15 And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.

16 People swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. 17 Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18 God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. 19 We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, 20 where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.

Dig Deeper

When I was a younger man and in college I regularly had to take a nearly twelve hour trip back and forth between my college campus and my hometown.  I nearly always took that journey alone and was quite proud of the fact that I could make that trip as efficiently as possible.  I had a stop that was almost half-way on the route and it had a gas station and fast food restaurant right off the road.  I didn’t have to really get off of anyway highway, I just pulled into one driveway and could refuel, grab some food, and run into the restroom all in one stop and then get right back onto the road quite easily.  In minutes I would be back on my merry way without having lost anytime at all.  That was then.  Now when I take trips it’s a bit more complicated because I have children.  It seems that no matter how much I plan out trips to our various destinations they never go according to plan in a nice, neat little package like they used to back then.  Invariably, just as we are really starting to make some good time, one of my children, although usually the youngest these days, will declare that they need to go to the bathroom, and quickly.  My first instinct is to tell them to hold it because I don’t want to change my route and there’s just no convenient spot to pull over.  But then I can feel that look from the other side of the car from my wife indicating her subtle but rather intense desire that I should find somewhere to pull over and allow our little cherub to relieve himself.  Doing so at unplanned times is usually a bit of a pain, which is why I don’t like to, but I will dutifully pull off the highway onto an off-ramp, search for a gas station or some other such place, make our necessary stop, and then get back on the on-ramp.  All of that just to get back to where left off a while before that.

It’s not that the author of Hebrews had to use the bathroom and it hasn’t even been inconvenient or unnecessary, but he did take us on a bit of detour beginning back in chapter 5 just as he was in the middle of discussing Jesus being our superior and ultimate high priest and explaining the importance of him being of the order of Melchizedek rather than Aaron.  This detour included a fairly harsh rebuke and call for the community of believers to wake up and begin to strive for maturity in their Christian faith rather than struggling with basic infantile type questions like were they going to follow Christ at all.  He had urged them to not become dull and lazy and to cling to the promises that God has made to those in Christ, namely the resurrection life and the ability to stay faithful to it based on God’s power and justice.  He’s got a few more things to say to encourage them about those promises but we are now on the on-ramp and getting back towards where we started.  In fact, by the end of this passage we will be at the very same point that we left off when we began our detour and will be ready to move forward in the point about the Messiah becoming a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.

In the previous section Hebrews exhorted the readers to keep moving towards the promises that God had given to his people.  In fact, those promises were something of an issue in the first century between Christians and Jews.  The Jews claimed that they were really God’s people because they were the keepers of the promises of God and if God wasn’t faithful to his promises to Israel then he was not really God.  The Christians, on the other hand, argued that only in the Messiah could the promises of God be fulfilled (2 Cor. 2:10).  They declared that the Messiah was the representative of God’s people, Israel, and that he was now the gate to God’s people and his promises as the true Israel, and that Jews and Gentiles alike would have to enter through that gate in order to claim possession of God’s promises.

So if they were going to be the people of promise then it was important that they held firmly to those promises and remained faithful to them.  For first century Christians, then, especially a group that included a lot of Jewish Christians, it makes a great deal of sense for the author to turn to Abraham as the classic example of someone remaining faithful to God’s promises despite difficult circumstances. 

God had promised Abraham that he would have one mighty family that would consists of all nations and that would be blessed by God.  If that were to happen, however, he would need descendants.  After exhibiting and learning a great deal of faith in seeing his son of that promise finally born, Abraham must have been rocked in his faith when God told him to take Isaac and sacrifice him.  Child sacrifice was not uncommon among the pagan religions of Abraham’s day, and in essence, God was saying, “do you trust me as much as the pagans trust their lifeless gods?”  Abraham acted on that faith and received the fulfillment of his blessings; not during his lifetime, as chapter 11 will make clear, but he received them nonetheless.  His actions in taking Isaac to the brink of sacrifice before being stopped by God demonstrates the fact that faith was not some vague act of mental agreement but was defined by living and acting as though God’s promises were true and he would fulfill them despite how unlikely it seemed based on circumstances.  That is what faith is.

It was common practice of the day to verify an oath by swearing by someone greater than yourself.  God wanted to make it as clear as possible in Abraham’s world of understanding, so he swore an oath while making his promises to Abraham.  There was just one problem.  Jews would often swear by the name of God to verify their oaths, but in God’s case he is the ultimate authority and standard of truth so there was no one greater by which to swear.  God then swore by his own name (Gen. 22:16) in promising that he would indeed bring about the family of blessing from Abraham’s descendants.  He didn’t do this because he needed to but so that Abraham could be doubly sure that God truly would fulfill his promises to him.  

God’s promise to Abraham was doubly secure, then.  Not only could Abraham rely on the promise just because the nature of God is unchanging and completely trustworthy, but God went above and beyond the call.  Just relying on his nature alone would have been enough, for God cannot lie and has absolutely no need to.  But to help Abraham out, he also made an oath, and repeated that oath to his descendants that he would indeed fulfill his promises.  Just as surely as we can rely on God’s nature, we can also rely on God’s oaths and promises, so now there were two things that cannot be changed, shaken, or disqualified that were confirming that having hope in God’s promises was reliable. 

