Partakers Christian Podcasts

Highlights in Hebrews 13

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 13 - Hebrews 4:14–16

Jesus the great High Priest

 

“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Hebrews 4:14-16

Apart from a passing mention in Hebrews 3:1 this is the first mention of Jesus by the writer as the great high priest - an idea which is going to dominate the next 6 chapters and thus forms the central core of his book.

He is going to talk of Jesus as high priest against the background of the Old Testament and not the current reality of his day. The high priest used to be the spiritual leader of the people of God. But by the times in which the writer lived he had become a political figure as well. The Romans appointed him and he was regarded by them as responsible for the way the people lived within the Roman empire - quite a difficult task.

In those next few chapters we will have plenty of opportunity to think about the spiritual aspects of high priesthood. Here we will look at the political work of Jesus. This was that he had set up a new kingdom, the kingdom of God, of which he was the king or at least the Crown Prince under his Father God.

It is the kingdom to which we belong as citizens of heaven, as Paul said in Philippians 3:20 ‘our citizenship is in heaven’. If we are Christian we have two passports, representing two citizenships. One, the obvious one, is our citizenship, our membership, of a nation in this world, the one into which we were born. The second, less obvious but more important one, is our citizenship of the kingdom of God. We are here, now, members of it on earth. One day we shall become members of it in heaven when we die. What a huge privilege that is and will be.

It is hard to change your citizenship from one country to another. It is equally hard to change our citizenship and leave the Kingdom of God, which is just as well considering how easily we can be tempted to try to do so. That is what the writer means when he talks about how we are to ‘hold firmly to the faith we profess’.

And it is only from within the kingdom that we can ‘approach God’s throne of grace with confidence’. That is pretty obvious. The king does not go visiting other kingdoms, so we need to be members of his kingdom to approach him. The kingdom is not all pleasure and excitement. Many difficult things will happen within it but we need not worry because the king has been there before us ‘tempted in every way just as we are’. The prime temptation that the writer will have been thinking of was the way in which Jesus felt a natural human horror at the thought of the cross, and how he wrestled in the garden of Gethsemane with his wish that he could avoid it. Someone has said that the biggest miracle Jesus ever did was not to turn away from his destiny on the cross! But he didn’t, so we can ‘find grace to help in our time of need’.

What a king! What a kingdom! What a great high priest to lead his people not only in spiritual things but in all the many difficulties and troubles of their every day lives.

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Highlights in Hebrews 12

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 12 - Hebrews 4:12-13
Under the knife.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

It is hard for us to see any benefit in the work of a sword. The writer will not have known anything about a surgeon’s scalpel so he could not have used that picture for what he wanted to say. But that does not stop us doing so. A surgeon’s scalpel, that little thin knife, is probably the sharpest sort of blade that there is around these days so it would make a good illustration.

‘The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any surgeon’s scalpel ….’few of us modern people will not at some time in our lives had to willingly submit ourselves to a surgeon carrying out an operation on us. He (or it may have been a she) may have had to sort out some part: a finger, an arm or a leg, that got broken. He will cut to make it better, to ensure that things naturally heal in the way that they should and not in some twisted way that will leave us permanently crippled. Or there may have been something wrong with one of the major organs in our body and he has had to go deeper in and try to sort things out. Yes, a surgeon’s scalpel is a better illustration of what the writer wants to say than a double-edged sword because its purpose is beneficial

The word of God that the writer was thinking about would almost certainly have been mainly the Old Testament. It may, or may not, (we don’t know when this book was written) have included any of the New Testament we know, but will almost certainly have included information about the life and words of Jesus. Our Bible has both Testaments, of course. Paying close attention to these Words of God will not always be a comfortable process. Sometimes, it will cut deep in order to straighten us out, make sure we do not get twisted in our thinking, keep us long term healthy when things were beginning to go wrong.

Make sure that you live a long and healthy life by paying close attention to the wonderful Word of God that we have in the scriptures. Sometimes they may cut deep to sort us out so that we continue along the good and narrow way. That will then ensure that we reach the ‘rest’ we were thinking about a few verses back, the Kingdom of God both in this life and the next. Another psalmist said, (Psalm 119:11) “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” The writer of Hebrews was thinking of what we should do; the Psalmist was more concerned with the outcome.

