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| Strength for the Journey #11 So? |
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Strength for the Journey (#11) . . .
So?
Hebrews 10:19-39 / November 10, 2002
[Note: Preached as dialogue between John York and Rubel Shelly.]
John York: Rubel, with our whole stage area set up this way, it’s hard not to begin this morning by talking about the wonderful play that our teens are putting on this weekend. They are telling one of those great stories in Scripture, the saga of that great scoundrel Jacob.
Rubel Shelly: Myra and I plan to be in the audience tonight. We were at a birthday party last night, but I hear the initial performance was wonderful! We have a super community of teens at Woodmont Hills, and they have invested a huge amount of time and work to put together a solid performance of “He Grips the Heel.” So if others of you didn’t make it last night, you can join us tonight. And no less than John York was able to get a bit part in that play. My versatile preaching partner reveals another dimension of his ability. Way to go, John!
John: I know you love great stories in whatever form they come to you, Rubel. Have you seen any good movies lately?
Rubel: As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen many movies this year. Very few things that have come out have piqued my interest enough to prompt me to plink down the money it costs to get into the theater – and get an industrial-size bag of popcorn. I’d have to go back almost a full year to think of one I saw and really liked. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring tells the mythical story of how a fellowship of nine Middle Earth dwellers is created to bear the burden of The Ring. It is the account of a complex struggle between good and evil — and retains many of the Christian motifs found even more emphatically in J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved trilogy.
The Ring is a metaphor for greed and the lust for power. It holds the potential for corrupting anyone it touches. The best candidate for resisting its temptation and for eventually destroying it appears to be young Frodo, a Hobbit who is pure of heart. In a brief but critical scene of less than a minute, the sympathetic wizard (Gandalf the Grey) who is guiding young Frodo explains a critical truth. One cannot choose the events of his life, but he can choose how to react when they happen.
In the wake of a terrible battle in which one of his party has died, Frodo reflects on his horrible responsibility:
“I wish the ring had never come to me,” says Frodo. “I wish none of this had happened.”
“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide” the voice of Gandalf answers in his mind — repeating the dialogue from an earlier scene. “All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”
Surely people of every generation have thought the same thing about their life challenges. And each has had to choose between faith and unbelief in the hard challenge of moving ahead with life. To be honest, I think this scene fits very well with what is happening in the Epistle to the Hebrews.
John: It is that call to decide how to live at the moment that is indeed at the heart of the preacher’s concerns. Come to think of it, much of the Bible contains moments and decisions like that.
Rubel: The story-line of the Bible is the one every aspiring novelist or script writer would do well to master. The story of God’s work in history really is “the greatest story ever told.”
John: All great stories have certain common ingredients in them, whether they are comedies or tense mysteries or action-packed adventures. A few years ago, my friend John Cherry showed me a diagram that outlines the basic structure of film story-telling. All stories have some common ingredients, beyond characters and plot. Most follow a main character through a series of events. We meet that character in the ordinary world, but events begin to unfold that tell us trouble is coming. When trouble arrives, there is crisis. Only when things can’t get any worse, there is insight or rescue, which in turn leads to affirmation.
It is easy to follow that “formula” in the adventure movies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Every person in the Star Wars adventures comes to life in this scheme. Biblical stories are also quite consistent. Thus telling the Moses story is a natural for Steven Spielberg. Think of the Abraham story, or Joseph, or even the nation of Israel as a whole.
The story of Jesus is told this way, although there clearly are surprises interjected from the beginning so that we know Jesus is by no means ordinary. At the same time, there is the development of the story in predictable ways. In the gospels there are early predictions that trouble is coming. The garden scene obviously is one of those dark-cave, crisis moments. The happy ending of resurrection and his departure so that the Holy Spirit can come both completes his story and begins new stories.
Rubel: Agreed. And when someone is reading the great narratives of either the Old or New Testament, they grab you early, hold your attention through the times of challenge, bring you to a powerful conclusion. Even when the punch line of the story isn’t a “happy ending” – as with the Solomon story or the Judas story – there is always a “punch.” You leave the theater – uh, text – with a story in which you can see the potential for your own life story. Sometimes inspired, sometimes made reflective, but always made to think – that is a good story.
But Hebrews isn’t narrative. It is a preacher’s sermon based on the sweep of biblical narrative. It is a homily and exhortation in which our preacher-writer draws on the story-line of Israel’s history as it comes to fruition and fulfillment in Jesus. He both assumes and reminds his hearers-readers of various features of that story in order to draw them into the drama. I think he wants them to see that the story is ongoing and that they are to see themselves as characters in it.
John: For that matter, the lives of those people in his audience are also an underlying narrative that runs through the sermon. Remember all of the hints we have heard in the past about their circumstances. The preacher fears that they are on the edge of drifting away, of neglecting the great salvation that they have received in Jesus. By this time in the maturing of their faith, they should be teaching others, but they still need to be instructed themselves. They run the risk of not entering God’s promised rest, if they continue on the path they apparently have chosen. They risk crucifying the Son of God afresh through their behavior.
In our text today we learn more, both about those who are currently at risk and those who have been strong and faithful through extraordinary suffering and persecution.
