Christophobia

Abraham's Obedience

2012-01-21T06:59:00.000-08:00

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. (Hebrews 11:08, NKJV).

Verse 8 of Hebrews 11 begins the faith saga of Abraham, the Friend of God and the Father of the Faithful. Like Genesis, which covered the history of the world from Creation through the Flood in 11 chapters, and then spent the next 12 chapters on the life and family of one man, Abraham, so chapter 11 covers the chronology from Creation to the Flood in 7 verses, and then spends the next 10 on this same one man.

Abraham is important. He is the top of the human funnel that, from the entire population of the planet, filters down to the divinely decreed lineage of Messiah. He is also the very first illustration of the way of salvation in a Fallen world, for Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness (Ro 4:3; Ga 3:6; Jas 2:23). Do you see the significance of that?

Human redemption is exemplified in the simple, thrice-repeated proclamation that Abraham was saved by faith, and in being the first, he became our father in the faith. We who believe are all spiritual descendants of this one man who was the founder of many nations, Jew and Gentile, and through his Descendant (singular), all the nations of the world shall be blessed.

From the perspective of Hebrews, this man is characterized by obedience. The fact that the call to go out to his actual going out after his own father died spanned many years does not even enter into the picture. Yes, it took him awhile in this instance, but Hebrews 11 is a "bottom line" exposition.

In the end, he obeyed, much like Jesus' parable of the two sons, the fawning hypocritical liar, and the rebellious one who refused his father's command, but then complied.

To be sure, later on in Abraham's walk of faith, his obedience became immediate, but this starting point was slow to come to fruition, and for all his descendants by faith who struggle with instant obedience to God, his example should be both illustrative and encouraging.

Far from perfect, especially at the start, and even after walking for years with his Lord he stumbled, but in the end, he became the shining example, the foundation, of justification by faith.

Why? Because his heart was wholly toward God and he refused to fall away. When he stumbled, he regained his footing and returned to his Lord.

Know that this is God's perspective with all His children. It is the "bottom line" that matters in the end, and this is both good and horrible news. Good because no matter how badly we stumble or backslide, if our hearts are truly with God, we will return and He will restore.

It is horrible because no matter how holy the outside of our lives appear, it is the inside that matters, and it is only from the inside that we endure to the end.

And while any disobedience, however transitional, costs us blessing and peace that otherwise would have been God's delight to bequeath, it is only those who have been made new by faith alone who are truly coheirs with Christ.

Spiritual adornment, holiness and faithful living should not be outward only, nor is it a grit-your-teeth-and-get it-done kind of effort. It is, instead, the result of a humble acquiescence of a human soul and will to Christ's transformative purposes, no matter what it takes on His part to make us like Him.

For Abraham, it took blessing and testing, riches and loss, joy and mourning, and a nomadic life fraught with peril. For each one of us, absolutely unique Creations of an all-powerful Deity, it may take more of less of these same things.

But the essential prerequisite, however imperfectly implemented, is a willing and obedient heart.

Without that, all the outward holiness and lip-service in the Universe will not provide escape from Hell.

With it, no matter how tattered, erratic, or clumsy our walk may be, in the end, He makes us His forever.

Again, to be sure, the goal is to live in obedience as exemplified by the man Abraham in his later years, but our inevitable failures in no way justify giving up the attempt...

…being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ; (Philippians 1:6, NKJV).

Noah

2012-01-15T10:19:00.001-08:00

By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. (Hebrews 11:07, NKJV).

Despite all the objective evidence confirming a global catastrophe in the fairly recent past (see here for starters), belief in Noah, the Ark and The Flood is considered, in many circles, equivalent to belief in The Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus, with this exception: The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are more acceptable because they are not Biblically based.

Believing in a literal Genesis in this modern culture makes you all kinds of backwards and nasty things, even in some churches. The fact that the Lord Jesus Himself held The Flood to be a real historical event apparently holds little weight. The teachers and leaders in such churches can presumably take that up with Him on that Day. As for me and my house…

Regardless of your Noahic view, we have here in Hebrews a picture of faith exemplified in a man who found grace in the eyes of God in an era when every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Noah was righteous because He believed God, even in the face of massive popular pressure to do otherwise.

What precisely did he believe?

He believed that God is, so he listened.

He believed that can, so when warned he took the commanded actions.

He believed that God meant what He said, and was moved with godly fear.

By his unprecedented actions of faith, he condemned the world just prior to divine judgment finally being executed. The timing was no accident, but was orchestrated by God to teach what it means to live by faith, and used in this superlative chapter of Hebrews to provide us with yet another concrete example of life according to the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

Noah and his household were an extremist minority. Ultimately, there were only eight of them, and they believed and acted upon things NO ONE ELSE would dare. In and of itself, this is not necessarily a hallmark of faith, but when taken in the context of his entire life, word and deed, it is a profound proclamation of where he put his trust. Or more precisely, in WHOM he put his trust.

When divinely warned of things not yet seen, he responded. In Noah's time, what had not yet been seen was rain as we know it (the ground was still being watered with a nightly mist), and flooding, especially a Flood that would cover all the mountaintops of all the earth. In reality, Noah had even less reason to believe than we do today, but believe he did, and he moved with godly fear, prepar[ing] an ark for the saving of his household.

The Ark itself was a massive project which took over a century to complete. In building it, his allegiance to God was undeniable, and undoubtedly subjected him to the scorn of his contemporaries. ALL of his contemporaries, save those in his own household. He had NO SUPPORT outside his immediate family for believing and doing what he did.

Do you sometimes feel that way?

Now exclusivity of belief, in and of itself, is no proof of anything, but taken in the context of his entire life, it spoke volumes of his faithfulness.

And these are the key take-aways from this man's godly example.

His entire life was lived in acknowledgement of, and submission to, the living God of the universe. The fact that he and his family were the ONLY ONES at that time is secondary to the foundational truth of his faith.

But despite the fact that he was vastly outnumbered, he obeyed the One in whom he believed. He did not allow social pressure in all of its pervasive forms to alter his personal conviction. Or actions. He was a man of steadfast belief, and lived out his faith in very conspicuous ways. Not because that was his, but God's choice.

His consistency and integrity served as an example to his sons, so that they followed their father's leadership with no hint of question or rebellion. We read nothing of any dispute among them, or of any disparagement of their father's faith. Family dysfunction only occurred well after the Flood, and then only because Noah lapsed into drunkenness, and one of three sons succumbed to a rebellious impulse.

Noah was not perfect, but he was a man of faith. Just like believers today.

He is an extreme example, and by extreme I mean undeniably obvious.

Sometimes, maybe most times, faithful obedience to the Lord can be done quietly and inconspicuously.

But there may be other times when God decrees otherwise. When, like in Noah's day, the coming judgment was scoffed at, scorned, and ridiculed, and the means by which God instructed Noah to survive the ordeal was anything but subtle.

In one sense, we have it easier today. As far as I know, no one is being commanded to build the modern-day equivalent of an Ark.

Plus, we have the record of The Flood and other judgments objectively recorded in writing for our learning.

Nevertheless, our struggle is the same as Noah's in this sense: it flies it direct opposition to the ways of the world, and is a source of contempt and calumny from the worldly-minded.

Yet, as with all the other heroes of the faith, Noah became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

That is the only goal that counts in this life: faithful obedience.

Anything else is just vapor.

Believing That He Is

2012-01-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:06, NKJV).

In the Western world, for generations, families have gone to great lengths to convince children to believe in all kinds of myths, like King Arthur, Merlin, Magic, Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Christmas Elves, the Easter Bunny, Evolution and the Tooth Fairy.

The primary danger in this is that when the inevitable awakening to the truth occurs, and these cherished beliefs are determined to be false, the child learns to equate all such believing in things not seen as equivalently false, and the integrity and truthfulness of the caregivers in the family are rightly called into question.

As quaint traditions to enliven Holidays and family get-togethers, or to celebrate rites of passage or exercise the imagination, these myths, if presented as myths, can either be benign or serve a greater purpose as a contrast to Biblical reality, but there is a grave peril in teaching children to falsely believe something that isn't true.

It can inoculate them against faith, poisoning the well of what C.S. Lewis has termed, Mere Christianity. Recall this ancient text:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom having not seen you love. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, (1 Peter 1:6-8, NKJV).

Children have an inherent ability for faith. It's built-in, part of their original equipment. Don't be fooled into thinking this innate ability is something evolution magically concocted to enhance survival. From the physical perspective, belief itself has very little survival value.

In fact, the young of all "higher" species get by pretty well without the ability to believe things that cannot be seen, for as far as we know, human children, constructed in the image of God, are the only ones who are born with the capability to perceive 3-dimensional reality and superimpose on it another qualitatively different reality. Call it what you will - the Spiritual Realm, the Supernatural, the World of the Imagination - its only earthly pioneers and explorers are human.

And human children are its most stalwart adventurers. That is part of the reason Jesus tells us that unless we become like little children we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now, entering the Kingdom of Heaven is synonymous with coming to God. To do either, you must first believe that He is, and further, that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.

According to the latest global surveys, more than 75% of the world's adult population believe in some Higher Power or Supreme Being. But that percentage is shrinking yearly, especially in Europe. Indeed, some countries, Denmark and Sweden, for instance, boast that between 46% and 80% of its residents are either agnostic or atheistic.

What is surprising, however, is that the percentage of belief in God remains so high, given the almost constant barrage of negativity in the world's news, opinion, higher education and entertainment media regarding religion.

This persistence of belief is intensely frustrating to the increasingly aggressive proponents of humanism. But these men and women willfully forget that arrayed against the Ivy League, New York, Hollywood, Europe and all the other realms of worldly humanistic propaganda and intellectual elitism, is the God of the Bible.

The God who is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. The God who has bridged the gap between Fallen man and holy Creator by declaring that faith in His Risen Son will achieve what no amount of human performance can achieve - access to His throne of grace.

He can, and does, ensure that the avenue of faith remains open. At least for now.

Coming to God entails believing that He is, even in the face of propaganda and popular opinion to the contrary. Or more precisely, especially in the face of such global misinformation, for that makes the exercise of faith that much more significant.

Further it entails believing, as a necessary subsequent step, that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Why else come to Him in the first place?

But what does diligent seeking involve, exactly?

Most importantly it means seeking Him as He has revealed Himself to be in His Word. Who knows what God the 75-percenters believe in? Is it the God of the Bible, or the God of their own vain and futile imaginings?

You cannot diligently seek Someone of whom you have no clue or information.

Fortunately - providentially - He has left us with all the clues we need, written down and preserved for millennia so that His light shines in the darkness, illuminating the path to His throne, His grace, and Himself.

Our task is to find and follow that roadmap, something He empowers and assists us to do if only we ask.

If you seek Him with your whole heart, mind and soul, He will be found. He guarantees it.

And He will reward your diligence in ways impossible to anticipate or comprehend, both in this life and in the life to come.

First you will get God Himself, as inconceivable as that may sound, for that is exactly what He promised Abraham so long ago.

And in getting Him you will get everything else, for …as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9, NKJV).

Pleasing God

2012-01-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:06, NKJV).

…for whatever is not from faith is sin. (Romans 14:23, NKJV).

For we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:7, NKJV).

If it were not for faith, there would be no hope for human beings. None.

We would be born in this fallen world, live a life chasing futile satisfactions, involved in ephemeral relationships doomed for separation, either before or at death, and facing an inevitable demise only to discover that the worst of earthly life was heaven itself compared to what awaits in the torments of Hell.

Make no mistake, though, it is not merely faith itself, but faith in Christ that saves us from our otherwise default destiny.

And it is not faith in the Christ of our own imagination or convenience. It is the resurrected Christ who came first as the Suffering Servant, but who will return as the Executor of Judgment.

It is the Christ of the Bible that saves, not some New Age avatar or Ascended Master, not some Cosmic Consciousness or Pantheistic Force, not some red-headed, long-tressed, broad-shouldered Shepherd that could just as easily adorn the cover of some pulp Romance Novel.

It is He who was from the beginning.

It is the Captain of the Lord's Host.

It is He who treads the winepress of God's wrath, who will execute judgment on an ungodly world, who will slay the wicked with a word, and will shed their blood, bridle-height, in the Valley of Armageddon.

It is a fearful thing to fall in the hands of the Living God, best by far to become His by faith, so that rather than fall, as a unbelieving rebel, He embrace you in His arms as a beloved child.

There are two fatal errors - and I mean eternally fatal errors - about faith.

The first is that it is yours to grit your teeth and drum up, like its the result of some spiritual pep rally. It is not that at all. It is first a gift of God, dealt to each one by measure, and can be left to languish like a vestigial organ, or exercised by volitional and humble dependence on God as who He is, not as you might like Him to be.