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Highlights in Hebrews 11

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 11 - Hebrews 4:11
Seeking rest

“Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.” Hebrews 4:11

‘Rest’ now there’s a thing! I hope you manage to get some even if you are a young Mum with several children, a farmer striving to get enough to eat out of a patch of not very good ground, or a busy executive in industry. Our writer never says very much about what he means here, thus indicating that the expects us all to know what ‘rest’ is. He has at least four different sorts of rest in mind:

1. ‘Rest’ is an essential and totally necessary part of the world we live in because even the Lord God rested ‘from all his work’ (Genesis 2:2). Rest is an essential part of creation.
2. Having set this example to all creation it became part of the law set out for all the people of God in Exodus 20: 8 - 11. Leviticus 16:29-31 even associates the day of rest with the cleansing of atonement. Unfortunately it became, and still is, one of the walls built around Israel to keep others, Gentiles, out. So that, instead of being a good thing it became a bit of a bad thing.
3. The Psalmist in Psalm 95:8-11 thinks of the Promised Land, towards which they journeyed through the desert, as a place of rest. There they would be able to settle down, stop travelling and putting up tents every night, build houses, cultivate the land and by generating a little more than they actually needed become richer and be able to have some leisure. Unfortunately that did not go well. They were not obedient in all they did as they travelled; they ‘hardened their hearts and ‘tried’ the Lord making him angry with them, thus delaying their arrival in the land by forty years (Psalm 95: 9, 10) thus serving as a warning to those for whom the psalmist was writing not to behave as they did.
4. The writer to the Hebrews uses all this background as a warning to his readers, including us, about how to behave. He does this by laying emphasis on the word ‘Today’ thus connecting the words of the psalm with the situation of his readers, like us. It is not completely clear what he now means by ‘rest’. He calls it a Sabbath rest but seems to mean something rather more than a weekly day off. One way of thinking of it is as entry into the Kingdom. In the Kingdom of God we will be able to rest; we shall no longer be struggling to gain acceptance by God because Jesus has secured that for us by his death on the Cross; when our days here are done we shall move, still within the Kingdom, into the glory where we shall surely have the real and final ‘rest’.

‘Rest’ number 4 takes us back to number 1 and the greater glory. ‘Rests’ numbers 2 and 3 are but stepping stones on the way. In a practical every day way these things are important. There is a realisation amongst those who know such things that there is a limit to how much work a person can do in a week. If someone is overworked in terms of hours, or demand on them, they become less effective than if they have a reasonable amount of rest. In our society that used to be accomplished by most people taking a Sunday/Sabbath rest. Shops were shut. Fields were not ploughed. By far the greater number of people in our society did not have any work to do on a Sunday.

All that has now changed. In our society the urge to get as many sales and therefore as great an income as possible means many people now have to work on a Sunday. Since the same number of people have the same amount of money to spend (allowing for the increase in population and general levels of affluence) it is hard to see who has benefited by this change. It just makes it harder for ordinary people to get an adequate amount of rest. As so often the Biblical, God-given way of doing things was, and is, better than that developed by ever greedy human beings. I hope you do not have to work beyond gaining a reasonable amount of rest, day by day and week by week.

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Highlights in Hebrews 10

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 10 - Hebrews 3:14
Hold on tight

Or as the NIV has it “let us hold firmly to the faith we profess”. That is very good advice, perhaps particularly for older folk, like me. (Sorry - if you can count yourself still young. Though it is probably worth while reading or listening on because one day we may all hope to become old if the Lord does not take us early.) It is very easy as our natural vigour slides away from us to begin to lose the vigour of our faith. Once we used to spend a lot of time working with the Sunday School or the young people of the church- now we are too old; or we used to do a lot of preaching but now our voice is beginning to betray our age, our memory is not as good as it was and it takes us many more words to say something than it used to do; or we have simply been active around the church but now we are too arthritic, or lazy, to do so.

Some of that is natural. In fact we can divide what happens into two parts: there is natural energy and vigour and there is spiritual energy and vigour. We quite inevitably lose some of our natural energy as we get older. For some of us this becomes evident to us, and other people, as we get into our 60s or even 50s. For some it is not so evident even as we get into our 70s or 80s. This we cannot fight or do much about apart from aiming to keep ourselves active and fit as long as possible by exercising or walking nearly every day, assuming you do not live in one of the parts of the world where you are expected to work until you are completely incapable of doing so.

But our spiritual energy is another matter. To some extent it will fade as our natural energy fades but it is also true that we can control it better. It may well change its shape as we get older. But we can hold on firmly to our faith. We can pray more when we pass retirement age, or the need to work everyday. We will have more time to explore the foundations of our faith. We can aim to become more knowledgeable about scripture and more loving towards our Lord as we gain an ever increasing understanding of what he has done for us and therefore what he means to us. We may become much better equipped to be a mentor to a younger person. Fundamentally we never know when we may not be called to use some skill in the Lord’s service even in our very old age. 

