Sunday, November 27, 2011

A New and Living Way

Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 10:19-22, NKJV).
The inner sanctum of both the ancient Hebrew Tabernacle and Temple was termed, The Holiest. It was where God's Presence was manifest among sinful men. It was that place of places where the Eternal met with His creatures, and then only after the prescribed ceremonial sacrifices were carried out to the letter.

It was a place of fear and trembling, the epicenter of awe and terror. It was a place where the slightest ritualistic misstep meant instant annihilation by God Himself. 

It could be entered only once a year, by the High Priest, and it was a function so fraught with apprehension that Jewish tradition tells us that a rope was secured around the High Priest's ankle so that if and when the ceremonial bells on the hem of his robe ceased ringing, the man's corpse could be hauled out without further violating the Holiest.

It is into that Presence of God that Christ's shed blood enables us to enter boldly, at any time. There could not be a starker contrast between the conditional blessings of the Old Covenant and the infinite superiority of the New.

Rather than dead works we have a new and living way which [Christ] consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh. Rather than fear and trembling we are to draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.

Does that describe your relationship with God? Do you have full assurance that He is for you, not against you. Is your heart sprinkled from an evil conscience; sprinkled symbolically by the blood of His sacrifice? Do you understand what raw love was shown for you in His death on the Cross? Love that transcends all time and circumstance. Love that is the essence and engine of all other love.

You have been washed clean in the water of the Word of God's forgiveness, the Bible declares. You are without spot, wrinkle or blemish. When the Father looks at you, He sees His Son in you - if you believe.

Full assurance is an astounding thing to possess. Without faith in Christ there can be no such thing in this life, or the next.

Can you enter boldly into His presence convinced, as only a beloved child is convinced, that He wants you there?

How much fear is there in the life of a Christian because we just don't let His love reach deep into where we really live - that super-secret place mostly hidden even from ourselves.

There are so many exhortations in Scripture to be - to live - unafraid because He is with us.

And especially in those gut-wrenching moments of unbearable fear, or prolonged, unceasing anxiety He wants us to know that He is in control.

If we believed this about Him, if we truly knew just how much He loves each of His children, we would never need to experience another instant of the kind of fear that leaves you breathless, or that robs your focus of anything and everything else.

It is the same kind of assurance a child has in the care of his or her loving parent. It is one of the reasons that our Christian life needs to be childlike in that regard. Becoming like a little child is not only a prerequisite for faith, but for courageous Christian living.

If you have never been loved like that in this life, or felt that sense of safety and protection as a child, then it is immensely difficult to lay that fear aside and enter boldly into that new and living way. No matter what you may desire to believe about your Heavenly Father, your own past experience can be your biggest obstacle to living in His love.

You must surrender that past, just as you surrender your sin.

You must lay it at His feet, no matter how ingrained it is in who you are, and He will take it from you as a living sacrifice.

You must trust in Him, rather than lean on your own understanding, and that in turn requires a deepening knowledge of who He is, and the goodness He has in store for you.

And that can only come by spending time with Him in prayer, worship, and in His Word.

Then and only then can you replace the fear and trembling with full assurance and faith.

Then and only then will you feel safe.

Perhaps for the first time in your life.

Spontaneous Remission

But the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us; for after He had said before, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the LORD: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them,” then He adds, “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” Now where there is remission of these, there is no longer an offering for sin. (Hebrews 10:15-18, NKJV).
Usually associated with sudden healing, spontaneous remission, is what happens when, for no apparent reason, the course of a fatal disease or ailment is reversed.
In one sense this is an inaccurate characterization of our sins being forgiven through Christ. We know the cause and source of forgiveness, Christ's loving death on the Cross. Yet, on the other hand, that moment of forgiveness is akin to a mysterious "out of the blue" healing, because the moment itself is frequently spontaneous, without apparent cause or precedent.

What precipitates the softening of a heart baked solid in sin? What enables someone to finally set aside all self-reliance or dependence on religious ritual or ceremony? For indeed, both the inveterate sinner, and the outwardly religious man are fatally afflicted by unforgiven sin.

It is as much an act of God's grace and mercy for someone to really believe the gospel, as it is for the establishment by God of the saving gospel itself. 

Note that it is the Lord alone who saves. He puts His laws into the hearts and minds of sinful human beings, giving them the measure of faith to believe. Our responsibility is simply to receive the gift of this New Covenant, which then enables Him to declare, “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”
Once that all-sufficient sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross was accomplished in time and space, all prior means of propitiating God's righteous wrath against sin were nullified and rendered void. No amount of ritual, ceremony, or performance of good works mattered in the least.

For some, this is the greatest stumbling block of the pure and simple gospel of Christ, and it is the single most significant distinctive between the truly saved and the merely religious. So many people are deceived into thinking that they can save themselves through a tipped-scale of good versus bad deeds.

Bargaining with God is a prevalent human activity. It goes on more or less undetected in the lives of everyone who is not a rabid atheist and who has not yet come to saving faith. The bottom-line formula is this: if my goodness outweighs my badness then God is obligated to allow me entrance into Heaven at my death.