The author here implies two things that would have been a little more obvious to the first audience than it probably is to us.  The first is that those promises made to Abraham were now in their possession.  Just as Isaac was the child of promise and Ishmael was not, and just as Jacob was the child of promise and Esau was not, so Jesus had become the one and only child of promise and Israel, the firstborn (Ex. 4:22) had not (Paul discusses all of this in Romans 9).  But all of God’s promises to Israel were faithfully and justly administered in the Messiah, and that meant that those faithful to him were receiving the promises.  The second thing is that the promises of God to bring about a blessed family of all nations had taken shape in the Messiah and now their great hope in those promises had moved passed waiting for the coming of the promises and on to the ultimate and final fulfillment of them all.  That was the time when God would dwell finally and fully with his people forever in the resurrection age of eternal life.  This is what the Christians were waiting for and hoping in.

And they had an even greater visible marker of the guarantee of those promises than Abraham did.  Abraham had God’s word and his character, enough to be sure, but those in Christ have a further confirmation.  We need not grow weary or lazy in living out our faith that we really reign with God as his people in the age to come, despite all appearances to the contrary in the present age, because we have an anchor that is firmly planted in the throne room, the inner sanctuary of the real heavenly Temple and not just in some earthly representation of it.  Jesus is our forerunner or the firstfruits.  He has gone ahead into the resurrection where humans dwell in God’s presence and is holding our spot.  He is acting as our mediator and high priest, ensuring that those who remain faithful to him will indeed join him in that resurrection age when he returns to make all things new.  He is, in fact, our high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.  And with that, we have now arrived at the same spot where we turned off, and are now ready to continue on our journey.

Devotional Thought

When the audience of this letter was struggling spiritually the author called upon them to really focus on the person and character of Jesus Christ and his superiority.  When they did that, he knew that they would remain faithful.  When you are going through hard times spiritually, what do you focus on?  Do you focus on the situation, your feelings, your emotions, how to relieve the situation, or do you meditate on the person and character of Jesus Christ and hold steady?

Hebrews 6:9-12

9 Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are convinced of better things in your case—the things that have to do with salvation. 10 God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. 11 We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, so that what you hope for may be fully realized. 12 We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

Dig Deeper

We moved away from Milwaukee some years ago now but we are still able to get back to our old hometown every now and again.  Recently, though, we went through town and went into an area that we used to drive through frequently but haven’t really been through since we moved.  The area lies a short distance from where we used to live in our first five years in Milwaukee, and is very near Miller Park where the Milwaukee Brewers play.  During those years it was really quite an eyesore.  The area was full of old granaries and buildings that had been allowed to decay into near ruin.  Everywhere you looked was a mass of rusting metal structures that soared several stories into the sky, unkempt fields, and overgrown parking lots and the such.  It really was an ugly few blocks to drive through until you got closer to the stadium.  During our last five years in Milwaukee, however, we moved to the other side of town and didn’t go through that area nearly as much, although we’d still drive through every so often.  During that period I noticed a slow and steady plan seemed to be afoot to knock down, blow up, and get rid of much of the blight of that area.  There wasn’t a whole lot of rebuilding of anything going on but, I thought to myself, “at least they’re knocking down the ugly stuff.”  As I found myself driving through that area the other day for the first time in about five years, though, I could not believe my eyes.  All of the old eyesores were gone and the area was completely built up.  It was teeming with shiny new businesses, pristine strip malls, and beautiful landscaping everywhere you looked.  It truly looked like a completely different place.  It became clear that there was a greater purpose to busting up the old neighborhood.  It was so that they could build it up to its full potential.

On a small scale, that is something of what the author of Hebrews is up to in chapters 5 and 6.  He has just completed one of the harshest rebukes found in the New Testament, chiding them for allowing themselves to be potential prey to spiritual laziness and dullness.  Yet at no point do we get that sense that he was being cruel or blasting them just for the sake of letting off a little steam or cutting them down to size.  There was a purpose to the deconstruction that he was doing in the previous passages, which now becomes clear in this section as the tone takes a dramatic turn.  Now that the dangers have been addressed directly and head-on, he can get to the business of encouraging and building.  They had potential to be so much more than those who would turn back and abandon the Messiah and his people.  No, his true belief was that wasn’t who they were at all.  They had stood next to him and stared at the blight that they could become if they weren’t careful, but now it was time to build themselves into the beautiful structure that God intended for them to be.

The tough things had to be said to warn them and let them know of the dangerous road down which they could head if they weren’t careful, but the author was convinced that they would heed his warnings and not fall into the trap that some had already fallen prey to.  They were his “dear friends” or “beloved” (which is the only time that phrase is used in the book of Hebrews) and he is confident that they will do better.  Surely the writer of Hebrews did want to be frank and straightforward with those that he loved but he also wasn’t trying to needlessly beat up a group of people that were facing difficult circumstances.  It’s time for a little rebuilding and so he turns to affirmation and encouragement.  These are elements that are incredibly vital to the Christian community.  In fact, some psychologists believe that appreciation is one of, if not the strongest, human need.  We need to be affirmed and appreciated by others and that’s exactly what Hebrews does in this section.