It is mostly private and always individual, meaning that it cannot be inherited or passed down by tradition or practice. It must be activated by a sincere decision of a person's will and mind.

The second fatal error is to view faith along the lines of this ancient and deceitful cliche: God helps those who help themselves.

This is a subtle and brilliantly effective lie from the pit of Hell itself. It is a statement that appears Biblical, but is, in fact, its antithesis. It is the essence of human-centric legalism, and is quite close to denying the existence of God itself. Or at least implying that He should allow room on His throne for you.

Until you realize that there is nothing good in you, that you have no intrinsic value to God in and of yourself, you are helplessly mired in your trespasses and sins. You may be a shining example of the best that human beings can offer, but you are nonetheless fodder for the fires of Hades.

This is because you are not intrinsically good, but the opposite. You are defective goods. You were born that way, conceived in sin and brought forth to die in sin.

Unless you are remade, you are far worse than useless. You are worthy of judgment.

Harsh but true.

That is why faith is so, so important. It changes all of that. Faith in Christ remakes you. It regenerates you. It kills you on His Cross and makes you alive again in Him.

It is your only hope.

And by exercising that faith in a momentous act of acknowledged helplessness, you enter from death into life.

God has decreed faith to effect your pardon. It pleased Him to do so.

But for that pardon, He had to send His Son to die in your place. He who knew sin became sin for us, and propitiated God's wrath against sin forever by making Himself a substitutionary sacrifice.

For you and for me.

But there is only one way to have that sacrifice credited to your account: faith. It is the currency of salvation. Nothing else will do.

By believing, you take full receipt of that unspeakable gift. Otherwise, Christ's death was of no effect for you, and you trample it under your feet and put Him to an open shame.

Thus you can see why faith is the only way to earn God's pleasure. He enables it in you so that you can give it back.

He has decreed what saves, and then provided you with the very thing that meets the single requirement.

When you acquiesce humbly to His gracious way of escape, He rewards you as if you were someone completely new and sinless. He sees in you His precious Son.

And that pleases Him, indeed.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8-10, NKJV).

Enoch

2012-01-07T07:26:00.001-08:00

By faith Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death, “and was not found, because God had taken him”; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God. (Hebrews 11:05, NKJV).

Presented in chronological order, the succinct and profound journey through the annals of the faithful in Scripture now brings us to Enoch, the seventh from Adam, whose name means, teaching.

If Abel is a representative of the Spirit-led Old Testament believer, Cain a picture of the bitter and self-worshiping religious hypocrite of all ages, then Enoch is a brilliant symbol of the New Testament church.

Precious few words are written about him, only a brief passage in Genesis, here in Hebrews, and finally in Jude. All emphasize his righteous walk of faith, speaking nothing of his actual deeds, but only of his heart - a heart that walked with, and pleased, God.

In fact God was so taken with him, that He took him - raptured him - into His presence without death, just before the global flood of divine judgment.

In all of existence, all its permutations and convolutions, all its decisions, priorities, and potentials, there is NOTHING that matters beyond your relationship with your Creator. Get that right through faith, and EVERYTHING else falls into place. Get that wrong through unbelief, and regardless of whatever else happens, your life is a tragic waste.

God has decreed this to be so. He created humanity - with its will, emotions, spirit and mind - for unique and everlasting fellowship with Him. The rest is either just icing on the cake, or a downward rebellion spiraling into eternal torment.

Enoch so pleased God by faith that He spared Him from judgment in the most conspicuous and unexpected way possible. He snatched him from the face of the earth. Before that, Enoch was bestowed a son, and chose a name for that son based on his role as one of the first ancient prophets. He called the boy, Methuselah, whose name signifies, his death shall bring.

This boy became the longest lived person in the antediluvian world. At his death, the Flood came and destroyed all but the eight humans preserved through the judgment in the Ark. But Enoch was taken before that in a marvelous act of grace.

The chronicle of Enoch, like Abel before him is presented with the formula By faith…

Having personally memorized Hebrews, I can attest that this chapter was perhaps the easiest, and certainly the most lyrical to commit to memory because of the formulaic preface to each episode, building into a verbal crescendo of glory after glory. The repetition of By faith, By faith, By faith along with its precise historical chronology is so very effective and powerful. It is a joy to recite, precisely because of its pattern and content.

And the lesson it drives home is simple, yet life-changing.

Faith, that substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, is the nuclear furnace of life, provided that it is centered upon the living God of the Bible.

It the crowning achievement of Fallen man. Without it, every other achievement is worthless, full of gas and vapor.

With it, even the smallest act becomes a cause for triumphant celebration, and lavish praise from the Lord of the Universe.

The ultimate reward of a life of faith is God Himself, as He declared to Abram in Genesis 15.

Yes, we obtain righteousness by faith. Yes, it is faith that enables us to be adopted into the family of God and live forever. Yes, it is faith that defeats Satan and conquers death.

But above even these marvelous things, faith gives us Jesus, in intimate, heroic, and noble fellowship. And fills the otherwise empty void of life that without Him, is vain futility ending in everlasting torment.

God has decreed that faith, not our own works of righteousness, earns His pleasure.

And that decree is the foundation of His greatest mercy and grace.

Exercise that gift of faith now, while there is still time, and become His beloved child, and like Enoch, you will be spared the coming judgment.

Abel

2012-01-02T07:40:00.001-08:00

By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and through it he being dead still speaks. (Hebrews 11:04, NKJV)

The second murder in history took place at the dawn of the planet when a bitter, resentful and prideful brother committed premeditated fratricide. He followed the precedent set by Satan himself, the one who was a "murderer from the beginning" and the "father of lies", who, through his deceitful seduction of the woman, Eve, caused her husband, Adam, to willfully rebel against God, thus causing them both to die.

It is clear that Abel, the second from Adam, knew something of God's atoning provision for sin: the shedding of innocent blood. He killed the firstborn of his flock and offered it as a sacrifice, while his elder brother, Cain, offered the fruit of the ground.

We are told that God respected Abel's sacrifice, but not Cain's, and like the self-centered, arrogant, and bloatedly prideful man he was, Cain's countenance fell.

In modern parlance, we mistakenly refer to this as sibling rivalry. It was not. First, there is no indication in the text that Abel competed with his brother on any level. In fact, when Cain invited him out to the killing field, it looks like Abel went willingly, trustingly.

The facts appear to shout these truths about the killer Cain: he had no objection to violence; he was a cheapskate (what did it cost him to offer to God what God himself had nurtured - the fruit of the ground?); and he could not tolerate criticism, implied or otherwise.

In short, Cain was a highly functioning self-worshipper; a man who considered all his thoughts and impulses as golden, and not to be denied. When he couldn't revenge himself against God, he did what in his mind was the next best thing - he sought and achieved vengeance against his godly brother.

Cain is indistinguishable from most members of human society since that time.

Don't be mislead by the simplicity of this historical vignette in Genesis 4. It highlights merely the pertinent details of the crime, and leaves much of the background information unreported. And here in Hebrews 11, the core of the matter is laid bare even more concisely.

It's this: Abel's offering, founded on faith, pleased God. It wasn't that his was blood, and his brother's produce, though that did speak to the comparison between their respective investments of time and effort.

In stark contrast, Cain merely went through the motions to look good. His heart was filled, not with gratitude and reverence for God, but with festering self-adulation.

God honored Abel's sacrifice, and even now, witnesses to the righteousness of the man through his act of faith, thus memorializing forever both the man, and the single path to redemption: faith.

Cain too is indelibly etched in history, as the quintessential symbol of human evil.

Think about it. The motive for the murder did not entail love or money or fame. The motive for the murder was the most banal and primitive imaginable. Cain was offended.

It takes an enormous sense of self-entitlement to go down the senseless path that Cain chose. There are many forms of the same response to offense prevalent today, though most fall short of actual physical murder (but refer to the Sermon on the Mount for the true definition of murder from God's perspective).

His heinous act accomplished nothing but further exile, and an eternal place in infamy, symbolized forever by the mark of Cain.

The man's response when discovered? Whining self-pity, the very opposite of repentance.

The man's legacy of evil: his descendants were even more psychopathically self-centered than was he himself.

I submit that this was the most senseless and evil act of murder in human history. Not only was it the first human-on-human violence, but it was the most puerile and useless.

Above all, it illustrates the root of all sin: pride.

Cain was a selfish monster, a goblin, a fiend - pure and simple. He deprived his brother of life because Abel's continued existence was an insult.

As such, Cain is rightfully held up as the progenitor of all human violence since the dawn of human history.

In the end, Cain, not Adam, is our most vile forebear.

We all inherit his dreaded mark, and only faith in Christ can remove the stain.

The God Particle

2011-12-30T06:37:00.001-08:00

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. (Hebrews 11:03, NKJV).

How did the "primitive and unscientific" writer of Hebrews know that subatomic particles exist? How did he know some 2000 years before the latest particle accelerator went operational in Europe?

Recent media attention has been paid to the search for the elusive "God Particle", that thing which gives all other subatomic particles mass, and without which neither matter nor energy would exist, hence the rather presumptuous name.

A few years before, physicists were excited by the search for the so-called gluon particle, that mysterious entity that was supposed to hold all the rest of the universe together.

Operational science is one of the most useful studies known to mankind. Through it, the human race has advanced in knowledge and technological abilities quite rapidly, especially in the last few generations, when we have gone from horse-and-buggy to interplanetary and extrasolar exploration. We have also progressed from geographic isolation to worldwide network connectivity, from telegraph to satellite phones, and so on.

Popular media loves to paint Christianity as anti-science, primarily over one facet of study: origins. But in reality, it was Christian scientists who began the scientific revolution, who studied the world because they believed its Creator was real, knowable, and a lover of order and logic.

Even today, unbelieving but honest scientists have penned surprisingly spiritual odes to the wonders and incredible complexities of the universe, and by their study have come right up against the idea of Design and Creator, without having whatever it takes to go beyond their worldly presuppositions into the realm of the true Reality behind reality.

Hence the overhyped search for the "God Particle" - reduce the Creator and Sustainer to a thing, and then you can have a few more nights of sleep untroubled by the nagging suspicion that there is more to everything than mere science can ever know.

Whatever the physical manifestation, the substance and evidence of faith teaches this ineffable truth: the worlds were framed by the word of God.

God spoke and other than Himself began to exist.

Think about what that means for just a second and be awed.

Our self-existent God, utterly complete and all-powerful, uttered the Universe into existence. He used words to manifest His incomprehensible creativity and, with seemingly very little effort, formed out of absolutely nothing, absolutely everything… except Himself.

He spoke light and energy and matter into causality. He spoke all the laws of physics, thermodynamics, mathematics, and biology into reality.

And He did so for the express purpose of making for us, His ultimate creation, a place to be and grow and live and enter into relationship with Him.

That is what faith teaches, and whatever else this God Particle may be, underpinning its function and purpose is, very simply, the Word of God.

I cannot conceive of a more effective presentation of God's divine attributes, His omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, than to have these encapsulated in these three reality-making words: "And God said…".

Consider all the human and natural demonstrations of power in whatever form you choose: dictatorships, presidents, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, nuclear detonations, etc. Each require whole systems of interrelated components in a preexisting configuration in order to achieve anything. Rulers require nations and infrastructure, nature requires climatology, hydrology and the physical realm. Weapons of mass destruction require science and technology, and all the foundations upon which these are built.

But only a Being of all-conceivable power could speak into the nothingness and by His very words not only move all heaven and earth, but create them in the first place.

Why choose words rather than gestures or something else?

I can think of three possible reasons, none of which are exhaustive, and all of which are speculative, for in the end, God chooses simply because God chooses.

Nevertheless, His creative power manifested in and by words instantly and intimately unites Him with the only elements of His Creation made in His image: us.

Words are what differentiate human beings from everything else. We are the only living creatures we know of who would understand even the concept of verbal and written communication, let alone the content of the communication.

Secondly, impersonal force and the use of words are oxymorons. It is unimaginable for mere energy to communicate in anyway. Nuclear explosions do not speak. There would have to be a controlling intelligence behind the use of words, and by definition, intelligence requires personhood.

And finally, there is nothing more representative of sovereign power than a command immediately and inalterably obeyed. As a symbol of divine authority, the Creation account is unmatched by any conceivable alternative.

God needed neither machinery, nor matter, nor energy, nor infrastructure, nor wealth, nor institutions of knowledge, nor anything else… but Himself.

God said… and it was so.

A Good Testimony

2011-12-29T06:40:00.000-08:00

For by it the elders obtained a good testimony. (Hebrews 11:02, NKJV).

The it here is the weight and solidity of faith. By faith, and faith alone, good testimony is obtained before God.

The phrase is used twice in Hebrews, both in Chapter 11. It is a derivation of the root from which we get our word, martyr, and literally means to bear witness of a positive nature.