Rubel: Just so we don’t lose the story-line here, let’s go back to the section that begins at 4:14. Our preacher focuses on the major sub-plot in his sermon – hinted at in the line about Jesus as a “merciful and faithful high priest in service to God” back at 2:17 – to the effect that our Melchizedekan High Priest has made a covenant change in order to meet our need for a final, complete sacrifice for sin, to secure a definitive cleansing of conscience for us, and to “perfect forever those who are being made holy” (10:14) through his ministry.
In everything we’ve read from Hebrews 1:1 through last week’s powerful lines about “the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10), laws written now in believers’ hearts and on their minds (10:16), and forgiveness so absolute that there is no more need for atonement sacrifices (10:18), our Hebrews teacher has been laying the groundwork for a therefore-section that starts at 10:19. A logician would say the premises have been offered and the conclusion is about to be drawn. Or, if we keep it in our theme of great narrative, he has introduced his characters, laid out the story-line, and is ready now to deliver the punch. In view of all that has gone before in Hebrews, we are about to find out what we are expected to take home from this preacher’s sermon! So what is his conclusion, John?
John: When we arrive at this powerful “so what” section, the preacher wants us to bring all that he has been talking about in those last four chapters with us. Because Jesus is our perfect high priest, because he has entered into the most holy place before us, because he has unconditionally one time for all time removed every obstacle that would block our own journey into the throne room of God, we now are invited to “draw near with full assurance.” To be drawn into the presence of God can only mean one attitude of mind and heart — worship. To draw near to God is to enter into full-time praise and worship of the Creator who has loved us and redeemed us and revealed himself to us in Jesus.
The preacher uses that trio of words that are so familiar to us in Paul: faith, hope, and love. “Let us draw near to God with a true heart in full assurance of faith (v.22) . . . Let us hold fast our confession of hope without wavering (v.23) . . . Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds (v.24).”
Faith and hope can be considered as individual attitudes, but love demands interaction with one another. To “consider how to provoke one another to love” demands looking around at one another, observing and paying close attention to one another. It demands communal living, out of which comes the ability to know what to say, how to act in encouraging ways. It is living and acting around one another in ways that bring out the best in one another. The continual outcome of this lifestyle in a faith community is “good deeds” – not the good deeds of seeking salvation but the good deeds that bear witness to his presence and power among the saved.
All of that is still in the context of what it means to draw near to God. This is what worship “in the meantime” looks like. While we already have been invited to follow Jesus into the throne room, we find ourselves still on this side of the space-time continuum. Our journey toward God in worship is now this shared journey of faith, hope, and acted out love. That is the context for the famous verse (25) about not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some.
Rubel: Do you mean people were already “skipping church” back in the first generation of the life of the church?
John: Yes, there were people in the preacher’s audience who no longer felt it necessary to be involved in the community life, the assembly life of the church. From his perspective, such estrangement from the community sabotages the whole project of drawing near to God. It is in the setting of community assembly that we encourage one another and keep our eyes collectively focused on the end-goal. “Encourage one another even more,” he says, “as you see the Day drawing near.” I realized for the first time this week that there is a very important sequencing of ideas regarding our worship in this exhortation. Our assembling together is the result of the larger life of drawing near to God (worship) that we otherwise are living out on the journey. The assembly is derivative of our life of worship rather than being the beginning point of worship.
Let me try that again. Our assemblies are not times and places where we go to worship, where worship starts at 8:15 or 9:45 or 11:15 and then worship stops when each assembly is dismissed. Worship is the life project for people of faith, hope, and love who have been invited into the throne room through the redeeming activity of Jesus. Drawing near to God is our way of life. Our assembling together to encourage one another, to share in that praise together for a time, is part of the larger whole. This time gives us clues about one another and about life lived fully in the presence of God in eternity.
Back in the days when we had to make sure we got every detail of human performance right in the assembly, we created a series of false definitions about worship and then turned our worship practices into our faith. We tried to generate the rest of our Christian duties out of doing the assembly right. We then used Hebrews 10:25 as a club to make sure everyone was “going to church.” How did you put it, Rubel: We were worried that members were “skipping church”?
That is backwards to the Hebrews preacher’s intent. It is the activity of Jesus that has opened our way into the throne room. We draw near with our entire lives. We live within that God-sight every minute of every day. (Do you remember the point from last week’s text that the vision goes both ways? God sees us through the blood of Jesus, but we also see God from the vantage point of Christ’s redemptive work.)
Worship is life – or, if you prefer, life is worship – and our community time together is a means by which we come to know one another well enough to love and encourage and perform acts of loving kindness towards one another in the name of Jesus.
Rubel: That’s a far richer interpretation of this text than making Sunday morning assembly an item on the checklist for the week! He isn’t attempting to guilt-trip people into “going to church.” Quite the contrary. I see him trying to help them to a view of church too many still don’t have.