It is the very needs for affirmation and appreciation that led the author of the Proverbs to write:  “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act” (Prov. 3:27).  That concept is certainly as true of kind and encouraging words as any other kind of tangible help that others might need.  Encouraging others, a consistent theme throughout Hebrews, is beneficial both to the receiver and the giver, which is why Proverbs 11:27 says: “One person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty.  A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.”  The writer of Hebrews had certainly embraced the loving approach of Proverbs 27:17 which declares that friends should sharpen one another as iron sharpens iron and that of Proverbs 27:6 which reminds us that wounds from a friend can be trusted, but it is the enemy that multiplies kisses.  But it was time now to move on to encouragement and positive reinforcement.

Hebrews wasn’t just holding out blind, wishful thinking to speak positively of the future that lays ahead of the audience.  He has great reason for his great confidence in their steadfastness.  The basis for his confidence lies in God’s justice.  God will remember and continue to bless their work and the love that they had constantly shown to one another.  If this letter was indeed written to the church in Rome, as we have supposed, then that would fit quite nicely with the reputation that the church in Rome continued to maintain throughout the first century where Ignatius described the Roman church as “having the presidency of love,”  and into the second century, where Dionysius, the church leader in Corinth, said that the church in Rome had always led the way “in doing good for one another, sending contributions to churches in need, relieving the poverty of the needy, and ministering to those in difficult situations.”  In fact, the picture painted in verse 10 is what the Christian family is supposed to look like.  It is a community devoted to God and engaging in the hard work of demonstrating that devotion through loving others.  This is what God wants from and for his people and we should not miss the point that the love shown to one another is, in God’s eyes, done to and for him.

God will continue to bless the community in their labor, which is why the writer ties in their loving work to the justice of God.  Here he has struck that perfect, and sometimes difficult to understand, balance between God’s grace and faithfulness and our own hard work.  Certainly God will provide for his people and given them the means to remain faithful but that faithfulness will always be seen in our actions.  That is why it is necessary for God’s people to both be active in sharing our love and doing good works but in also constantly recognizing that the strength and grace to do so comes from God.  God’s people certainly are created for good works which he has prepared in advance for us to do (Eph. 2:10).  It is this balance that led Paul declare in 1 Corinthians 15:10 that he had worked harder than anyone to advance the gospel, but reminds his readers that it was not through his own effort but by the grace of God.

So what is the proper balance between resting in God’s grace and faithfulness to see us through to the end and the constant biblical call to good works and laboring in the Lord?  I think the proper balance is beautifully on display in Philippians 3:16: “Only let us live up to what we have already attained.”  If we over-stress the “live up to” part we will be full of guilt and constantly pushing ourselves according to our own strength to do more and get better results.  On the other hand, if we over-emphasize the “already attained” portion then we endanger ourselves in becoming lazy and undisciplined and actually failing to show appreciation to God for what he has done.  Yes, God has declared us as his people, and yes we do need to show evidence of that in our lives as we love others and work for the advancement of God’s rule and his kingdom. 

There is, of course, the looming danger that he has already covered: that we can so spurn God’s grace and become so unappreciative and dull that we take our eyes completely off of Christ and willingly wander away.  That is why Hebrews urges his readers to stay diligent in living up to the status that they have been given as God’s people until the very end.  Rather than becoming lazy and letting go as some apparently already had among the family of believers, he wanted them to look at some of the great examples of those who remained faithful to God and would partake in the inheritance (the positive examples are something he will mention briefly in the next section and then draw out more fully in chapter 11).

What they needed to understand and what we cannot miss is that feelings are unreliable.  If a runner only ran and trained when they felt like it there would be no great runners.  If we wait until we feel like it to work hard and be consistent in loving others or giving of our time and energy to God’s people, or serving in a ministry then it will never happen.  Our feelings don’t matter when it comes to this.  What does matter is God’s call to stand firm to the end in loving him and loving others.

 

Devotional Thought

What encouragement do you find today from the author of Hebrews words of affirmation to his audience?  Why is it important to balance the affirmation that God will not forget us with the need to be diligent?

Hebrews 6:1-8

6 Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death,[a] and of faith in God, 2 instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3 And God permitting, we will do so.

4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age 6 and who have fallen[c] away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. 7 Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. 8 But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.