It is instructive to note that the three other instances in the New Testament (so, 5 in all) refer respectively to the man who ministered to Paul's blindness in Damascus (the Ananias of Acts 22:12), to the qualifications of those in church leadership (2 Timothy 3:7), and to Demetrius, an acquaintance of the elderly John whom he mentioned in his last epistle (3 John 12).

In each case, it is the unsolicited, voluntary report of a good and decent person from an eye witness. In that sense, faith is our character witness.

Whatever we do NOT from faith is therefore sin (Romans 14:23), and acts as a witness against us at the Judgment Seat of Heaven.

This means in turn that all our "good" deeds on earth, if not fueled by faith, no matter how vaunted and beneficial from the human perspective, serve not as recommendations, but indictments.

Are you generous and charitable because it does something for your self-image or self-esteem? Then keep your treasure for God is not fooled, nor mocked.

Are you diligent in religious activities, studies, and practices because you believe it earns you credit in Heaven? Then you are wasting your time, and treasuring up for yourselves evidence of hypocrisy.

Do you stumble in sin daily, and grieve because you know that such behavior breaks your Lord's heart? Do you go to Him as a trusting child to implore forgiveness? These are acts of weighty and solid faith, achievements of substance that please God far more than any outward piety or righteousness (Luke 18:9-14).

Any "good" thing done for reasons other than loving and obedient gratitude to the Creator and Savior is likened to a whitewashed tomb, adorned on the outside, but on the inside full of dead men's bones and corruption.

This both complicates and simplifies a life of faith, doesn't it?

The complication comes from ruthlessly weeding out any thoughts of self-righteousness and self-worth (a remarkably difficult task in this era of culturally promoted self-worship) and simply allowing the Spirit of God to work in and through you each and every waking moment, motivating, directing, and empowering. The self-surrender involved here is hard and takes long and diligent practice.

Children do it far better than adults; humble people better than the proud; those poor in spirit better than those who think highly of themselves.

In fact, the more worldly success you've experienced, the higher the regard you receive from worldly neighbors and worldly family and worldly friends, the more control you think you have over your own destiny, the harder it is to live by faith.

On the other hand, it simplifies things because neither your own plans nor power nor position amount to a hill of beans from the heavenly perspective. A true life of faith is, in this respect, one spontaneous adventure after another.

Spontaneous because the directing force comes from above, not within, where you have to grit your teeth and strive and obsess. It is an adventure because the outcome is not up to you, but in the hands of Someone far greater and better than you.

And while some adventures may not be safe, all adventures change something fundamental inside the adventurer. And adventures under the loving hand of God change you in the direction He wants you to go, for your good and His glory.

In reality, the Christian walk of faith is not the staid and safe and colorless tedium portrayed by popular wisdom. It is the diametric opposite.

Sometimes it means heroically walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Sometimes it means purposefully taking the hard, rather than the easy path. Always it means putting all your trust in Someone you have not seen, not as a striving or work, but as a simple act of devotion.

For remember this above all else:

...without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6, NKJV).

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8-10, NKJV).

Solidity and Weight

2011-12-28T06:59:00.001-08:00

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:01, NKJV).

Faith in Christ is transformative. It was meant to be.

Faith, we discover, is the only way to please God.

Faith is the differentiator between a life worthy of condemnation and one worthy of divine commendation.

Hebrews 11 is the one place in Scripture devoted almost entirely to what faith is, and what it looks like lived out in the world.

Read it and tremble. Memorize it and have the pathways in your mind re-grooved.

I dare you.

For when you finally see what a life of faith may entail, you will quickly see that it is NOT a nice, neat contractual agreement between you and God. You will see that it is NOT one of the things on a list that you agree to do, or have, that enables you to pass the citizenship test of Heaven.

It is, in fact, what you BECOME as a child of God, and it changes you fundamentally, like radical surgery. Often, those around you will not like the results. They will see you as somehow disfigured, unfit for continued association. You become a pariah, an outcast, sometimes from your own family and household.

When this reaction is caused by your own sense of supposed superiority, the stench of that is hard to bear by anyone, even your staunchest former allies. But when it is caused by your sincere desire to put Christ first in your life, to become like Him, then in some sense you join the long list of those "hated for Christ's sake."

The popular conception of faith in Christ is characterized by the "pie in the sky by and by" dismissal. All the cool kids know better, and if you believe in the atoning work of Christ on the Cross for your sins, and live your life surrendered to Him, you are as far from membership in the Cool Kids Club as you can get and still be a resident of the planet.

The polite condescension heaped on you is even more unbearable than the open contempt. And many of the most rabid Cool Kids believe you need "an intervention", and if they had their way, you'd be forced into state-sponsored rehabilitation.

The reason a life of faith invokes such hostility is because it threatens the very foundation of human pride and self-sufficiency, and unflinchingly declares that we are not our own - that we are accountable for our choices, actions, and priorities to an Omnipotent Judge.

The very idea sends a lot people through the roof; they go ballistic and their missiles of rebuke and ridicule are fueled by an endless supply of "HOW DARE THEY BE SO _____" (fill in the blank).

It's tiring and damaging and to be expected. Jesus Himself warned of the consequences of following Him.

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. “But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me. (John 15:18-21, NKJV).

But remember, it is God's opinion that counts, not the world's, and a heart of faith knows this because of the substance of things hoped for, the solidity and weight of the promises of God.

If I promise you something, the degree to which you can rely upon those promises being carried out are directly proportional to my integrity and power. My past track record and my control over the circumstances of life are what any thinking, rational person would focus upon to determine the likelihood of my fulfilling my word.

To trust me in that regard requires an investment of time and personal experience. Only a fool trusts someone they don't know. Consequently, if you don't know me, or if my track record is spotty, or if my promise is unrealistic in relation to the power required to carry it out, the substance upon which you base your trust in me lacks solidity and weight. It's just so much vapor and gas.

Such is NOT the case with God. If He is who He says He is, then His control and power over circumstances is absolute. He can do what He promises. And if you have experienced His gracious transforming power in your own experience, and seen the impact of His beloved Son on the history of the world, and on the individuals submitted to His care, and have spent time in fellowship with Him through His word and prayer, then you are in a position to judge His track record. You understand it is flawless.

The solidity and weight of His promises are off the scale. It would take work to disregard or dismiss them.

Add to that the incontrovertible evidence of things not seen, and you have an iron-clad argument for the rationality of faith.

What evidence?

How about the Goldilocks Principle of Cosmology - everything in the Universe "just right" for that thing we call life?

Or accurately fulfilled prophecy from a source obviously "outside of time" - the reemergence of the Nation of Israel after nearly 2000 years of dispersal; the eerily prescient description of the history of mankind in general and the Middle East in particular?

Do you really believe it is a quirk of fate that the eyes of all national governments are focused on a part of the world that serves the energy needs of most of the modern global economy? Is it merely coincidental that 2500 years ago that very thing was written down ahead of time, and has played out just as described?

Or the amazing declarations in Scripture of how the underneath of all things are put together - "so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible…".

If these evidences leave you unmoved, what about the changed lives of the men, women and children who have come to faith in Christ? Murderers become missionaries; slavers become emancipators; warmongers become peacemakers?

The transition from degenerate sinner to regenerated saint is inexplicable without the ingredient of faith. Postulate what you will, but name me one life changed for the better by committed atheism, or one nation becoming the vanguard of human decency and uplifting without its people motivated by belief in Christ.

You can't. Not honestly.

And honestly, once you consider the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen in this light, faith must be admitted to be something real. Something substantial you can sink your teeth into and upon which you can base your destiny.

But in the end, faith is by definition unprovable in this age. It is a matter of the human heart. mind and will, and that is a good thing, because once faith becomes sight, as the prophecies tell us will happen, then it will be too late to exercise faith.

That opportunity to please God in the only way fallen human beings can will be gone… forever.

So take heed and consider now, before it is too late.

Instead of contempt, put on humility and teachableness.

Instead of being dismissive, try honest investigation.

Instead of falling for propaganda and cultural stereotypes, try looking at people as unique individuals and taking the time to find out what truly makes them tick.

Instead of indiscriminately swallowing lies, seek truth.

Do you really have your life so under control, and the world so neatly organized that you can afford to overlook these things? If so, for your sake, I hope time does not pass, because no matter what you believe, the future has a way of unravelling your nice, neat package of what is and isn't true.

And maybe, just maybe, if you try these things you will be surprised by the grace of God, and come to see His Son and His people in a different light.

A light that gives life to the world.

To the Saving of the Soul

2011-12-27T05:53:00.000-08:00

Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise: “For yet a little while, And He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him.” But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul. (Hebrews 10:35-39, NKJV).

Two different words are translated as confidence in the two places they appear in Hebrews. As always in Scripture, the distinctives are significant.

In 3:15, (For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end), hupostasis [hoop-os'-tas-is] is used, and it speaks of a foundational substructure or of that which actually exists. Here, it is parrhesia [par-rhay-see'-ah], and literally means cheerful boldness of action. Do you see the difference? The first is a state of mind, the second is the response to the state of mind.

Put another way, the hallmark of of truly believing in something is acting upon it. This is exactly the message in James, where a great distinction is made by the Lord's half-brother between professed faith and actual, living faith. One is dead and incapable of saving. The other is living and powerful, and saves.

Both kinds of confidence are essential components of saving faith. In fact, you can't have the second without the first, which makes perfect sense. You won't walk across a building's foundation, for instance, if you have no confidence the cement will bear your weight - if you are unsure that it is actually what it appears to be.

But you can't stop at the intellectual aspects of the first either. You must go on to the cheerfully bold response to that faith - live it, speak it, jump up and down on it. And this second ingredient of saving faith, built upon the first, is the easiest to cast away. You can just stop being Christian. If you do, the writer of Hebrews warns that you forfeit a great reward - that enduring possession of previous verses.

Look, it is clear you can hold intellectual assent to the fact of God and Christ, you can believe that they exist. But even the demons believe and tremble. But that is not salvation. In fact, that serves to increase condemnation. If you do not allow the Lord to move you beyond that intellectual assent into saving faith, you are just as doomed as those who scorn even the existence of God.

This is solemn and dangerous territory which the book of Hebrews ploughs through head-on, providing dire warning after dire warning. Can you lose your salvation? I believe the answer is a resounding NO. Can you deceive yourself and others about being saved? With equal conviction, I believe the Bible answers, tragically, YES.

Now, one of the identifying characteristics of saving faith is endurance. “And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved. (Matthew 10:22, NKJV). Forms of the same Greek word are used in Matthew and above. It is not that endurance in this regard gets you into Heaven. It is that by enduring you have proven your citizenship. In truth, there are only two choices, enduring, or drawing back.

I have seen little children with a 1000 times more endurance than an adult. I have seen elderly and frail men stand their ground more firmly than Olympic athletes. Endurance is a God-given ability bequeathed through humble acknowledgement of where strength lies. Those who truly endure in the faith understand that strength is from God, not themselves.

Inevitably, those who trust in themselves, or on their circumstances, or in their bank accounts, human relationships, earthly achievements, intellect, popularity, or ANYTHING ELSE but God, do not endure to the saving of the soul. And like the irresistible force of gravitation, those who do not endure are drawn back into perdition - like matter sucked over the event horizon of an inescapable Black Hole.

Perdition is that state of eternal destruction. It is not once-and-done. It is an endless crushing obliteration in the cold, black fires of Hell.

The heavenly perspective of saving faith is summarized this way: “For yet a little while, And He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him.” Note that. In comparison to eternity, even a hundred years of earthly suffering is yet a little while. Note also that the heavenly measure of a successful life is that it be lived by faith. Not by sight.

Human accomplishments done in human strength are abominations to God. Pure and simple. It is equivalent to atheism.

But a life lived by faith, even if no visible earthly achievements result, is a sweet-smelling aroma, an acceptable sacrifice to God. Remember that the next time you, like Nebuchadnezzar, pat yourself on the back for all you have accomplished without attributing your success in your heart to the God of Heaven.

From the Lord's viewpoint, a successful life is a life of faith leading to salvation. Everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE, is a potential distraction leading to Hell.

But take heart beloved, if you are truly His, you are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.

An Enduring Possession

2011-12-26T05:46:00.000-08:00

But recall the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings: partly while you were made a spectacle both by reproaches and tribulations, and partly while you became companions of those who were so treated; for you had compassion on me in my chains, and joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods, knowing that you have a better and an enduring possession for yourselves in heaven. (Hebrews 10:32-34, NKJV).

First illumination, then struggle, sufferings, humiliation, reproaches, tribulations, and being plundered - the life of a Christian on earth while he or she awaits the redemption of the purchased possession. If anyone promises you something different, they are trying to sell you something. Don't buy it. You already have an enduring possession beyond price.