This is a supposition based on no evidence and in direct contradiction to the revealed Word of God, yet it holds sway in the hearts and minds of most of humanity. It operates under various guises and takes as many forms as there are unique fingerprints. But underneath it is all the same idea.

And it is blasphemy.

Anything we attempt that is not from faith is sin. There are no longer any offerings that will satisfy the wrath of God.

This should be a mind-numbing truth that strikes fear into the very core of unregenerate humanity because it declares there is nothing we can do to achieve that healing and forgiveness necessary to escape judgment.

To appropriate that spontaneous remission so freely offered we must set aside all pride and self-reliance and believe solely on Christ. We must cease working, and let His Spirit work in us and through us.

But these are just words until we come to faith. These are truths that are spiritually discerned, and cannot be understood by the natural man, which makes belief in Christ that much more of a miracle.

God wants all to be saved, and wishes no one to perish, so He has made the gospel accessible to everyone. He then miraculously offers us the faith to believe repeatedly until we either accept the gift, or our hearts are hardened beyond remediation.

Each time an unbeliever hears or reads the truth, he or she is on the precipice of a supernatural event. Each time that truth is rejected, the mundane is substituted for the miraculous and the miracle moves farther afield until finally, it becomes unreachable.

We are all afflicted with a fatal disease. There is a cure, a means to be healed forever, but it must be accepted.

If it is not, there is no other means of survival, and the resulting fatality is not the cessation of pain and suffering that the world would have us believe. It is, instead, the beginning of endless torment apart from God.

Be healed or be condemned forever. The choice is yours.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Perfected Forever

And every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God, from that time waiting till His enemies are made His footstool. For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. (Hebrews 10:11-14, NKJV).

Based on this passage alone, it can be concluded that the Book of Hebrews was likely written before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D., since it references the daily animal sacrifices. 

Every morning and evening, God's righteous wrath toward sin was propitiated by the shedding of the blood of innocent livestock according to the Laws of Moses. This repeated carnage pointed to the ultimate singular carnage, the death of Christ on the Cross.

In one sense, our salvation floats on a massive sea of blood, illustrating undeniably the horrendous nature of sin, a fact which we in the modern world are scarcely aware. But this bloodletting was stopped, once for all, by the unthinkable act of the Son of God's crucifixion, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever. 
Anything other than that single momentous act could never take away sins.

Dwell on that thought the next time you doubt God's love for the world and the sinners of the world.

It is a tragedy beyond description if these are just meaningless phrases to you, or a quaint barbaric myth, or the product of some primitive religious delusion. Indeed, if this is not the single most important fact of your existence, then you are in a very dangerous place in this life, and you are doomed in the eternity that awaits every living soul.

If the death and resurrection of the Savior is not the central tenet of your universe, nothing else really matters. Not your family, or health, or prosperity, or any other circumstance.

Lift up your head and look at the world around you. Take your eyes off yourself for just a nanosecond, and let the lawlessness and despair assail you unbuffered by the habitual distractions of your life, and sense the utter immensity of your helplessness.

If you do this for just that amount of time, naked and defenseless, you will hear the awful ancient cry of all humanity imploring all the gods of fate to "SAVE ME!". Only one God answered, and in the only way that salvation could occur, substituting a sinless Man for you in awful mend-bending judgment. 

Christ offered Himself for you because He loved you. It is relatively easy to love someone lovable, but you and I were not that; we were its opposite. Yet Christ died for us anyway.

For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8, NKJV).

Was His death effective or purposeless? Did it achieve what was intended?

Repeatedly in Scripture we are given the answer to this often unspoken question. Mostly it is couched in terms of death's inability to keep Christ; it could not hold Him. Here in Hebrews, we are informed even further in regard to its efficacy: this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God.
Do you see the point? Not only was death defeated, but once risen and shown among the living with many infallible proofs, Christ ascended to His rightful place of absolute sovereignty at the right hand of the Throne of God; sitting because the work was done and the bestowal of authority by the Father was complete. From that point in history, He is waiting till His enemies are made His footstool.

This last is symbolic of devastating conquest, of complete and illimitable victory over the enemy - a victory so comprehensive that there is no possibility of the battle ever being engaged again. This was the war fought, and won, alone, by the Son of God on our behalf. That final Day, when the Lord Jesus Christ rips open the fabric of reality and returns to take possession of that which was won on the Cross will be a time of judgment and wrath as never before visited upon mankind. 

All His enemies will be crushed, and the world will bow to Him in rightful and inevitable acknowledgment of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

And those of us who are His now by faith, who are currently being sanctified - made over into His image day by day through the work of His Spirit within us, and our surrender to that work - will finally achieve that which was intended from the beginning.

For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.
Perfected forever means that we will be made complete and endure.

Perfected forever means that nothing in all Creation can undo that work of final sanctification brought about by His sacrifice.

Perfected forever means that all weakness will be made strong; all perfidy will be eliminated, and all our inherent evil will be expunged. Forever.

Our lives and our very being will be glorious beyond our frail and limited human ability to imagine.

We will be like Him.

That is why He came to save us.

That is the gift He came to give us.

That is what His death on our behalf accomplished.

To not receive that gift in utter humility and faith is the greatest act of arrogance and self-worship imaginable.

In the face of His sacrifice, every nuance of unbelief is Hell-worthy.