Dig Deeper

Recently I was going to a location that I had never been to before and, unfortunately I didn’t have my GPS with me, so I had to try to figure out how to find the building I was looking for on my own.  I was looking for a particular road to turn on and couldn’t find it.  After a time I became convinced that I was heading the wrong way and so I turned around.  I talked myself into the fact that when I had turned onto the road that I was currently on that I had turned the wrong way, so I turned around and headed back the other way.  I had traveled almost a mile on that road so I had to go back the mile, then go through the intersection heading in the opposite direction and begin searching for the road that I wanted.  The problem that I didn’t realize at that moment was that I had been going the right direction in the first place.  In fact, as I found out later, the road I was looking for was only a few blocks beyond the point where I gave up and turned around to head in the other direction.    The reality was that I had given up on the right way, becoming convinced that it was not the right way.  I turned around and started in the wrong direction, thinking that I would find my destination in the other direction.  I could have headed in that other direction for hours and would never have found where I was going because I had already given up going in the right direction.

This passage in Hebrews must surely be considered among the more hotly debated and easily misunderstood passages in the entire Bible.  At the heart of this passage is the confounding statement that seems, at first glance, to be saying that once someone falls away from their discipleship that they can never be restored.  Is that what Hebrews was saying to his first audience?  Did he really intend to say that you get but one chance at this life in Christ and if you stumble away once, then don’t bother trying to come back?  Or was that not exactly what the author was driving across to his first audience?  When we take this passage within the entirety of the context of the letter and consider carefully what the author actually says, we will see that his point not all that different from the above illustration.

In the midst of a majestic section showing how Jesus is the superior high priest that God had always promised his people and that he was not just superior to the Aaronic priesthood but completely different from them, coming from the line of Melchizedek, the author of Hebrews broke in to face a harsh reality.  The deeper truths he wanted to teach them about the identity of the Messiah and how that worked out in their life of faith, he couldn’t because they had grown spiritually dull.  They had taken their eyes off of the important things like who Jesus was and what he was trying to accomplish in and through them, and were focusing on other things such as the persecutions that they were facing and the pressure to return to their old lives outside of Christ.  The author chided his audience as only a good friend could do.  They should be teachers who were delving deeply into God’s word, living it our in their lives, and sharing those truths with others.  But instead they were struggling with baby Christian issues like staying faithful.  How can you move onto maturity if you’re still struggling with basic things?  How can you learn to drive a car when you still haven’t learned to walk?

In challenging them, he urged them to leave the basics of becoming a Christian and mentioned six specific areas, calling them the elementary teachings, which was a way of saying the basic principles or the ABC’s of the faith.  The first area is the repentance that they entered into when they chose the life of Christ.  To understand the author’s line of thinking we have to realize that for them, repentance was more than just an act, it was a new way of life.  It was another way of saying “dying to one’s self.”  To enter into the repentance of Christ was to leave the way of life that led to death and go in the other direction towards the life of the age to come.  The second and third areas were inseparable from one another and deeply connected to the first: faith in God and baptism. To have faith was to demonstrate their repentance and embrace the life of Christ, trusting in it and entering into it.  Their baptisms were the point when they entered into that life of repentance (Some newer translations have changed “baptisms” here to “ritual washings” claiming that the plural state of the word might indicate that the author was referring to the different cleansing rituals of the Jews, but the simpler solution is simply to realize that he is addressing the community as a whole so to refer to instructions about their “baptisms” makes sense).  Closely on the heals of repentance, faith, and baptism came the fourth area, that of the laying on of hands, which probably referred both the early Christian practice of laying hands on a newly baptized person, accepting them into the community and the apostolic practice of passing on miraculous gifts of the Spirit through the laying on of hands.

The final two areas referred to the basic beliefs and core doctrines of the early Christians.  The resurrection of the dead, which was the great hope of the Christian faith and the “eternal judgment,” which would probably be better translated “the judgment of the coming age.”  The resurrection and the time when God would judge the present age while ushering in his eternal age were both future hopes but also realities that the early Christians believed they were to be living out now, showing the world what that age looked like (or at least of hint of that age).

I don’t think the author’s point was, as is often times assumed, to criticize his audience for doing lessons about these basic things over and over again and never moving past these basic principles or salvation-type sermons.  Perhaps there was an element of that, but it seems more likely that the author was shaming them by pointing out that they were struggling with remaining faithful to the life of Christ into which they had entered.  His point would be like telling a teenager who didn’t want to do their homework that it was time to move past potty training and their ABC’s and get it together.  If they were mature spiritually they would not be struggling with such an idea of being faithful to Christ and would be moving onto to maturity in their life of Christ.  That they were struggling with being faithful demonstrated that they had never moved past a true understanding of the basic beliefs of the Christian family.  It was high time to move on to mature issues of Christian faithfulness.

This was important stuff, though, because one who has walked in the life of Christ and then turned the other way would not find repentance anywhere else.  The debates on this section usually fall somewhere in between two extremes.  One on end are those who do word gymnastics to claim that the author is not intending to say that someone can genuinely be a Christian and then walk away from their faith.  On the other extreme are those like 2nd century church leader Tertullian who erroneously began to argue that Hebrews was saying that if someone sinned after their baptism that they were excluded from Christ.  This led some to embrace the idea of putting off their baptisms until their death bed.  So what is the author trying to say here?  Is there a better middle ground that we can find that is closer to the author’s original intent?