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What Christians Believe - Nicene Creed

This year, Christians around the world are observing the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea — an event that significantly influenced the Christian faith and continues to unify believers across centuries and traditions. Convened in 325 by Emperor Constantine in what is now modern-day Turkey, the Council of Nicaea resulted in the creation of the Nicene Creed: the first universal summary of Christian belief. We pray together and when Christians pray together, from different nations, different churches and different denominations - that reveals Church unity! Come! Let us pray and profess together!

Nicene Creed

What we believe as Christians...

 

We believe in one God,

the Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth,

and of all that is,

seen and unseen.

~

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God,

Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one being with the Father.

~

Through Him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

He came down from heaven:

by the power of the Holy Spirit,

He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

~

For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

He suffered death and was buried.

On the third day He rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures:

He ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end.

~

We believe in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son,

He is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

~

We believe in one, holy,

catholic (universal), and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come.

~

Amen

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Highlights in Hebrews 9

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)
Part 9 - Hebrews 3:13

Working Together

Hebrews 3:13 tells us we should “encourage one another daily”. That was presumably good advice in those days when everyone lived on top of each other in very small and cramped accommodation. It does not work so well with many of us who may be living in one place, working in another and finding fellowship in a third place. In our last study I suggested that we should be careful to work out a schedule for our personal time with the Lord and stick to it - even if it was not the ‘approved’ version.

Exactly the same thing is true here. We need fellowship, preferably fellowship of the sort that encourages each other with the sort of friendly fellowship contact that a small group can give. We need to have a good schedule for such things and stick to it. Once a week in a big church building listening to a preacher is not really the best way to do this, popular though it is! If you live in one of those parts of the world where the small shops are closing and everyone does most of their shopping in big stores, supermarkets, then also driving to a big church once a week, or even less often, would seem to fit with that lifestyle. But we are people, naturally gregarious people, if not quite pack animals, who need human contact to live good and happy lives. Going in to a big church once a month for some entertainment is not what we were designed to do!

As our writer goes on to say,

“ See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.” (Hebrews 3:12–14).

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Highlights in Hebrews 8

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 8 - Hebrews 3:1
Jesus rules

The writer says “Therefore fix your thoughts on Jesus” (Hebrews 3:1) This reminds me very much of the old song that starts ‘fix your eyes on Jesus’. Both of them are very good advice.

The image they bring to my mind is that of a collie sheep dog. We, in this country, herd sheep with the help of dogs who race around the flock and move it in the right direction. A collie will walk alongside its master or mistress scarcely taking its eyes off them and so walking very awkwardly. At the slightest command they are away very fast to follow voice or whistled instructions. Not only are they very obedient they are also very intelligent - one of the most intelligent breeds there is. So if there is a fold in the ground that takes them out of sight of their master they will almost certainly continue to do the right thing.

In the previous chapter the writer has been explaining things about Jesus, how effective his death has been for us in making us acceptable to God in spite of our sinfulness and general waywardness. He has now come to a ‘therefore’, challenging us to live in a way worthy of Jesus. (He does this most of the way through his book, alternating descriptions of what Jesus has done for us with challenges of how we should respond to him.)

Here his ‘therefore’ indicates that we are being challenged to act towards him as a sheepdog does to its master: with complete obedience whenever possible and intelligence when it is not. That is an intelligence that has been well developed by our past history of concern for scripture reading whenever possible, studying it and developing a good working knowledge of what it says.

When and how we do this is important. It used to be that everyone was exhorted to start the day, everyday, with Bible reading and prayer. That is all very well if you are retired and come to life as soon as you wake up. If you have a young family, need to start work as soon as you can, or, like me, are quite hopeless until you have some breakfast inside you, that is not very good advice. What you need to do is to set yourself a pattern of activity with the Lord that will fit into your day or week. I remember one time in my life when it was one evening each week, always the same one, which I dedicated to Bible study and prayer. That fitted into my life in a way that an early morning daily ‘quiet time’, as we used to call it, would not. Don’t worry if you can’t fit into someone else’s idea of what you should do. Make up your own schedule and stick to it. The good Lord will surely approve of you if you do that provided you are consistent and persevering.

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Highlights in Hebrews 7

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 7 - Hebrews 2:17
Jesus atones for us

For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

A few days ago, as I write, Liverpool football club took on Real Madrid for the Champions of Europe cup. The game is remembered for two awful mistakes made by Loris Karius, the Liverpool goalkeeper. They might still have been beaten but he made sure they were. He threw the ball out far to close to an opponent who was able to score easily from it, then he let a very catchable ball slip through his hands into the goal. One can only imagine what he felt like in the changing room afterwards. He must have sat in a corner and wished the ground would open up and swallow him! Nothing he could do would remedy the situation. Nothing he could do would atone for his awful mistakes. They had lost and that was that. He will have been the outcast of the team. He will have been lucky if anyone was prepared to say anything kind to him. He will not have been at-one with the rest of the team. (Only much later did they realise he may have been concussed in an earlier incident.)
We too have made some awful mistakes. Nothing we can do will make us winners who can appear before the great Lord God. Although we may not have broken any of the greatest laws of mankind such as murder or adultery, we have failed to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and souls and minds. We have lost the game of life.