Illumination is literally given light. The people who walked in darkness Have seen a great light; Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, Upon them a light has shined. (Isaiah 9:2, NKJV). It is no accident that the Lord Christ is repeatedly associated with light. Among His many evocative titles is the Light of the World. He is that which obliterates darkness, especially the darkness of sin and death, the very things He came to destroy and conquer.

Struggle is the same Greek word from which we get athlete, and means, simply, fight. And it is characterized purposely as a great struggle. Again, as believers we are in a war declared by the world upon God. As His, we are enemy combatants, and our battlefield is everywhere, even inside us.

There is no shelter, except in Him, and there is no place to retreat, since we are already behind enemy lines. Indeed, that is where we were recruited in this ubiquitous battle between light and dark. He provides full armor and weaponry, but we must purpose in our hearts to use it and stand firm, not to obtain that better and enduring possession, but because we know, deep down in our renewed hearts, we already have it.

Sufferings, another word precisely chosen by the divinely inspired writer of Hebrews, derived from the same root from which we get pathology - having to do with fighting disease. We live in a world that, if we pay any attention at all, often makes us sick. We suffer over sin in the same way that Christ did, in the same way that Paul writes of in Romans. Having been given deep and intimate knowledge of the true goodness of Christ, the contrast with its opposite in the world is literally, sickening.

Spectacle is theatrizo (theh-at-rid'-zo), an action involving being put on a stage as a laughingstock, for conspicuous and public derision and contempt. By far, the worst of this is when it is done within one's own family and household, but it is also a common and prevalent practice in the world at large. Mockery is an ancient and effective strategy to undermine an enemy's cause, if not in the enemy himself, at least in those who are part of the audience.

Today, the more despicably Christians are portrayed in popular cultural media, the more "edgy" and avant grade the "artists" involved. In reality, they are participants of one of the oldest strategies in existence - a tactic that plays upon the unthinking and naturally twisted human tendency to rebel against its Creator by calling good evil and evil good. You see and hear it everywhere, and the goal is to make you SHUT UP! But don't listen, for you have a better and an enduring possession for yourselves in heaven. The world is neither your friend, nor your home. If you are Christ's, you can do nothing to earn its lasting regard.

Reproaches are acts of contemptuous dismissal, symbolized primally by being spit upon. It is what happened to Christ as He was forced to carry the means of His own murder through the streets of Jerusalem. It involves a sneering, and hostile devaluation of you as a person, and is routinely accompanied by a crowing sense of superiority from the one who spews the contempt boldly in your face. It hurts the worst when it comes from so-called loved ones (a typical Satanic maneuver), when the deceptive mask of condescending tolerance is ripped away to reveal the seething hatred just beneath the surface.

It happened to Jesus within His own town and family. Do not be surprised when it happens to you. It is part of what you signed up for when you put your trust in Christ, but it is OK, because you have a better and an enduring possession for yourselves in heaven.

Finally, we come to tribulations. Appropriately enough, this is the same thing that happens to olives in a stone press which, through the application of intense pressure, causes the oil to be expelled from the husk so that it can be purified through repeated straining. It is the oppression at all levels of existence and sensation that the Christian experiences in the hands of the enemies of God, including his own fleshly nature. It is never fun, but it is always purposeful.

And therein lies the core of the matter: the purposes of the Father in allowing His children to remain in, and be transformed by, this life. His purposes are good. Our lives have meaning that the world can NEVER take away. It is why a Christian in the throes of these things can joyfully accept the pressings and plunderings that come our way because we know - we KNOW - that He works all things together for good.

What the world means for evil, God allows for our good and His glory. It may not seem that way in the midst, but that is precisely when the eyes of faith must be opened so that we can see that enduring possession.

And what is it that we already own by inheritance? What is it that can never be taken away? What is it that rust cannot destroy, or that thieves can not break in and steal?

It is our life in Christ - eternity in the Presence of God, not as amorphous, undifferentiated spiritual energy, but as solid, thinking, emoting, unique individuals knit together in our mother's wombs by the hand of God Himself, and transformed into the Son's masterpieces by faith, forever being transformed into His image.

Ultimately, it is God Himself that we possess. As He promised to an old man so long ago:

“Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” (Genesis 15:1, NKJV).

The Living God

2011-12-24T06:15:00.000-08:00

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:31, NKJV).

Putting aside the western world's most common conceptions of God, which are conveniently diluted by cultural myths ("the Man upstairs") and westernized pantheistic misinterpretations ("the goodness in all of us"), and taking what the Bible reveals about Him at face value, you are left, if you think about it all, with two choices: fear and trembling, or complete defiance.

Anything else is sheer indulgence in your own self-serving fantasies and denials.

One of the few advantages non-technological societies have over more modern people is the former's sense of NOT having conquered nature. People who live daily understanding (and fearing) the power of the natural world have a definite leg up on understanding (and fearing) the power of God. The other group have come so far from that very sensible stance that they believe nature needs their help to survive.

Occasionally, the God of nature sends a reminder that even nature's formidable forces are so far beyond our control that to think otherwise is certifiable. One tsunami, one giant earthquake, one continent-sized hurricane, and we are slammed back into the paleolithic.

The existence of a personal, and all-powerful God who blackens mountains at His word (Mount Sinai), eliminates whole nations (the Canaanites), and judges the world with a global flood is typically an unacceptable proposition to people enamored of popular wisdom.

And that is tragic because one day, perhaps soon, this Person who is Sovereign over all will exercise His prerogative over Creation, and we are foretold the deniers will run into caves and beg for the mountains and rocks to fall down on them.

The book of Hebrews stresses Christ's power and superiority, AND His Personhood. We are made in His image. We do not worship an idea or a force but a living God.

And that Person is exacting and unrelenting in His standards and in His ability to enforce them. He is NOT the infant in the manger or in His mother's arms. He is God-Who-Became-Man, who stepped into time and space to demonstrate His grace and mercy in preparation for His future ripping open of the fabric of reality to execute judgment and reassert absolute control.

He is a living God. He is not a nice, neat manageable conception that we can tuck away in some satisfying and cozy intellectual corner. And by His very essence, He is a fearful thing, whom you either embrace through faith and are forever after sheltered in His loving and outstretched arms.

Or, on that Day, you will fall into His hands.

Either way there is no escaping Him through defiance or denial or cleverness or self-righteousness or self-sufficiency. You are His, one way or another, whether you like it or not.

The only way not to be destroyed in His consuming fire is to make Him yours as well.

He has set the grounds for this relationship, and it is not performance (thank God!), but belief.

His standards of holiness are so high, and we are so far fallen from them, that He had to die as a Man to enable the imputation of His righteousness to us through faith. There was no other way for Him to be both just, and the justifier, of those who believe. There was no other way for us to be saved.

Thus, He is the living God who died - for us. And in His dying, we live too, IF, by faith we accept His sacrifice on our behalf, allowing His transforming Spirit to indwell us.

For to this end Christ died and rose and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living. (Romans 14:9, NKJV).

Fearful Expectation

2011-12-23T05:54:00.001-08:00

For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries. Anyone who has rejected Moses’ law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. And again, “The LORD will judge His people.” (Hebrews 10:26-30, NKJV)

We've all felt it - that gut wrenching dread; that chest-thumping, breath-catching anxiety of something bad just about to happen. We may not know exactly what it is, or exactly when it will strike, but we know enough about it to be unable to ignore, deny, or avoid - that fearful expectation.

In reality, that is the state of sinful man all his waking moments. We are born, and live each second, under a devastating and unthinkable sentence of impending judgment.

The people of the world make three mistakes about this reality: they either eat, drink, and live life under the delusion that this judgment is a myth (modern irreligion); or they make foolish attempts to propitiate the Judge through rituals, bargains, bribes, and superficial goodness (classic, prideful self righteousness); or they resign themselves to the inevitability of Hell and act on earth like resident demons.

Each of these groups, if they stay the course, will receive the fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries. It is what they deserve, and what will come, and their personal feelings or beliefs about that outcome mean as much as a grain of sand swept up in a tidal wave.

But there is yet another group, worthy of much worse punishment. It is comprised of those who sin willfully after [they] have received the knowledge of the truth, who [have] trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace.

For a professing Christian, the passage above serves as a dire warning. The Book of Hebrews contains more of these than any other single book, and this is fitting, since more than any other single book, Hebrews presents the magnificence, superiority, and extravagant goodness of Christ, our Savior.

The warning is this: once you know the truth, know it both in your head and in your heart, not just intellectually, but experientially as well, and then willfully disregard that truth in the face of all guidance and direction to the contrary, you are without remedy. By your manifest actions, you have already rejected the only cure. For, The LORD will judge His people.”

I strongly suspect, that if, in your deepest heart, you are horribly worried about falling into this state of affairs, you are as far from it as a fallen human being is possible to be.

If whatever secret sin that is plaguing your conscience and robbing your peace has the upper hand for now, by your very misery and tortured ambivalence, you are under the Lord's corrective hand. You may be kicking and screaming at the chastisement and struggle, but a dead man does not kick and scream.

It is those who are convinced of their own good standing, and yet clearly in flagrant disobedience of the truth, who stand on the brink of destruction. It is they who are [trampling] the Son of God underfoot, and are [counting] the blood of the covenant by which [they were] sanctified a common thing.

It strikes me, horribly, that the judgment rendered on the rest of sinful humanity will be a corporate affair in some sense - massive and wholesale, but the judgment, the worse punishment, against those who fall into the category of tramplers will be excruciatingly personal. “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.

This scares me on behalf of those who are legalistically convinced of their own righteousness. Those who name the name of Christ, and yet deny Him through their actions, will look into His eyes of fire, face to face, it seems to me. And their cavalier and self-centered hypocrisy will be what is warned of in Psalm 2: Pay homage to the Son, lest He be angry and you perish in the way when His wrath is kindled but a little.

They will fall into the hands of the Living God, who is a consuming fire.

You may argue whether or not the tramplers were once saved, and subsequently lost their salvation, or whether they were ever truly saved. But I think that is a diversion that misses the point of this warning entirely.

And the point is this:

Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?--unless indeed you are disqualified. (2 Corinthians 13:5, NKJV).

Volcanic Encouragement to Love and Do Good

2011-12-19T15:18:00.000-08:00

And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching. (Hebrews 10:24-25, NKJV).

To focus one's attention intently and determinedly on another (consider), to incite like a volcanic eruption or paroxysm (the literal meaning of stir up), to gather as one body with one purpose (assembling for worship and learning - as in a synagogue), to plead (exhorting) for action founded upon God's love and goodness - is what this passage beseeches we Christians do, always.

It is the encapsulation of our primary mission on this earth as God's beloved and redeemed children. It is why we continue to walk to and fro on the planet, living our lives for Christ.

It is obviously NOT our natural inclination, else there would be no exhortation in Scripture to remember to do these things, for God does not warn or encourage in His word for no purpose. If it is there, it's because we all fail more than we succeed, if not in action, then in motive and intent.

The encouragement to do good and to love is right up there with prayer and thankfulness in the things He wants to do, but which we - naturally - do not do.

That is why we need His Spirit conforming us to His image day by day. That is why the first priority of a servant is to surrender and obey the will of the Master.

That is why we are to empty ourselves from our selves and be filled with Christ.

This emptying is the very thing that quenching the Spirit prohibits from happening.

This is why Christians are never to be Lone Rangers, but are to be in fellowship with other believers. That is the design of the church by God Himself.

But what happens when we don't comply with the two verses above? When we fail to consider one another in order to stir up love and good works? When we forsake the assembling of ourselves together and cease exhorting one another?

We get stale and weak and complacent. Instead of a cauldron of good works and love, we become a stagnant pool of self-focus and misery - and the enemy takes aim at us like fish in a barrel.

It is important to be in fellowship, to be a committed member of a Christ-centered church that believes and teaches the Word of God; to be both a conduit and recipient of the actions succinctly described above, like brightly burning logs in right relationship with each other and with the Lord.

Yet there are times when a Christian must go it alone. When circumstances, or illness, or persecution prevents this kind of necessary interaction, so what do we do then?

As always, we follow the example of the Son of God Himself, who sometimes went alone to pray for hours at a time, and when He was abandoned by His disciples on the night of His arrest He knew that He was not alone, for the Father was with Him.

The exhortation here is like so much in this marvelous Book of Hebrews - not a formulaic checklist of do's and don't, but a living and dynamic prescription and preventative regimen for the ills and fallenness of this life.

If, while we are able, we are willing to follows these precepts, then when we are unable, for whatever reasons, the nourishment and edification we have received in the past will see us through to the end of whatever isolation God has allowed.

But the key is to know where our strength really lies, not in ourselves, but in each other, and ultimately and finally, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Himself.