I believe there is.  First, Hebrews describes the initial entry and walk in the life of Christ in five respects.  Those who have been enlightened (early Christian language for baptism and entering into the life of Christ); those who have tasted of the heavenly gift of the eternal life found in Christ; those who have shared in or “partnered” with the Holy Spirit and the transforming work that he begins in the life of each baptized believer; those who have eaten from the meal of obedience to the word of God and done the will of God; and those who have seen the transformational power of the life of the coming age.  At every stage it is clear that the writer is describing someone who had truly been part of the life of the age to come, a true Christian.  He is not, as some claim, describing a person who has only “dabbled” in Christianity.

Keep in mind that he was writing to a community where some had already abandoned Christ, denouncing him and returning to Judaism or other such beliefs.  Others were struggling with making that same mistake, so the author wanted to be clear what the result of that is.  We need to be clear that by using the term “fallen away” he was most likely referring to those who have fallen into apostasy, meaning that they denounced Christ and returned to their former way of life, thinking that they could still somehow be God’s people without Christ.  Once they have gone down that road their is no repentance.  In making the decision to abandon Christ and leave his people they were declaring that they could find another path to God, another repentance.  Hebrews is not speaking here of people who have grown weak in their struggle against sin and drifted off in their resolve to live a holy life.  He speaks of those who entered into the repentance found alone in the life of Christ.  Once they turn away from that and turn to another “repentance” that they supposed could be found in the works of the law or some pagan religion, all hope was gone.  There was no repentance except that found in Christ so if they denounced that and left, the idea that they could be brought back to repentance through some other means was a fantasy.  They couldn’t reject repentance and then somehow be brought back to it through another means.

Not only would leaving Christ and his people be turning around and looking for their destination in the wrong direction, it meant that they would be crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public shame.  In other words, they would be joining the ranks of those that had rejected Christ during his lifetime, putting him up on the cross of shame to die the death of one cursed by God.  They had to hear in the starkest terms possible and realize that they weren’t just taking a rest from a weary journey.  To leave the life of Christ because they no longer wished to suffer for him meant to join the ranks of the very ones who put him to death.  And that would be a true tragedy.

He finishes off the point by putting it in agricultural terms that would have been more familiar to those in the agrarian societies of the first century (and uses a great deal of imagery from Isaiah 5 as well).  Like land that takes in the rain and produces a good crop are those that remained faithful to the life of Christ.  But those that turned to other ways thinking that they could find repentance there, would be like land that took in the rain and produced nothing but thorns and thistles.  In the end, all that can be done is to burn out the land.  The warning that they are given to remain faithful to their life in Christ is stark and direct and should cause us to do a great deal of thinking ourselves, but it’s not all doom and gloom.  In fact, there was great hope on the horizon, and it is to that that the author will turn next.

 

Devotional Thought

The author of Hebrews strongly exhorted his readers to move past struggling with issues of remaining faithful to God and his people, citing those as the types of things that infants deal with, not mature Christians.  Have you truly settled those things in your mind and moved on to growing spiritual and continuing the process of spiritually maturing?  How does the author suggest being able to do so to those that are struggling with the basics of their faith?

Hebrews 5:11-14

11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Dig Deeper

Very recently the weekly pop magazine “Time” came out with a cover that has generated a great deal of controversy.  This is a magazine that has made a living over the past decade or so by still positing itself as the newsmagazine that it once was but really being much more concerned with an ideology, creating sensation, and selling copies of its magazine than with actually being a serious reporter of the truth and news.  This recent cover, however, has really fulfilled their constant desire for attention and “buzz.”  It features a woman on the cover with her bare breast exposed.  Standing in front of her on a small chair is her nearly four year old son, looking much more like a regular “boy” than a baby that would normally be of breast feeding age.  In the picture the boy is shown suckling at his mother’s breast.  The article portends to be about a growing movement of mothers who argue for children to be breast fed well into their childhood, going far beyond the normal infant stages of breast feeding.  Setting aside the controversy of the picture and the magazine cover itself, the point of the article is that some people believe that it is a better alternative for young children to continue to be nurtured by their mother’s milk for many years past the normally thought of time frame.  Others, however, find that strange and abnormal to the point of doing harm to the children.

Whatever you might think of that particular issue, this is something of the picture that Hebrews presents here.  He is envisioning a body of believers who should be well beyond the normal stage of breast feeding and using that milk as the source of their nutrition.  It is fine for a baby to breast feed and grow strong on the milk of his mother but it becomes a rather grotesque prospect to think of an eight or ten or fifteen year-old child doing the same thing.  Wherever that age might be, there is an age where the child needs to leave their mother’s milk and move on to solid food.  This is the stage at which the author of Hebrews believes his audience is at.  In fact, he believes that they had passed that stage long ago and were still stamping around demanding milk when they really needed to start chewing some serious food.  Milk nourishes babies but it simply won’t do for those who are up and moving, and exercising, and living life the way that they should.