But we are not as Karius. We, amazingly, have been put at-one with the Lord God. Not through anything we have done or could possibly do, but because of what Jesus has done for us. Jesus has made at-one-ment for the sins of the people. He has done that by his death on the cross; by giving his blood as a sacrifice for us. Later our writer categorically announces that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (9:22) The reference is, of course, to the blood of animal sacrifices made for the forgiveness of sins. Why that should be is never completely clear but it is a fundamental background understanding through scripture. The writer to the Hebrews is going to go on to explain this background in great detail though he only uses the word ‘atonement’ once more in his book.

Rejoice then! We have been accepted into the favour of the Lord God through the action of Jesus. Charles Wesley’s great hymn starts, ‘And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood’

 

Its answer is Yes, Yes, and Yes.

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Highlights in Hebrews 6

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 6 - Hebrews 2:10
Jesus our pioneer

1 In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered.

Our main emphasis here is going to be on that word ‘pioneer’ but before we go there here is another thought from this verse.

Have you fully realised that you are a brother or a sister of the Lord of Creation? He is your elder brother. WOW and triple WOW!

The word translated ‘pioneer’ in the latest NIV or ‘author’ in the older one is quite tricky to get the full meaning of. Authors write down something that has not been written before; pioneers hack a new way through the jungle where no one has been before. I like to think of the word ‘pathfinder’ as a possible translation although I can’t find it in any version. A ‘pathfinder’ is a member of a unit of the British army whose dangerous job it is to go ahead of the main force; to identify where helicopters can land; to locate the enemy and where he can be best attacked. And those are just the things that Jesus did for us - with a bit of imagination.

 

What Jesus did was exceedingly dangerous - he actually had to die doing it. When the Lord God created our world he deliberately made it a chaotic place. It may seem strange to us but earthquakes, tsunamis, thunderstorms and so on are part of the very interesting place in which we live. Otherwise it would be a very boring place! He also ensured that we would not all be perfect, living to a ripe old age without any aches and pains or diseases on the way. But neither of those sets of chaotic problems are the worst part of life on this earth. No, the worst part is what men and women do to other men and women. The sinfulness of humans is the source of all the worst things that can happen to us. As a result suffering is a normal and almost essential part of our life experiences. Only in a comparatively few peaceful and quiet parts of the world can fortunate folk expect to live lives without suffering caused by humans.

It was the great and amazing intention of the Triune God that Jesus, the earthly embodiment of that Trinity, should be the pathfinder to force a way through the jungle of sinful humanity, to search out the enemy, Satan, and to die in doing so. In that victory his true people became his brothers and sisters. So, as the next verses say, “ Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.”(2:11) and “ Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil”.(2:14)

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Highlights in Hebrews 5

Highlights in Hebrews

(with Roger Kirby)

Part 5 - Hebrews 2:9
Jesus as representative man

“we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

Our writer quotes the psalmist (Psalm 8:4–6) in Hebrews 2:6-8:
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
a son of man that you care for him?
You made them a little[ lower than the angels;
you crowned them with glory and honour
and put everything under their feet.”

It is a tricky passage as is obvious from the lengthy footnotes in most English versions. The second line seems to be singular while all the other lines refer to mankind in the plural. It is the nearly unanimous opinion of modern translations that this is correct. The quotation refers back to Genesis 1:26 where God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” In an astonishing act God put the care of this world of ours in the hands of mankind. We haven’t done very well with it. As I write the main problem seems to be plastic in the seas. For centuries mankind has assumed that the oceans are so big we can dump anything we like into them and they will absorb it. It is now clear that there is so much plastic in the seas, which will break down into ever smaller particles without dissolving, that all the fish and other creatures in the seas will be poisoned by them. We have scarcely done any better with the land. We continue to fight over it with each other and generally mess it up.

But our writer can see good in even these problems. He goes on to say in Hebrews 2:9, “we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

 

Jesus has rescued all mankind from the consequences of their failures if they will only recognize that he has done so. Ultimately we, his people, will all end up in his New Heaven and New Earth. What exactly that means; what it will look like; how it will relate to our present experience; we do not know, but we can have confidence in our Lord and Saviour.

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