It is not good for man to be alone, were words spoken by the Creator at the very beginning. They are as true and applicable today as they were in Eden.

An isolated Christian is a vulnerable Christian.

We need each other in the love of God in as functional and interwoven a relationship as the many parts of a physical body.

Without that we are incomplete and handicapped, invalids stumbling through life anemically and without strength.

If you don't have a church, seek one.

If you do, become even more involved as the Spirit leads.

Become that source of volcanic encouragement to others.

And you are promised to receive the same.

Hold Fast Without Wavering

2011-12-18T05:04:00.000-08:00

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. (Hebrews 10:23, NKJV).

Hold fast is a blood and guts military term. It was meant to be. There is nothing ambiguous or wishy-washy about it. It is what soldiers do to defend a hard won battlefield, no matter what the personal cost.

Without wavering is from the Greek word, aklines (ak-lee-nace'), which is the absolute negation of another Greek word, klino (klee'-no), meaning s to fall back, bow down, or wear away (the a- prefix in Greek signifies the diametric opposite of whatever word it fronts). In other words, the divinely inspired writer of Hebrews is exhorting his readers to do whatever it takes NOT to fall back, or bow down, or be worn away from the confession of our hope.

This is ominous and fascinating in the sense that it emphasizes the war-like struggle, expressed in unmistakably martial terms, of the life-and-death battle believers will undergo, at some time or another in this fallen world - the unending struggle to simply hold onto hope.

God knows we will be tested and He is graciously warning us of that inevitability, and dictating our response - hold fast without wavering to the confession of our hope.

That word, confession, is also extremely interesting. It is homologia (hom-ol-og-ee'-ah), which literally means to say the same thing, to agree in the strongest terms possible. It is what we are commanded to do with sin in 1st John:

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9, NKJV).

And note in that passage, as well, the equally fascinating pairings of confess and faithful, with the one being what we humans do in the glorious face of God's faithfulness.

This is important.

There is nothing more essential in the struggle to hold fast without wavering than to know that the ground upon which we are commanded to stand, in this case, the confession of our hope, is for a cause or Person about which there is absolutely no uncertainty.

The anguished parent watching over his critically ill child, the spouse facing the almost certain loss of her life's partner after decades, the child suddenly bereft of a loving family - these things are real potentials in this mostly painful, sometimes joyous earthly existence.

For a Christian to survive these tragedies in the faith requires the same energy, the same commitment, the same sense of noble purpose with which an honorable warrior faces battle.

To stand firm against all odds is possible ONLY when the hope of ultimate victory is based, not on our own puny and powerless selves, but on something or Someone greater than each one of us. Someone whose purposes, goals, and promises are sure and trustworthy.

And this hope that lies within us is a gift from the One who loved us and gave His own life to make us more than conquerors.

It is more certain than the sunrise; more solid and real than Heaven and Earth.

It is hope founded on the promises of the living God, whose faithfulness serves to define faithfulness itself.

Many go through this life blissfully unaware of, and inexperienced in, real pain or suffering, until it catches them unexpectedly and knocks the very breath out of their lungs. When that happens, as it most certainly will, their response will either be bitter defeat, or blessed hope.

For some, this reckoning awaits them at the moment of death, like the foolish rich man who thought to build himself more and larger storehouses for all his worldly wealth, not knowing that his soul would be demanded of him that very night.

For others, life is filled, or rather emptied, with tragedy and loss in heartbreaking frequency.

Some times, maybe even most times, we cannot begin to fathom why one person suffers while another seems to prosper; why life is unthinkably hard for one, and a virtual picnic for another.

But in reality, determining the "why" of these things is not in our job descriptions. It is above our pay grade. It is the Who behind it all that matters.

And He wants us to know that He is with us as we walk through these valleys in the shadow of death.

And in the end, if we believe in what He has said in His word, and what He has demonstrated in the life and death of His Son, that faithful Someone promises to bring us safely home.

It is the promise that, if held on to, makes enduring all the tragic stories of this life worthwhile.

It is the ultimate happy ending.

And like the branch clinging for dear life to the Vine, all He requires is that we hold on. He will see us through.

A New and Living Way

2011-11-27T15:00:00.001-08:00

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

2011-11-27T05:56:00.000-08:00

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.

Perfected Forever

2011-11-23T05:19:00.001-08:00

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.

By That Will

2011-10-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come-- In the volume of the book it is written of Me-- To do Your will, O God.’” Previously saying, “Sacrifice and offering, burnt offerings, and offerings for sin You did not desire, nor had pleasure in them” (which are offered according to the law), then He said, “Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God.” He takes away the first that He may establish the second. By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Hebrews 10:05-10, NKJV).

A 1000 years before Christ, King David penned Psalm 40 in prophetic anticipation of the coming incarnation of Messiah.

That alone is an astounding thought, with even Christ's foreordained humanity (My ears You have opened, being a Hebraism for a body You have prepared for Me) detailed in exquisite succinctness.

But beyond that, there is the repeated declaration that sacrifice and offering were not the real desires of God, but were the prerequisite pictures of His ultimate desire: redemption for fallen humanity.

All of history, everything of significance, funneled toward that magnificent goal, so that the pertinent details of the actions and lives of the major redemptive players were laid out beforehand and recorded in divinely inspired Scripture for our learning and edification; all this to confirm the existence, sovereignty and care of God.

The Psalm cited in the above passages from Hebrews draws the reader's attention back to the foundation of the Old Testament before launching us forward into its glorious fulfillment in the New. Christ, and everything about Him, were contained in the volume of the book - which can variously be interpreted to be the Old Testament itself, as well as the Book of God's Redemptive Plan, the Book of God's Holy Prophets, the Book of Life, and the Book of God's Will.

And it is this last Book of God's Will that is perhaps the most comprehensive and powerful, for it is by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Of all the truths of the Bible, this is one of the most astonishing. Our sanctification, that day-by-day process by which He conforms us into the image of His Son, is God's ultimate desire for His Creation. It is brought about at the unimaginable price of the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, God's Beloved Son.

And the effectiveness of that fulfillment is once for all - one offering for all who believe for all time and eternity.

Christ, our incomparable Savior, set aside everything to do Your will, O God - out of His perfect love for and obedience to the Father.

Their unfathomable relationship within the Godhead formed the foundation for our salvation.

That which foreshadowed the death of Christ, the centuries of bloody animal sacrifice under the Law, was merely the precursor, the setup, for what was to come. Christ's advent took away the first hopeless system of works-based redemption, as it was always intended to do, so that the second way of life could be inaugurated through faith in His death and resurrection.

Never think that any part of Jesus' life was accidental or tragic, in the sense of it taking an unexpected turn. All of it, every second of it, fulfilled the plan written before the foundation of the world.

Why do we think, then, that any aspect of our lives is tragic or accidental under God's care? If we are His children by faith, we are coheirs with Christ, and are of far more value than we can conceive. This is true not because of what we are, but because of who He is.

That being the case, do not waste one moment of doubt in response to life's inevitable losses and pains. Yes, we will walk through the Valley of the Shadow of death. Yes, our days in this world will likely have periods of agony and grief. Yes, enemies will be arrayed against us, and may sometimes even appear to be victorious, but what of it?

The same occurred in Christ's life.

If we take the short-sighted view, the self-centered view, this will only add to the misery.

But if we can keep steadfast in our hearts and minds the fact, reiterated again and again in Scripture, that it is by that will that we move and live and have our being, and by which, through faith, we will receive an eternal inheritance, then we will be able to say, as our brother Paul did so long ago:

...I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. (Romans 8:18, NKJV).

Know and remember that whatever the circumstances, our God is for us.

Consciousness of Sins

2011-10-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. (Hebrews 10:01-04, NKJV).

No matter what we call it, no matter how we try to sweep it under our mental rug, no matter how we strive for self-justification or excuses, you and I both suffer from the knowledge that we fail at living up to even our own standards, let alone a holy and righteous God's.

Whether we believe in a Supreme Being or not, we know, we just know deep down inside, that we are guilty. That is why we become so defensive at the slightest hint of baseless accusations, because underneath that indignation is the sure and certain knowledge that there are plenty of accusations we are rightly guilty of, and we daren't give an inch lest we lose the whole battlefield of reputation and self-esteem in one onslaught.

That consciousness of sins is His mercy. It is indisputable evidence of His grace, for unless a sick man has symptoms he will not seek a cure.

Ancient Israel was given the rites of animal sacrifices for precisely this purpose - a reminder of sins.

The substitutionary death of innocent animals could never take away sins, but all that red, flowing blood was an indisputable and graphic picture of the penalty of sin.

The greatest, and often most overlooked gift of Christ is a clean conscience - a lifting of that burden and ghastly weight of guilt that plagues every man, woman and child capable of even minimal self-examination. Ritual cannot do it. Hypocritical self-righteousness cannot do it. Concluding that you are certainly not as bad as that guy around the block, and considerably better than that woman over there, cannot lift the stain of our own iniquity.

That is why most are so eager to find egregious examples of wrong-doing so that our own evil looks relatively benign in comparison. Yet, such pitiable attempts at assuaging our battered consciences will always ultimately fail. That too is God's mercy.

I have been with more people than I care to recall as they breathed their last on this earth. Of those individuals, the passing of each indelibly etched in my memory, there was an undeniable difference between the man or woman who believed they were cleansed from all unrighteousness, and those who, even as the rattle of collapsing lungs echoed uncannily from their death bed, struggled with the paramount, but typically unspoken issue of human existence: forgiveness.

It is that consciousness of sins that drives some to suicide, some to bitterness and resentment, some to an inexplicable sense of victimhood… and some to Christ.

It is the last group, and only the last group, that finds relief from this ancient and necessary human compulsion to be forgiven.

If ever we become so anesthetized to that ubiquitous sense of failure that we think we are "ok", we are then, in fact, the most hopeless.

Better a miserable perfectionist than an apathetic decent citizen.

The one can never be content, and will search exhaustively for that ultimate goal of acceptance. The other won't even try.

And it is in the striving for forgiveness, for acceptance by Someone greater than ourselves, whether we know His name or not, that can lead us to life everlasting.

Self-satisfaction, complacency, a sense of decency, or worse, superiority, is deadly; eternally fatal.

The writer of Hebrews does not want his intended audience to stop at those reminders of sin, but to go forward to Christ, crossing the threshold of unbelief on our hands and knees, looking for that which we know we need.

Forgiveness.

Waiting Is

2011-10-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation. (Hebrews 09:27-28, NKJV).

According to ancient and venerable Christian doctrine, Christ, the Suffering Servant, is coming again, physically, magnificently, undeniably - as Savior and Lord of Lords.

This next appearing will unfold in two phases: apart from sin, for salvation; and “to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” (Jude 1:15, NKJV).

This is necessary in the same way that it was necessary that Enoch was snatched away before the flood, "…so that he did not see death, 'and was not found, because God had taken him'…" (Hebrews 11:5, NKJV). After which, the Flood of Judgment came, destroying all that walked the earth except for those creatures preserved in the Ark.

So too, when Christ comes again, first He will snatch away His Bride, the church, then pour out God's wrath in judgment against a sinful world, preserving a remnant only of mankind.

And that interval between His Resurrection and Ascension, until He returns, is happening now. For the faithful, it is a time of eagerly waiting and occupying until He comes.

For the willfully unbelieving, it is a time of unacknowledged approaching doom. For when they say, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. (1 Thessalonians 5:3, NKJV).

That dreaded inkling of coming judgment is anathema to those who dwell on the planet in conscious rejection of God and the things of God. To be reminded of it in anyway evokes the desperate reaction of a spoiled child confronted with obvious wrong-doing. Shrill and vile accusations, foot-stomping, breath-holding, and even violence often ensues against the messengers of approaching judgment.

But to those of us who believe, we look toward His coming with comfort and joy, eagerly waiting for the Return of the King to put right all that is amiss in this crooked and perverse world. We hold fast the Word of Life so that whatever befalls us here and now is but light affliction, and cannot be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us.

It is essential to believers to have this anticipatory mindset, to set our minds on things above, lest we, like Lot, become enveloped in the things of the world, and lose sight of where are true citizenship lies. Knowing He might come at any moment for His church purifies our hearts and minds, while we wait and occupy.

Yet, the waiting can be long and hard, fraught with pain and isolation, as we wrestle against our flesh, the world and the Enemy.

Like the fallen beings we are, we either lose sight of our destiny when things are proceeding according to our satisfaction, or we whine and grumble about how long He is tarrying when life is difficult, or our pride is injured, or when we simply become tired of keeping on.

Our Lord knows this about us, and encourages us in our weakness.

But as for you, brethren, do not grow weary in doing good. (2 Thessalonians 3:13, NKJV).

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16, NKJV).

And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. (Galatians 6:9, NKJV).