This warning, in fact, comes out unexpectedly like suddenly seeing the flashing lights of a patrol officer in your rearview mirror.  The rebuke is so straightforward that it gives us a flash of insight as to how well the author knew his audience and their spiritual condition as well as how much he cared about them as to tell the truth no matter how it might have stung.  The author had been teaching about the importance of understanding about Jesus as high priest in the order of Melchizedek.  He wanted them to understand that they now have a high priest who did not rely on being of the lineage of Aaron because he was far greater than that priesthood.  He was not a temporary priest, but the eternal and complete high priest, and was thus, the one to be clung to tightly.  But he breaks off in the middle of that teaching to give a stern rebuke and warning of the type that almost anyone who has ever taught is quite familiar with.  There is more that he would like to say; greater depths to which he would like to take their understanding, but he cannot because they are not fully engaged in the process of learning. 

We’ve all heard of speakers who are dull and lifeless and we’ve all probably suffered through one or two in our lifetimes (or made others suffer through our own dullness on occasion).  But rarely do we hear of an audience being dull.  That’s exactly what Hebrews says to this struggling group of Christians, though.  The NIV translates what could be rendered as “dull” with the phrase “you no longer try to understand.”  And that was exactly the situation.  It wasn’t that they couldn’t understand but they weren’t trying.  They were giving no real effort and had grown quite lazy.  They had fallen into the inexplicable zone of thinking that they didn’t need to work hard at learning about God through his word.  Their eyes had long glazed over and they had stopped thinking that learning any more or going any deeper was necessary.  It would be one thing if they were too young and immature spiritually yet to be able to process what the author would like to teach them.  It would even being something different entirely if they were just exhausted and worn out and needed something light and easy to encourage them.  But that was not the case.  They were fully capable of of what our author is calling them to but had grown lazy in learning.  That might not have shown up fully in their actions yet, but it would before long.  This should be a stern warning for many of us who are quite comfortable in simple little devotionals and lessons who balk at the first sign of lesson being a bit tough to chew or an implication that we need to step up our Bible study and work harder at grasping the depth of God’s word.  The warning is clear: baby food only nourishes babies.

They should, at this point says Hebrews, be teachers.  They should be able to take in and give out to others but instead they are like immature children who only want the warm comfort of an easily swallowed swig of milk and do want to share with anyone else.  That’s fine for a baby but it’s monstrous behavior for an adult.  They didn’t want to learn more but wanted someone to teach them the basic elements over and again.  The deeper truths of the faith are demanding and cost us because they call us to change our thinking and behavior.  That’s why people don’t typically want to go deeper in their study and understanding of God’s word.  They might use the cover story that they don’t understand but the reality, as the author of Hebrews points out, they just don’t want to badly enough.

There are two reasons basic reasons that we become dull and immature as Hebrews describes.  The first is that we grow old without growing up.  Job 32 says “I thought, ‘Age should speak; advanced years should teach wisdom’. But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.  It is not only the old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right. “  Just being older or being a Christian for a long time doesn’t mean that we have grown mature in our faith and understanding.  The second reason is that bad habits keep us from growing.  They had fallen into the habit of taking in simple food but not growing beyond that and not learning further so that they could teach others.  Lazy habits of Bible study lead to dull Christians.  As Christians we need to desire more food than what we take in on a Sunday morning.  We need to develop healthy eating habits spiritually so that we can get the nourishment that we need to grow and mature.

But what exactly was the author calling them to in charging them with moving beyond the basic and simple elements of the faith?  The author cared for his audience and he wanted what was best for them which meant that they would get off of the baby food and move onto the teaching about righteousness.  In using that phrase he didn’t just mean teachings about how to be a good and moral person.  “Righteousness” referred to being in a right relationship with God, to dwell in his justice.  He wanted them to be people that didn’t just learn things that made them feel better but he wanted them to be a people who “did” their Christianity.  He was calling them to live out their relationship with God, being confident and faithful in their relationship because of Christ, and then able to pass on that life to others.  There is also potentially another element that he was inferring.  By the second century writings of the early Christians it had become pretty common to speak of “the teaching about righteousness” to refer to the advanced Christian truths that put emphasis on the cost and responsibility of being disciples, a great portion of which included sacrificing and laying down one’s life for others (in both a metaphorical and literal sense).  It is quite probable, then, that this aspect of that phrase was already being used at the time Hebrews was written and is exactly what he had in mind for a group that was beginning to buckle under the pressure of persecution.

The Hebrews writer wanted this community of believers, and by extension all disciples, to grow into spiritual maturity which was marked by three areas.  The first marker is solid food.  Solid food takes time to prepare, to chew, ingest, and digest as opposed to milk.  So many Christians see deeper teaching and learning as an option for the “smart folks” that they would rather not be bothered with.  It is important to note, however, that Hebrews is talking about practical deep teaching that has an immediate impact on the lives of believers.  The teaching he is referring to is not a bunch of interesting but largely irrelevant scholarly material that has little bearing on our walk with Christ or in sharing the gospel with others.  Biblical teaching encompasses the truths that will bring our walk in the life of Christ into completeness and there is a vital connection between what we learn and what we do.  This is why Jesus encouraged his listeners to dig in deeply into his word because we receive the same measure of spiritual maturity from God as we use to dig into his word (Mark 4:24-25).