Church isn’t buildings, budgets, and big numbers. Church isn’t nickels, numbers, and nails. Church isn’t checklist righteousness. Not for our preacher-writer, at least! For him, church is the experience of a nurturing community whose life is rooted in faith, hope, and love. Church is a guild or fraternity or partnership – pick the metaphor that gives you the clearest picture – in which our identity and unifying factor is faith in the Son, our sustaining factor is confident hope in his/our promise-keeping Father, and our decision-making and performance factor is love empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
What happens if one were to turn back from this community? What is the result for anyone who makes a commitment to follow Christ only to renege on her word? What will become of the person who confesses Christ only to turn back when the journey gets hard? Goes uphill? Meets strong opposition?
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (10:26-31).
I see no reason to think that our writer-preacher believes in the “probability of apostasy.” Anyone who comes to God through the Son has a merciful and faithful high priest who is interceding for him constantly. He is on duty perpetually – not one day a year. His once-for-all-sacrifice is a matter of record in the true Holy of Holies he entered by his resurrection. By the power of an indestructible life, he lives forever to confess the names of those who have confessed him.
But . . . on the other hand . . . the assurances of grace notwithstanding . . . in spite of the great love by which we have been redeemed . . . over against the fact that we are indwelt by the very Spirit of God . . . BUT . . . God will not be mocked. Heaven’s “amazing grace” is not “cheap grace.” Liberty is not license. Divine love is not mere sentimentality that has neither eyes nor backbone. The Holy Spirit can be grieved, resisted, even quenched by human presumption!
This text isn’t a stick with which to beat people about church attendance. It is a hair-raising observation by our writer-preacher that some of the believers whom he was exhorting were exposing their unbelief, apostasy, and willful rejection of Jesus by having become dropouts to Christian assemblies. Spotting church attendance isn’t his issue here. It is apostasy – as indicated by their being AWOL from the church’s corporate life. The interpretive key here is less verse 25 than the second half of verse 29: His warning is to one “who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace.”
He doesn’t believe in the probability of apostasy as indexed by occasional absenteeism on Sunday morning or non-participation in Wednesday-night Bible Classes. But he does believe in the possibility of apostasy – the root of which is the deliberate rejection of God’s redemptive work in Christ Jesus. Sometimes still the most obvious presenting evidence of a person’s apostasy is that he or she just drops out and disappears. But I can imagine other evidences of apostasy from people who would never miss an assembly. Things ranging from Christianity’s far left where clergy deny the historicity of the resurrection and thus have no through-the-veil high priest to atone for sin, to Christianity’s far right where legalistic hair-splitting imposes norms and judgments that eviscerate the gospel of grace and make redemption our own achievement through conformity and accomplishment. In another of those lesser-to-greater arguments (cf. 9:14), we are warned of both the certainty and severity of judgment for those who reject the work of God on our behalf that has come to its fullness in Christ Jesus. He says, if effect, this: If you turn back from the commitment you have made to the Son, you have nowhere to go for salvation. If you shrink back from him because the going has gotten rough, you have no hope of finding a Savior anywhere else.
John: Just as the writer did back in chapter 6, after he raises the horrifying prospect of apostasy – of people turning their backs on the once-for-all sacrifice and thus losing the one possible door into the throne room – he reminds them of better days. “Remember when you first came to faith,” he says. Remember the hard struggle, the weighty contest you once endured, the suffering and public shame and abuse and persecution. Remember when some of you were once imprisoned for your faith. Remember “when you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting” (10:34).
Notice how he redefines happiness for those whose lives are connected with Christ. This is not how the world defines happiness. In fact, all of the markers of honor and happiness in the world were stripped away — plundered possessions, loss of freedom, verbal and physical abuse for their faith. These are all shameful outcomes in the world, but they are signs of true honor and even happiness for people of faith. What is needed in the current times, he says, is endurance.
When the preacher used the word in verse 32, he told them to remember how they first endured a “hard struggle.” The term translated hard struggle comes from athletic contests. He frames the whole notion of their endurance not in terms of cruel hardships and unjust abuse and suffering. Rather they are to think in terms of the athletic contest. Endurance there has the end zone or the goal in mind. The physical punishment one takes in an athletic contest somehow makes sense to us. Just so, that kind of endurance is necessary and sustainable if we keep the end goal in mind. Much like the athletic team that never quits, never gives up, the preacher exhorts his audience: “We are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.”
Rubel: Do you see now why I thought of that scene from The Fellowship of the Ring as a Hebrews scene? “I wish none of this had happened,” laments Frodo. Indeed! Those first-century believers could have wished to live at an easier time. Underground Christians in China or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan today could wish they were in America where freedom of religion is guaranteed to them. You may wish that your life circumstances were very different – and that you could see God differently, if only they were. That you could feel differently about Jesus, if only they were. That you would not be so angry or so addicted, so distant from your family or such a pain to everybody at work, so “entitled” to the affair or “justified” in your greed – if only God would fix this or give that or take away some difficulty.
No. Those are self-deceptions. Nobody asks for challenges, setbacks, and pain. But those are not decisions for us to make! Galdalf was right in telling young Frodo, “All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.” That is my only choice to make as well. And yours.
We can believe, stay on the journey, and be saved. Or we can “shrink back” and be destroyed. “So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised” (10:35-36).
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