This world is not our home. Not yet. One day it will be, when He gifts us with a new heaven and a new earth, and with that quality of eternal life which He died to make possible for us.

The primary danger then is twofold while we wait: distraction or weariness.

Both are debilitating.

Both take our eyes off Him and refocus them on ourselves - a sure guarantee of miserable self-absorption.

Yes, it's hard to wait, but the waiting is also part of His absolutely unique and perfect plan for each one of His children.

Remember this, especially in the night seasons.

For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. (Psalms 103:14, NKJV).

The Judgment

2011-09-27T17:09:00.001-07:00

There is nothing more repugnant to fallen human nature than the thought of final judgment. And there is nothing more inevitable, regardless of all the protestations, railings and blasphemous objections. To be brought before a superior authority and evaluated solely on the basis of our performance is the guaranteed climax of every human life. And without Christ it is equally guaranteed to go badly. Very badly.

Further, the Bible slams the door on the doctrine of reincarnation as a hope for second chances, as explicitly stated here: it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.
A personal Judgment Day is a concept embedded in the very fiber of our being. Every known culture has its particular version written large in mythology, archetypal stories, and societal expectations. It is as human as an opposable thumb.

It was put in our existential fabric by God Himself, as an act of both warning and mercy. We can attempt to deny it; by rebellion, try to purge it from our thinking, or we can do our best to attempt to "buy off" the judge by temporally bargaining against an eternal outcome. But it is a futile tactic doomed to failure.

Every word, every deed, every thought will undergo judgment in the fiery eyes of Christ, and nothing will escape notice. Every thought and intent of the heart will be brought to light. Nothing will remain hidden.

This should terrify every defendant (and we are all defendants), but in the majority of the cases, either because the outcome is so unthinkable, or the necessary submission to a higher authority is so repulsive, the modern strategy is to proclaim disbelief.

It doesn't work, though, especially in the "wee hours of the morning", alone, sleepless, steeped in guilt. We know, we just know, that judgment is coming, and for those who are not in Christ, whether they profess belief or not, the anxiety is virtually unbearable.

The "head in the sand" remedies abound. Compulsive eating, drinking, promiscuity, denial, outbursts of wrath, or any other profligate activity that distracts from the core revelation will do, as long as the thought, and attendant feelings, that "the judgment is coming" is, at least temporarily, overlaid.

Yet, as mentioned, this inherent, indomitable guilt is both mercy and culpatory evidence.

Mercy because it inflicts us with unease and motivates us, perhaps, to seek expiation.

Culpatory because even within our own God-bequeathed conscience we know we are inexcusably guilty.

Ignored, this double-edged impetus eventually diminishes in power and influence until our conscience is seared beyond any sensitivity, and we find ourselves saying or doing things that would previously have been unthinkable.

In the end, if left untreated, the patient not only dies, but enters into eternity defiled with guilt and iniquity.

At that point, there descends upon that immortal soul an infinite weight of hopelessness and despair. All that was possible before death - repentance, coming to real faith in Christ, forgiveness - becomes utterly impossible.

This stiletto-sharp warning in Hebrews is meant for those who have yet to admit their own sinfulness. It is especially directed at those who mistakenly consider themselves righteous before God. For know this, without receiving Christ as your Savior (truly and sincerely):

…“There is none righteous, no, not one; There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.” “Their throat is an open tomb; With their tongues they have practiced deceit”; “The poison of asps is under their lips”; “Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; Destruction and misery are in their ways; And the way of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” (Romans 3:10-18, NKJV).

Once at the End of the Ages

2011-09-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Therefore it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another-- He then would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. (Hebrews 09:23-26, NKJV).

Evolutionists and Old-Earth advocates divide earthly history into epochs, ages, and eras.

So does Scripture, except the stratigraphic criteria is vastly different. The former focus on the physical, attempting to interpret geographic and radiometric data according to preconceived notions of how things "really are".

The latter does so based on infallible revelation provided by the Manufacturer, whose focus is on the spiritual, and who has the distinct advantage of being eternal and transcendent, outside of both time and space, from where He is the indisputable cause of both.

From that divine perspective, the division of history is both simultaneously simpler, and infinitely more profound. It boils down to four eons, from Creation to Christ's First Coming, from His Ascension to His Visible Return, Christ's Millennial Kingdom, followed by Eternity, also called "The Age to Come".

As you can see, the demarcation lines are all Christo-centric, eminently fitting since He is the agent of Creation, the Redeemer of the Fall, the King of Kings, and the Son of God. To believe this is to believe the gospel in its deepest and most satisfying form.

Deep because it takes all the treasures of God's Word for what it purports to be, revealed Truth, and satisfying, because it answers the most ancient cry of the bereaved human heart: How long O Lord?

Everything in Hebrews is meant as encouragement to understand the superiority of Christ - He is superior to angels, to Moses, to Joshua, to the ancient priesthood of Israel, and especially to the temporary atoning animal sacrifices established by the Law to foreshadow that one, ultimate cleansing sacrifice of the Son of God.

His death, much more than His birth, is the single most significant event in time and space. By coming to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He purged our sins once, for all, and made available the undoing of the devastation of our specie's rebellion against the Creator.

This occurred in what the Bible terms the fullness of time, and here as the end of the ages. And its efficacy was such that it need never be repeated. In fact, any attempt on our part to add to the atoning power of that single unique act is, at bottom, a declaration of unbelief.

Make no mistake, until His death on the Cross, the ongoing and repeated Temple sacrifices were necessary to comply with God's decrees. Without them, the nation of Israel would have suffered severe temporal judgment, a result clearly understood by the people and the religious authorities for all their long history prior to Jesus' Incarnation as the Suffering Servant.

But after His death, these same foreshadowing rituals were fulfilled and rendered redemptively obsolete for all time. Christ once at the end of the ages… appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.

What does that mean for those of us who have been born since that fateful day in Judea?

It means that there is only one approach to God, and that is through complete dependence on His Son's terrible, yet glorious, work on the Cross.

We can not save ourselves. Nor can we add to His righteousness by our own works.

Indeed, if there is any act that humans can undertake besides complete faith in His singular sacrifice, than Christ's death would have been unnecessary.

To even contemplate this is utter blasphemy.

We are either made clean by trusting in His sacrifice alone, or we are still dead in our trespasses and sins.

Nothing else - nothing else - will suffice.

This does not mean that we are not to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. Nor does it mean that we are to avoid those good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

No, it signifies something far more difficult than either of those alternatives: humble, sincere, loving service to God, rather than easily disguised self-service.

Sometimes this service requires us to forgo earthly pleasure, or even earthly life itself.

Always it requires casting aside all the hypocrisy of self-righteousness, and outward, superficial obedience, and surrendering to His rightful sovereignty over each moment we live and breath we take.

But it starts with simple faith in Him, and finishes with faith in Him. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:17, NKJV).

And it is by His empowerment that we do this, not our own prideful striving, for it is ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ Says the LORD of hosts.

In short, it all begins and ends in Him, who, at the precise preordained moment in time, in grace, mercy, love and filial obedience to the Father, went to the Cross to put away sin, once, for all.

The Presence of God for Us

2011-09-17T13:44:00.001-07:00

All of Creation, Heaven and earth, was twisted and cursed at the Fall. Mankind's rebellion disqualified him from being in the presence of God, and in some unfathomable way, sullied all of existence.

We are shown by this the importance we have to God. We are perhaps the primary reason why God created things and beings that were other than Himself in the first place.

So, because of us, the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs until now. This makes sense if it was all made for us.

The priesthood of Israel was established to symbolize the way back into God's presence - through the shedding of blood for purification from sin. This powerful paradigm offends our modern sensibilities precisely because of its primitive rawness. Pools and splatters of cleansing blood are not easily ignored.

But even more offensive is the idea that only sacrifice of the innocent can somehow remediate the break in fellowship between man and God. It seems unfair that the guiltless should be required to pay the blood-debt of the guilty. Such a system automatically undermines our "natural" sense of self worth because it speaks loudly of our culpability. And after all, whatever did all those poor innocent animals do to deserve such a brutal end? Barbarous!

Yes we are. How else would you describe a sentient species that itself sacrificed all that was glorious and good for the sake of enacting the impossibly futile statement of "my will, not Thy will"?

And that is the point. Sin and its result are just exactly that: barbarous. Having forfeited unfettered access to God, having been rightfully exiled from His pure and holy presence, declares plainly that we are unworthy. And cruel.

And it's not just us. Our sin makes everything else that was made for us unclean, as well. Even Heaven. All of it, every last corner of everything, must be purified in order for that Creator-creature relationship to be restored. It is that, or utter separation from His presence for all eternity - a fate we call Hell.

That needed purification is what Christ accomplished by His death on the Cross. The Book of Hebrews rams this point home unequivocally, over and over again, to both declare the magnificence of Christ's work, and decry the barbarous nature of our sin. While it will always be a noble and heroic picture of the Lord, it will also remain forever a testament to our helplessly depraved self-will.

Having everything, we chucked it away through an insanely toxic act of self-aggrandizement, and by doing so, we cast ourselves from the very source of Life: the presence of God.

Thus, in anticipation of that single momentous restorative death, animal sacrifices were established to provide for mankind an unforgettable picture of how far the Fall took us. Therefore it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these all during that long period of grace and mercy whereby God allowed sinners to be born and come to repentant faith in His Son's future sacrifice.

In going steadfastly to the Cross, Christ also accomplished much more than the cleansing of our souls. He also began the restoration of that realm that will be our eternal home. Those heavenly things themselves [were purified] with better sacrifices than [their earthly symbolic counterparts], by our Great High Priest entering that heavenly holy place and sprinkling His own purifying blood. For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God… for us.

Beloved, do not overlook that. Christ did what He did... for us.

If you stumble at the thought that the universe was made for our delight, to render back to God our adoration and praise for His power and wisdom and love, then consider how much more He did to enable us to re-enter His presence. He sent His magnificent, worthy, and innocent Son to die.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8, NKJV).

When the Lord Breaks You Down

2011-09-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

And he said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 01:21, NKJV).

Pain is personal and concrete.

As C.S. Lewis wrote a generation ago, there is no such thing as a sum total of pain, no matter how many individuals are suffering, each suffers only their own, and not another's agony. There is no one being who suffers additive pain. There is perhaps one exception to this law, and that is God Himself, but we don't know that for sure, and perhaps never will.

What we do know is that theory and philosophy, generalities and nuance, are all annihilated in the fiery furnace of one's own pain.

Pain is ultimately inexorable.

No matter what form it takes, physical, emotional, or spiritual, it is a thing - an experience - of substance that can transform everything about a person's life. It can do this slowly, or at the speed of light. It can be expected, or assail us like a thief in the night. In the end, pain wins.

The minions of pain - disease, injury and loss - can be perceived a mile away, or emerge explosively from ambush. The attacks can come in brief breath-taking (literally) episodes, or lay siege to us like a well-equipped army around the walled-city of our mind and body.

Again C.S. Lewis from The Problem of Pain: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world… [Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul… Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless… Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself…Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness… Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal… God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."

Some of the most poignant, tragically bereft, and heart-stoppingly flawed heroes of Scripture knew all about being broken by the Lord of Heaven.

For make no mistake, God takes full responsibility for everything that happens in the life of every one of His creatures, especially the agony of life in this fallen world. And we are all, every one of us, most emphatically, His creatures.

He may not be the author of every event, in the sense of being the instigator, but He makes no bones about being accountable for allowing these to happen, and often, more often than we might like, micromanaging each excruciating detail.

It is indeed a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God? (1 Peter 4:17, NKJV).

Adam, Abel, Noah, Job, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ruth, Esther, Naomi, David and Mary are just a few of God's beloved who were refined in the crucible of pain. Adam forfeited Paradise, Abel lost his life to fratricide, Noah his world, Job his children, prosperity, and health, Ruth her home, Esther her royalty, David his kingdom, and Mary, the love of her life.

That pain serves a divine purpose is a conviction of the deepest faith in the child of God. That very conviction is what gives Christians hope and meaning even in the deepest well of the most prolonged agony, and makes our suffering absolutely distinct from the world's suffering.

But pain still hurts, sometimes so profoundly that we cry out in helpless wonder and horror at our having to abide even a nanosecond of what can befall us.

And of all the pain in the world's vast inventory of that which hurts, perhaps the pain of grief is the worst.

And it is in this, above all else, where Christ reveals just how much a Savior He is, for His death - His and the Father's unspeakable loss - gives us that sustaining hope of impossible reunion.

I do not pretend to fully understand the will of my Father in Heaven. I do not comprehend why a beloved child must suffer and die, or why a man or woman in the prime of life must meet a tragic end, or why, after a long and faithful life, a godly elder must fade away in the ignominy of senility. And a life lived, however long or brief, in chronic pain or disability is beyond my tolerance to even contemplate.

