16 March 2014 : Hebrews 7 : 11-19
At school, there were certain subjects I couldn’t quite get my head around. Like calculus. Trigonometry. Latin poetry. Things I didn’t even begin to comprehend then and, let it be admitted, have never, for one passing moment in the intervening 40-odd years, missed.
I must admit that I find parts of Hebrews 7 to be similarly hard to get my little peanut brain around, but today I’ve tried to identify a couple of points of interest from this rather obscure passage. It does get easier from here. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Remember what I said when we started our study of Hebrews, that whoever wrote this book was trying to sort out a problem that had kicked off in the church. People of Jewish origin who had become Christ-followers were being persecuted, and were under pressure to give up their radical faith – that salvation came through the blood of Christ alone, with no reference to our performance – and not exactly give up that faith in Jesus but settle for half-and-half, Jesus plus obedience to the customs and practice of the synagogue.
The basic argument in this chapter is that you can’t have it both ways. If being accepted by God depends on our obedience to the Law, our human performance, then what was the point of Jesus coming at all? Why did He bother going through all the agony of the cross, if the cross was only part of the deal? But if being accepted by God is, as Paul and the early church believed and taught, by grace ; if the blood of Christ is enough to wash us clean, then the good news is that it can’t be invalidated by our momentary lapses.
And this isn’t just an airy-fairy topic of dinner-party conversation over port and cigars long, long go, it’s absolutely fundamental to our understanding of who and what we are, and to our sense of security. There’s an old saying that blood is thicker than water, and I think most of us know what that means. You and I can behave like utter jerks from time to time – at least I know I can! – and some people might fall out with us because of it.
But the people who really love and care for us, our own families, the people with whom we have a blood bond, they’re the ones we can count on to stick with us through thick and thin. They may not like the way we’ve behaved, but they still love us enough not to confuse our “who” with our “do”. The great thing about being a Christ-follower is that we have a blood bond with Father God. When we’re born again, it’s with a new DNA – we are now blood group X, X for the cross, and no subsequent botch-up overrules that.
And I know I’ve preached this message many, many times before, but I suspect we need to hear it many, many times again, because the devil – who comes only to steal, kill and destroy – is heavily into identity theft. I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you, but it was something we experienced not that long ago when our debit card was hacked and my details used to purchase fire-arms, ammunition and face-masks on-line. Quite what the supplier thought a reverend would do with such items is a whole ‘nother story!
I know I mentioned tithing and the forthcoming stewardship campaign last week, but I can categorically reassure you that we’re not going down the road of extortion and armed robbery to persuade you to up the weekly offerings! At least not yet! But the whole episode was creepy. What else did they know about us? Scary! We were on edge for quite a while, and if the same thing has happened to you, you’ll be able to understand that.
The devil likes to try his luck with identity theft. The Bible tells you in 2 Corinthians 5 : anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So … you have God telling you, in His Word, that you are a complete new person, the old sinful life dead and buried, a new life full of grace and hope in its place, and that you are – not just have but are – the righteousness of God.
These are things, of course, that the devil doesn’t want you to know. He wants you to think that you are basically still a sinner, and that whatever forgiveness you may feel you have is valid only till the next time you slip up. The devil wants you to believe that any unconfessed sin in your life trashes your relationship with God, so you better make sure you’ve owned up to anything everything you may have said or done wrong, because if you don’t, and you get run over by a no.68 bus, you’ll go straight to hell because of that unconfessed sin, or at the very least it will stop you ever getting any prayers answered.
That’s what the devil wants you to believe, and sadly that’s what a lot of religious people want you to believe, but it’s not what God wants you to believe and it’s not what God’s Word says. What God’s Word says is that you are the righteousness of God in Christ, and your identity, who you really are, cannot be affected by anything you may do.
And that’s essentially the point behind this chapter of Hebrews. The Jewish law, coming 430 year after the blessing of Abraham, does not in any way invalidate God’s blessing on you, because you are a descendant of Abraham. Vs.18-19 : The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.
In a world like ours, where so many people choose not to recognise God, there is a value for rules and regulations. They have their place. Without some external legal restraint, the people who don’t want to know about God would run riot and the result would be chaos. But law can never change character. At best, it forces people to suppress their selfishness and meanness, for the time being, but it doesn’t get rid of it. It doesn’t have that power.
Grace, on the other hand, does have power to change character. Think this through for a moment. Say you’re dealing with a difficult person. You be difficult back to them, and it will just confirm to their identity-thieved minds that they are in fact every bit as bad as, deep down, they believe they are, and it will just harden their resolve to be nasty and mean, because that’s all they know how to be – they’re conditioned to fail.
By contrast, if you can hang on in there and, by the grace of God, override your natural fleshly reaction to respond in kind and, over time, you’ll cause questions to arise in that person’s mind. They’ll start to ask themselves : Hmm, this church person actually treats me as if I wasn’t the ill-natured pain-in-the-tonsils that I’ve always believed I am, that everyone else thinks I am. What’s going on here? Am I missing something?
Now, as I say that, your immediate reaction might be : Hang on Frank, no way I can do that, I’m just not up to showing that level of grace to that miserable so-and-so. Can I just throw two words at you? Identity theft? Who says you’re not up to it? Philippians 2.13 : God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. Philippians 4.13 : I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Now you guys may not need to hear this message. You may have discovered the glorious truth of that double whammy from Philippians years ago. But, believe me, I need to hear it right now, so if necessary I’ll preach this message to myself because I’m struggling at present with the fact that, in my flesh, there are some individuals I’d cheerfully launch to the Moon! Please be assured, present company absolutely excepted!
Law always tends to drive us away from God. Grace will always draw us closer to Him. Every single time. That’s why the new covenant given in Jesus is better and stronger than the old covenant given to Moses. And that’s why the devil will always try to drag us back into a legalistic, performance-based self-righteousness, which can never bring us lasting joy or peace, instead of the real thing, the free gift of right standing with God in Jesus.
Just one more wee thing for today, the reference in v.14 to the Saviour coming off the line of Judah. This refers to all those begats in Matthew and Luke, tracing the ancestry of Joseph, step-father of Jesus, back through King David to Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. Now, we see in Genesis 37-38 that Judah was no angel. It was he who recommended selling his brother Joseph as a slave. His family life and love life were an utter mess.
But we note that, by Genesis 44, when the brothers meet up again with Joseph who by now was prime minister of Egypt while they were reduced to begging for food, that Judah was a changed character. Judah is the one who puts his neck on the line as security for Benjamin, both to Jacob and to Joseph. And in Jacob’s final blessing on his sons – some of which was forthright to say the least – he describes Judah as a lion and says this : The sceptre of leadership shall not depart from Judah, until the Messiah, the Peaceful One comes to Whom it belongs, and to Him shall be the obedience of the people.
Fast forward : Revelation 5.5 : Do not weep! Look, the Lion of Judah, the heir to David’s throne, has won the victory. Who is this verse about? The risen Jesus. Again, God in His grace changes failure into glory, disaster into triumph. Judah, and his descendant David, were men with human failings that the tabloids would have had a field day with, yet God loved them and did great things through them. Don’t let the devil’s identity theft routine kid you on that you’ve made too many mistakes to be of any use to God. In Christ you are a new creation, and the righteousness of God. You’re in His plan. Let Him fulfil it.