The second marker is correct practice.  The mature constantly use the word to train themselves in righteous, just, godly, mature behavior.  There is an old saying that “practice makes perfect,” but that is incorrect.  Perfect practice makes perfect.  Teaching that does not induce us to grow is not teaching, it is information.  Too many Christians avoid the hard work of learning the deeper elements of walking as Jesus walked and prefer encouraging devotional that are warm and go down easy but there is a time, and it comes relatively quickly, to move beyond that.

The final marker is to have good senses.  Once we have trained ourselves that enables us to distinguish good behavior from bad.  It allows us to recognize immediately the difference between things that further conform us to the pattern of the world and the things that will take us through the often difficult process of being transformed to God’s will.  Babies are blissfully unaware of much of what happens right around them, but the wise and mature have been trained and they know and understand what is going on and know how to respond.  This is the mature Christianity to which we must strive and join the recipients of Hebrews in answering the challenge to leave the milk and go after solid food.

Devotional Thought

If our present dedication to growing through the word of God is somewhat predictive of our future spiritual maturity, what are your prospects at this point?  Have you been doing the work of feeding on the solid food of the word of God or have you been stamping around for milk?

Hebrews 5:1-10

5 Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. 2 He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. 3 This is why he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people. 4 And no one takes this honor on himself, but he receives it when called by God, just as Aaron was.

5 In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him,

“You are my Son;

    today I have become your Father.”[a]

6 And he says in another place,

“You are a priest forever,

    in the order of Melchizedek. ”[b]

7 During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8 Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered 9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him 10 and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

Dig Deeper

I never cared much for my sister’s birds while we were growing up.  We always had dogs and I loved having dogs but my sister started to have birds as pets, parakeets in particular, and I really never like it much.  I’m not a bird hater, mind you, but the birds were loud, they were messy, and I never have appreciated the smell of either birds or bird food for that matter.  Then one day I found myself at home alone as a teenager and in charge of the house for a few hours.  I don’t know if someone left one of the cage doors open or what exactly happened but I suddenly noticed that one of her birds had escaped his cage and was fluttering and flying around the house.  I wasn’t very tall yet at that point and didn’t necessarily care all that much for grabbing the birds by hand but I knew that I had to figure out a way to get that bird back in its cage before our dog somehow got hold of it and thought it was a new toy.  After chasing this bird around for several minutes and jumping up time and again in vain to catch it, I began to realize what an exercise in futility this really was.  The bird was frightened by me and had no concept of the fact that I was trying to help it.  The more I chased after and lunged towards him, trying to rescue him and bring him to safety, the more he misunderstood and got more frightened, doubling his efforts to keep away from me.  At one point I found myself trying to reason with this bird to go back in his cage.  Okay, the reality is that there was less reasoning and more just yelling at the stupid bird to get back into its cage but you get the idea.  If only there had been a way that I could somehow become a bird for just a short time and explain in my little birdy language and way that I was not trying to harm him but was, in fact, trying to keep him safe.  Yes, if I could just become a bird then I could have communicated with him in a way that he would have understood.  Unfortunately for me, that was completely impossible.

Believe it or not, it’s almost as if Job struggled with this same thought but from the opposite perspective.  He did not understand what God was doing in his life and wished that he could somehow question God as a man so that he could get to the bottom of why it seemed that God was intent on making him suffer.  Job begins chapter 9 by asking “how can mere mortals prove their innocence before God?  Though they wished to dispute with him, they could not answer him one time out of a thousand” (Job 9:2).  He closes the chapter by lamenting that ““He is not a mere mortal like me that I might answer him, that we might confront each other in court.  If only there were someone to mediate between us, someone to bring us together, someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that his terror would frighten me no more.  Then I would speak up without fear of him, but as it now stands with me, I cannot” (Job 9:32-35).  In other words, “if only God were a man that I could figure out what he is up.”

What Job longed for had finally happened in the Messiah.  God had come down in the person of Jesus Christ.  He had become a man so that he could be communicated with.  But it was much like my desire to become a bird for a moment as well.  God became one of us so that he could communicate with us that he did indeed understand.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know what it is like to be human, for he made us and knows us better than we know ourselves.  But in Jesus, the high priest, God has shown us that he understands.  We can know that he knows what we go through.  We can know that he cares and is only offering help and salvation.  God himself came and removed the rod of terror.  Through this ultimate high priest we can now relate to God in a way that we can understand.

The writer of Hebrews, in expounding upon this great high priest, sets about the difficult task of showing that Jesus is both a proper and fitting high priest, while at the same time being a completely different type of high priest than has ever existed.  He starts out with a list of qualifications that were common to a normal high priest and that definitely apply to Jesus.  First, he must come from among the people.  This was part of the importance that Jesus was a descendant of Abraham.  He was from among the Jewish people so he could represent them as a true representative of Israel, and he was also human so he could serve as the high priestly representative for all people.