But neither do I fully understand the blessings of eternal reward in a realm of unimaginable satisfaction in that existence we are promised in the life to come.

But this I do know, that my Lord is good and loves me with an everlasting love. He has shown me His mercy and grace more often than I can number, even though I know beyond doubt that I deserved not even the least of one of His gifts. And this knowledge, if not strength or noble stoicism, gives me an escape from utter despair, and enables me to crawl, however falteringly, into the light of His hope. Thus,

...brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. (James 1:2-4, NKJV).

Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord--that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful. (James 5:11, NKJV).

And I know this, as well, that there will be a time and a place of safety for us.

“And God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4, NKJV).

Blood and Remission

2011-09-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

For where there is a testament, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is in force after men are dead, since it has no power at all while the testator lives. Therefore not even the first covenant was dedicated without blood. For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant which God has commanded you.” Then likewise he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry. And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission. (Hebrews 09:16-22, NKJV).

Death and blood are mentioned more than a 1000 times in the Old and New Testaments. The Bible is a blood-soaked book precisely because it deals frankly with human history, human nature, sin, and salvation. It could be no other way, and this offends many people.

It was meant to.

Jesus Himself said that the gospel is an offense to the Gentiles and a stumbling-block to the Jews.

Gentiles (those not Jewish by birth or culture) are offended largely as a matter of pride. How dare God deem that His displeasure toward us can only be remedied with the shedding of blood. How dare He judge our behavior as worthy of death. In short, how dare He pronounce any judgment whatsoever upon vaunted humanity. Who does He think He is?

To the Jews, more acclimated to the idea of blood sacrifice as propitiation for God's righteous wrath against sin, the gospel was offensive because it took this divine condemnation an infinitely greater step forward, declaring that not only was sin blood-worthy, but for it to paid for once and for all, God Himself had to die.

This too was intended by God from the beginning, a fact made clear by the dual pervasive messages proclaimed in the Old Testament regarding God being the only Savior, and blood being the only currency of salvation.

As a rebellious race of created beings, we humans are indescribably arrogant in our self-centeredness and delusions of worth. We are born with the default potential and tendency to believe that we are something apart from God. It is part of our inheritance through our fallen forefather, Adam.

We don't want to agree with God about much of anything, but especially with His evaluation of who and what we really are, and with what needed to be done in order to make us acceptable in His sight.

Everything about the gospel of Christ shouts to us that we are helpless and hopeless and condemned. It is a fire of humiliation meant to stoke us into repentance, or burn us in Hell. It announces our inability and disability for the whole Universe to see, and then casts us even further into abject shame, because while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Repeatedly, God revealed to His Chosen People that the life in the the blood. Since He is the creator of all life, the blood is His, and without that life's blood being shed, there is no remission of sin. This is true because the soul that sins must die, for the wages of sin is death.

That word remission has such a profound connotation, especially in regard to an otherwise fatal affliction, and that too is intentional.

How parochial! How regressive! How indomitably primitive! How utterly ridiculous that some "sky god" would make such a pronouncement, and how unbelievable that any thinking person would swallow the premise whole!

That is the unregenerate human reaction, in itself a declaration of war against God. In itself, another fatal self-indictment.

Nevertheless, there is something unavoidably compelling about bloodshed. Deep in our inherent makeup we know beyond doubt that it is powerfully significant.

Most of us are repulsed by the sight, some to the point of sickness or fainting. Others are revoltingly fascinated by it, experiencing something akin to a twisted and perverse passion. And yet, over time and repeated exposure, still others condition themselves against any strong reaction at all, but by doing so they develop callouses on their souls.

God, in His infinite wisdom and compassion, has painted the picture of both our depravity and our salvation on a sweeping canvass depicting a raging sea of deep red blood, impossible to ignore.

He meant to.

Even the ancient ritual of sprinkling the blood of innocent animals using scarlet wool and hyssop foreshadowed the horridly compelling and momentous murder of God's Son on the Cross.

All for one purpose: to lead us from the blackness of darkness forever into the wondrous light of the Kingdom of His love.

God is a consuming fire unless we are purified with blood - the blood of our Magnificent Savior that washes us from all unrighteousness.

Offense is what it was designed to be, so we would take notice.

Offense is what it was designed to be, so that by taking notice we would choose, much like Adam and Eve had to choose, to either humbly accept and embrace the offense by an act of repentant faith, or go pridefully, and screaming our arrogant defiance, into the deepest pit of Hell.

For without shedding of blood there is no remission.

By Means of Death

2011-09-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

And for this reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. (Hebrews 09:15, NKJV).

In Romans, the Apostle Paul writes this:

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 5:7, 8, NKJV).

When I come face to face with the realization that I needed someone to die for me so that I might live, it undermines any illusion I might harbor about my personal worthiness. That is a good thing.

When I further understand that the Someone in view is the perfect and righteous Son of God, who knew no sin, and came to this planet precisely for the purpose of saving me, it emphasizes the truth about my helplessness and Christ's unspeakable heroism.

It is by means of death, His death, that I am redeemed from my transgressions against God's perfect Law, and through that redemption I become eligible to receive eternal life. It is not mine by anything other than inheritance, a beneficiary of Christ's Last Will and Testament - the New Covenant in His blood. It is certainly not mine by anything I have done other than heed the call, the invitation, to believe.

And it is only by inheritance that I could receive it, since I could never earn such a treasure, nor could anyone but He, who has been granted authority over all flesh, bequeath it to me.

Like any other Will and Testament, the testator - the author of it, had to both own what is being handed down, and had to die in order for the provisions to take effect.

So, my Savior had to die. For me.

His death was not of natural causes, nor was it in any way untimely. It was a deliberate act of sinful men according to the preordained counsel and foreknowledge of God.

Unlike human material inheritance, what is mine by Christ's death is more like genetic inheritance than anything else - it determines who I become. It changes who I would have been otherwise. It gives me His likeness, and empowers me to take on His traits and character. It changes me fundamentally and forever.

But like human inheritance, I can do nothing to forfeit this gift, or be disqualified as a recipient, because it is unconditionally mine by means of His death. There is a finality to the bequeathment that is irreversible because, in that legal sense of inheritance, His qualifying death is irreversible.

The only thing that will prevent me from appropriating my inheritance is my willful rejection of the offer. I can refuse it, but if I sincerely receive it, I can't lose it, nor can it be taken from me.

No matter who I am or what I have done.

And in receiving my eternal inheritance, I am necessarily transformed by it. Who I was before receipt is very different from who I become afterward, and that transformation involves yet another death - my old sinful self. That part of me the Bible calls the natural man.

Thus, by means of death I am made alive, a new man, a new creation. I am no longer a son of Adam, but a son of God by faith. I am born again into a new family.

This is the greatest example I can conceive of God working all things together for good; even the most egregious enemy - death itself.

Without Christ, human death is entry not into annihilation, but into a horrific realm as far from God, and therefore as far from all that is good, as it is possible to be.

With Christ, through belief in Christ, human death is entry into His presence, and into a place prepared especially for my everlasting joy.

But make no mistake, the gift was not free. It cost God the life of His Son.

The God-Man

2011-09-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. (Romans 01:01-04, NKJV).

The strangest thing about Jesus is that He is both fully human and fully God. He is, and was, and will forever be, God - with no beginning or end, the Great I AM, all-powerful, all-knowing, in perfect and eternal loving relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He exists because He exists, and everything we know and think of exists because of Him.

But the unexpected thing about Him, the surprise of all surprises, was that this Second Person of the Holy Trinity did something just for us that was more remarkable than we can really wrap our tiny brains around: He took on an additional nature - a human nature - and became a Man.

And from that momentous point in time onward, He is forever the God-Man.

Right now, there is a Man - our King - on the Throne of Heaven awaiting the Father's command to return to earth and first judge, and then set up His Kingdom from the ancient city, Jerusalem.

The Bible tells us this is true and what will happen, and most of the world knows something huge and important is coming but they don't really want to believe it because they don't know who Jesus is, and they want to rule themselves. They don't want to have to answer to God, or have Him in authority over them, and underneath all the other ugly, horrible things about sin, that is the root cause of it.

It doesn't matter though, because Christ, the Son of David and the Son if God, is returning regardless of how the world thinks or feels about it.

He has waited this long because when He was born as a human, and grew up to be an adult 2000 years ago, He did something even more amazing and wonderful than becoming a human - He died on the Cross in our place.

He took the punishment of sin on Himself so that we would be spared, and that is what saved us because His sinless death paid the devastating and eternal penalty for our sin. And He is waiting for all those who will believe to be born and come to faith. Then He is coming back.

Without the Crucifixion, the rest of humanity before and after His death, could never escape punishment. And because God planned before even time began that this would be how we are saved, everyone who died before and after Jesus believing in God's promise of a Savior, is declared innocent and can enter Heaven because of the Cross.

Jesus proved all this to be true by not only being born and dying, but by His resurrection from the dead.

You see, death came into the world through Adam's rebellion in the Garden of Eden. And from that moment on, all of Adam's descendant's (everyone alive since then - except Jesus) were born in sin, and instead of living forever as God intended, they were doomed to die after their puny and troublesome life on this earth was done.

Not only that, but everything else bad that happens in life - pain, sorrow, aging - can be laid at Adam's feet because Adam, by sinning, decided that he, rather than God, was in charge. Adam could not save himself. Or us.

And as in Adam, all men must die and suffer in Hell, so in Christ, all who believe must live in Heaven with God and each other. For now though, until Christ returns, our bodies die, but our souls escape Hell and go to be with Jesus. If we believe in Him.

In some ways, it seems almost too simple to be true, but that's only because we don't really understand how horrible sin is, and how miraculous and loving Christ is. But one thing is certain - if we were not all in Adam when He sinned, we could not all be in Christ when He paid for our sin. We would have to pay the penalty ourselves, and because He was without sin, death could not keep Him.

It would keep us though, forever, just as it will keep all those who breathe their last in unbelief.

That's why Paul writes what He does, reminding us thick-headed humans that without faith in the God-Man, there is no hope. It would be much better never to have been born at all.

But because of Him, by faith in Him, this Son of David and Son of God, becomes our Lord and our Savior.

And He proved it by what He said and did, and most of all by that Empty Tomb.

To Serve the Living God

2011-09-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Hebrews 09:13-14, NKJV).

Dead gods abound. The gods of wealth and youth, of power and prestige, of renown and influence. These are dead gods by their very nature - they leech life rather than give it. And in the end they are as ephemeral as snow flakes in the heat of the sun.

Yet, all of human history is a corporate chronicle of two diametrically opposed pursuits: the false idols of this fallen world versus the true and living God.

Without miraculous intervention, the human heart is doomed to seek that which appears alive and meaningful, but is merely a thinly disguised tomb full of decay and dead men's bones.

Christ came to die so that the door to life could be opened, once for all. His entire purpose was to provide a means of escape from our default destiny of eternal darkness. That He had to suffer on the Cross to accomplish this speaks of His unutterable love and our utter depravity.

He offered Himself in our place, taking upon Himself the accusations and punishment of our offenses so that we could be cleansed of our unrighteousness and become pure in Him.

But He doesn't just wash us clean if we let Him, He goes far beyond that by inculcating His nature into us, and providing us with the power, ability, and prerequisites to achieve the greatest avocation conceivable - service to an infinite, perfect, good, righteous, powerful, loving and living God.

This vocation is all mercy and grace on His part. He in no way needs our service, just as He does not need our worship, adoration and devotion. He desires us to have and do these things not for Him, but for us.

It's a simple equation really. He, being fully aware of His omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, His godhood and power, and self-existing as the very definition of right and good - He made us for Him. He, being who and what He is, is the greatest reward we could possibly receive, and He has offered that reward as a gift, and enabled us as free moral agents to choose to accept or reject that gift.

Knowing ahead of time that our Creation would result in rebellion, and that our redemption would cost the excruciating death of the priceless human incarnation of the second person of the Trinity - His eternal Son - the Father in perfect cooperation with the Son and the Holy Spirit, created us anyway.

It is impossible for me to fully express in words alone what service to Him means. I can point to the magnificent glory of creation, the vast and intricate complexity of the material universe and say, "See! He made that for us."

I can paint a picture of the transformational love possible between husband and wife, and between parents and children and say, "See! This is for us, as well."

I can allude to the glories of eternal life in a new, immeasurably superior earth and heaven, in intimate fellowship with Christ and each other and say, "See! This is the everlasting home and family He has lovingly and painstakingly prepared for us, adopting us into His household, not because of us, but because of His beauty and goodness."

But these, while real and true, are mere pictures and hints at what it means to serve Him.