Second, he represented God to the people.  Who more qualified to do that than the Son of God himself?  Thus, he could rightly serve as a mediator between God and humanity, offering gifts and sacrifices for the sins of his people.  Because the high priest was a regular human being, he was never detached from his people.  In the case of a normal high priest, though, he was as much a sinner as anyone else.  He had to atone for his sins as much as the rest of the nation and so he would never deal harshly with those who needed atonement.  Christ went through the temptations and weakness and could rightly identify with the struggles but he was an even greater high priest because although he went through even greater temptations than most, he never sinned, and thus could offer a perfect sacrifice when he laid down his own life on the altar for the sins of the people.

Third, the high priest could not appoint himself into that role.  He must be called by God.  Nothing is more suspect than when someone appoints themselves to a important role and the high priest could never be allowed to put himself in that position.  Even Aaron, the first and greatest high priest, did not confer upon himself the office of the high priest.  He was called by God to the role.  In fact Aaron met all of the criterion.  He came from among the people.  He represented God to the people and was gentle in so doing.  And God had appointed him high priest.  But Jesus also met all of those qualifications.  So when did God appoint Jesus as the high priest?  The author of Hebrews returns to Psalms 2 and 110, two of the most important Psalms in forming the early church’s understanding of the role of the Messiah.  Psalm 2:7 declared that there would be a day when the Father would declare publicly that the Messiah was indeed his son, the chosen one.  The gospels, of course, all connected that day with the moment when Jesus was baptized.  That’s when God publicly declared that he had sent his own Son to be his mediator.  He was the high priest. 

“But wait a minute,” an astute Jew might have asked, “there is no evidence that Jesus was a Levite or a descendant of Aaron so how could he be part of the priesthood?”  That’s where the mysterious figure of Melchizedek comes in.  We’ll hear much more about Melchizedek in chapter 7, but a quick word of introduction will be appropriate here.  Melchizedek was a priestly figure who comes somewhat out of nowhere in Genesis 14 to bless and receive offerings from Abraham after a successful recovery of his nephew Lot.  What Hebrews will unpack in much greater detail in chapter 7, he only teases at here.  Jesus has every right to the priesthood of God because he comes from a different order than Aaron.  This is truly a masterful teaching point and would have been an important clarification for those who were once devout in their Judaism.  Melchizedek was a priest outside of the priestly order of Aaron, demonstrating that that line of priesthood was not the only or definitive line, and was always intended by God to be temporary.  Melchizedek is given no lineage or line of descent in Genesis.  He simply was called by God, and what is implied here (and will be made clear later) is that Jesus is like that.

Thus, Jesus was a rightful priest that was not just equal to Aaron but was superior.  Aaron was appointed from the line of Levi but Jesus was the Son of God himself.  Aaron offered sacrifices but was a sinner himself, while Jesus was a perfect priest forever.  Aaron’s priesthood offered temporary assistance but Jesus’ sacrifice was eternal and complete.  On top of the obvious statements, this passage has a chiastic structure that further demonstrates the author’s desire to depict Jesus’ priesthood as complete and replacing Aaron’s (chiastic refers to an ABCD DCBA structure of a passage to show the relation between specific items):

                              A The Old Covenant priesthood (v. 1)

                                              B The sacrifice of the old priesthood (v. 1)

                                                              C The weakness of the high priest (vv. 2-3)

                                                                              D The appointment of the high priest (v. 4)

                                                                              D The appointment of Christ, the new priest (vv. 5-6)

                                                              C The suffering of the new priest (vv. 7-8)

                                              B The sacrificial provision of the new high priest (v. 9)

                              A The new office of the high priest (v. 10)

But one should not think that Jesus just got handed the role of high priest because he is God’s son as though is he some trust fund baby that is given an inheritance that he never really earned, understood, or appreciated.  The sacrifice that the Son made was indeed a sacrifice as is evidenced by the cries and tears that Jesus offered up to the Father throughout his life, particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Through the sacrifice of the Son he learned obedience and was made perfect.  Hebrews doesn’t, of course, mean that Jesus was made perfect on the Cross as though he was imperfect before that.  The term means “finished” or “completed.”  Jesus was not like an ancient prince or priest who was given his position simply by lineage and privilege.  He was Son, but he was called to walk a path of obedience and suffering for others, and only when he did that did he complete his role and become the source of salvation and entrance into the life of the age to come for all. 

The anguish of Job has been answered.  God did become a human and spoke to the questions that mankind has struggled with since before we can even remember.  God is not distant.  He came himself as a high priest in the order of Melchizedek.  This high priest understands us because he is one of us, yet he can perfectly sacrifice for us because he is greater than us.  The point that Hebrews is carefully and skillfully building up to is that not only is the Messiah the superior sacrifice for sin, he is the only true sacrifice for sin.

Devotional Thought

Take a few moments this morning to reflect on the phrase “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”  What gratitude does that provoke within you heart as you reflect on the role of Jesus as high priest?  What does that gratitude do for your resolve to continue to be obedient to him?  What does obedience look like for you specifically today?