In the end, all that can be said is that we were made for Him, to delight in Him, to be with Him, to glory in His unspeakable goodness, and when we, through His grace, achieve that goal by believing in His Son, our life will forever afterward be fulfilled in increasingly profound and wondrous ways that “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9, NKJV).

To serve the living God is the opposite of pain and death. It is the opposite of sorrow and loss. It is the opposite of being enslaved by sin and fear. It is, instead, the restoration of all things.

In Christ, all things become new and nothing is lost.

All for us.

Cleanse Your Conscience

2011-09-05T06:42:00.001-07:00

For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Hebrews 09:13-14, NKJV).

Anxiety and guilt are closely related, but originate from different sources.

In a certain sense anxiety is amoral, or at least morally neutral. It just is, however painful it may be, and while it is often due to lack of faith, it is not necessarily the direct result of some sin.

Guilt is inescapably moral. Guilt is the function of that God-given part of the mind, called the conscience, that inflicts you with unease or shame when you go wrong. The conscience has gotten a bad reputation over the last 150 years, starting with the advent of Freudian psychology and culminating in modern modes of therapy founded on the propagation of self-esteem.

The product of the conscience, guilt, has been relegated to the ash heap of culture. It has become the first casualty of the feel-good epidemic that has wiped out the absolutes of morality (the "you shall nots" of the Ten Commandments), and replaced them with puff and situational vapor.

Guilt has been relabeled Toxic Shame, and like all sustained and appealing marketing efforts, this propaganda effort has rebranded a once venerable commodity into something worthy of manufacturer recall. Inflicting guilt under all circumstances is now a thought crime. In the near future, I suspect it will become an actually crime, especially when perpetrated against someone who is actually guilty of some tangible crime.

Unless, of course, the alleged perpetrator is a conspicuous Christian, then he or she will be deemed GUILTY no matter what.

Such is the way of the world for now, but try as it might, grit its teeth and strain as mightily as possible, the world will not ever completely eliminate conscience, nor its progeny, guilt. They are part of our original equipment, like personhood and intestines.

Even before God codified His moral laws to the Children of Israel, He gifted fallen man with a conscience. It is our inbuilt moral sensor that sends a jolt of perception to even the most hard-hearted miscreant that SOMETHING IS WRONG. The message can be subverted, the conscience can be seared into virtual disfunction, but the underlying framework of guilt generation remains. Thank God.

Because at some point, if a human heart is sufficiently softened by life or love (a work of the Holy Spirit), then it is the conscience that will relentlessly drive a man, woman or child to seek its cleansing.

And the only effective solvent is forgiveness.

This is a hard nut to crack in the modern world. We have been conditioned by the culture, education, our intellectual betters, and our own flesh, to pretend we are accountable to no one morally except ourselves. This, despite being a guaranteed recipe for societal disaster, is the snake oil we have imbibed almost since birth. And it makes the work of the conscience that much harder.

But when it does start to work, the torment of a guilty conscience can be intense. Thank God again. At full force, it drives us to seek some kind of remedy, some kind of guilt-easement. We can "try to make up for things", or "attempt restitution", or "begin to tip the scales so that our good works outweigh our bad".

In fact, it is quite common in the annals of human history to discover a person who has gone from practicing demonic evil to selfless philanthropy - from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll. I wonder how many Nazi Death Camp doctors became angels of mercy after World War Two? Probably more than we know.

But in the end, despite Herculean human effort, the guilty conscience remains stained and smelly because there is only one means of true cleansing - forgiveness. And the only true forgiveness is from God, because it is against Him and Him only that we sin. Yes, others are damaged and hurt by our sin, sometimes whole nations, but it is the Holy God Himself, the Eternal Lawgiver, who is the sole target of our sin.

We know this inherently, like we know how to breathe or sneeze.

It is only the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, [that can] cleanse your conscience from dead works. It is only through your acceptance of that fact that you can obtain forgiveness, the kind that lifts the burden of guilt from your heart, mind and soul forever.

And while that acceptance may seem too easy, too good to be true, it is, in fact, one of the hardest things a human can do, for it entails the setting aside of ALL thought of self-worth and self-reliance, and acknowledging God's Lordship over your life, and your absolute dependence on Him for everything - especially forgiveness.

Unless you have experienced the lifting of this burden of guilt for yourself, all these are just words, like imagining a new color.

But Christ came to give this world a gift that only He could give for the express purpose of obtaining your forgiveness.

Remember that and praise Him with all your heart.

But it doesn't stop there. Forgiveness is only the miraculous beginning. It is the opening of the door into a life of joy and hope no matter how bleak a future on this earth is before us.

It is the beginning of the greatest vocation imaginable: to serve the living God.

Not of this Creation

2011-09-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

But Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. (Hebrews 09:11-12, NKJV).

For now, Christians are bi-dimensional. Simultaneously, we live in two realities, with two natures, under two very different regimes, operating under two very different sets of rules.

Alive and active in this world, we are also citizens of the next. We are at war within ourselves - flesh and spirit - and which one is in ascendancy at any given moment is dependent on which one we have been feeding. Our daily lives are immersed in both the natural and supernatural - walking both by sight and faith, navigating between the realms of what is seen, the temporal, and what is not seen, the eternal.

Without a doubt, and due to absolutely no effort or will on our part, we are one of the most interesting creatures in existence.

We do not emerge from the womb this way, of course, but this bi-dimensional dichotomy is a function of being born again, and the entire purpose of our time on this planet is to be fully transformed into beings who are not of this creation.

Not surprisingly, this metamorphosis begins and is sustained by the power of God - the One who is the author and finisher of our faith; the Eternal King who has begun this good work in us and promises to complete it to the end.

This belief, this way of life founded on divinely inspired revelation in conjunction with existential transformation, seems crazy to those who are still citizens of the world. At least that was true for me before I became one myself. At the time it all sounded like so much fantastical gibberish to me, but that is understandable because I was looking at things not of this world through lenses of perception and thought that were.

That's very much like a shortsighted man trying to make sense of something too far off to really see, and the vague shadows and shapes he does perceive appear nothing at all like they are in reality.

The indescribably tragic thing about all this is that the greater realm we are no longer a natural part of was the original sphere in which humans were intended to thrive.

Our ancestors rebelled and were exiled - an act of mercy since the real penalty was death, not banishment - and ever since then our Creator has done everything necessary and possible to reinstate our citizenship; even sending His own Son to die in our place so that we could be transformed and live in Him.

Again, to those still outside, these truths don't make sense, But Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come so that they could make sense, at least to those who were willing to listen. And He came with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, which was, in a very real and tangible sense, His own physical Person.

In a way not readily comprehensible by earth-bound minds, His Presence as a Man tore open the veil between the merely temporal and created realm, and the uncreated eternal realm of the Creator Himself. And that tearing aside of the barrier was no mere symbolic act, but was accomplished Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood.

Look, there are laws of the material universe that we humans barely comprehend, and there are others, like Quantum Electrodynamics, that our most lofty scientific minds can describe, but cannot admittedly "make sense" of in terms of the underlying reasons and purposes. These rules of materiality just are, from our current perspective.

Will we ever discover and be able to understand the illusive and supposedly elegant physical Law of Everything? That's a question great intellects have been pursuing now, officially, for close to a hundred years, and the more data that is discovered, the more questions emerge.

If that is true of the merely physical realm, why do we think it strange that the same level of mystery exists in that greater realm not of this creation?

We may never know why God's Plan of Salvation had to be played out the way it is in the Bible, certainly not while still barely through the foyer from this realm into the next, but we can know and trust in the results, in the very same way we can know and trust the results of the laws of light, and gravity and nuclear forces.

And the singular, most momentous and significant result of Christ's ministry on our behalf is this: He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.

His sacrifice made it possible for each one of us to live forever.

Is it possible to fully understand why that is so? Maybe not in the way you want to, but face it, you really don't understand why the sky is blue, or why the proven and repeatable probability of a single red photon traveling through a given photon-sized pinhole is 4 instead of 16, either. But you can believe it nonetheless.

So the writer of Hebrews provides us with the facts in a way that emphasizes the magnificence of what Jesus did on our behalf. Can you fully understand it? Maybe not in the way you want to.

But you can believe it nonetheless.

And when you do, you are granted citizenship into this other, larger, and more substantial realm that is not of this creation.

Until the Time of Reformation

2011-09-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

Now when these things had been thus prepared, the priests always went into the first part of the tabernacle, performing the services. But into the second part the high priest went alone once a year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the people’s sins committed in ignorance; the Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way into the Holiest of All was not yet made manifest while the first tabernacle was still standing. It was symbolic for the present time in which both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make him who performed the service perfect in regard to the conscience-- concerned only with foods and drinks, various washings, and fleshly ordinances imposed until the time of reformation. (Hebrews 09:06-10, NKJV).

The Tabernacle and Temple precincts, its partitions, implements, vessels, and priestly services were highly significant, especially in foreshadowing the saving work of Christ. The passages above deepen that picture, emphasizing the continuous separation between God and sinners, broached only symbolically, and then only through the constant sacrificial shedding of innocent animal blood.

The available access to the sanctuary versus the Holiest of All painted a solemn picture of the drastic break in fellowship between creature and Creator, and the extent to which God went to make at least a temporary reunion possible. Even so, that place designated as God's earthly seat, the Most Holy Place, was barred from entry except when the the high priest went alone once a year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the people’s sins committed in ignorance.

This graphically illustrates the almost inconceivable heinousness of sin, even unintentional sin (sins committed in ignorance). It is akin to a living creature purposely or stupidly denying itself the breath of life, only to have the Giver of life go to extreme lengths to prevent the resulting suicide.

We really have no clue just how bad we are, nor how good God is, and we would remain blinded beyond hope of sight unless the Holy Spirit-inspired Scriptures provided us with the truth about our despicable condition.

The provision of atonement established by the services of the Tabernacle were more intimate than their later counterparts in the Temple, precisely because of their lack of cultural inculcation. It was a new thing for the wandering Children of Israel to be required to ritualistically and routinely slaughter animals for the express purpose of escaping their own just punishment for sin.

By the time of Solomon's Temple, nearly half a millennia later, the symbolism was farther removed from the actuality, and the formal practice of Judaism became, not a humble supplication for mercy, but a supposed work of righteousness in and of itself.

We thick-headed humans do that all the time. We ascribe delusional credit to ceremonial cleanliness as if it were meant to be something more than a ceremony. Rather than expiating sin, the sacrifices were reminders of sin. Every bleeding and bleating lamb, goat, or sheep was a piteous reminder of how far humanity was fallen. But that reality became obscured over time by the very sinfulness it was meant to temporarily cover.

As written in the verses above, there was no actual way to draw near to God. The rituals were billboards indicating that the way into the Holiest of All was not yet made manifest while the first tabernacle was still standing. As long as their remained a need to be cleansed, true fellowship with God could not be restored. Instead, [it] was symbolic for the present time in which both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make him who performed the service perfect in regard to the conscience-- concerned only with foods and drinks, various washings, and fleshly ordinances…

What was required, and what could be made possible only by Christ's once-for-all sacrifice on the Cross, was an inward cleansing; the creation of a new heart, a new nature that could only occur when the way to the Throne of Grace was thrown open by the shedding of the Lord's blood. Without Jesus it was a hopeless Catch-22. Only by drawing close to God could the real transformation take place, but that drawing closer could only be accomplished, not by the covering of sin, but by it being taken away in Christ.

These temporary measures were imposed until the time of reformation, which began to take place with Christ's saving work, and which will continue throughout this present age, individual by individual, until the consummation of this age, and the ushering in of Eternity.

All of it, every single drop in the ocean of blood prior to Christ pictured the need for a Savior.

All of it, every single drop in the ocean of blood prior to Christ pictured the horror of sin and the holiness of God.

All of it, every single drop in the ocean of blood prior to Christ pictured His indescribable love in coming to save us.

The priesthood, the Tabernacle, the Temple, the rituals, ceremonies and sacrifices could never be sufficient to repair the breach between God and sinful man.

Only God Himself, reaching across that unbridgeable chasm in Christ could restore the relationship. And then only because Christ set His face like flint to go to Jerusalem and took upon Himself the penalty of sin.

For us.

The Earthly Sanctuary

2011-08-31T17:27:00.000-07:00

Then indeed, even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service and the earthly sanctuary. For a tabernacle was prepared: the first part, in which was the lampstand, the table, and the showbread, which is called the sanctuary; and behind the second veil, the part of the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of All, which had the golden censer and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which were the golden pot that had the manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant; and above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these things we cannot now speak in detail. (Hebrews 09:01-05, NKJV).

Maybe it's because life is inherently fragile and uncertain; fate and circumstances can change for the worse in an instant; no one anywhere no matter how advantaged, protected or privileged is guaranteed more than the moment at hand.

Or maybe it's because we are too broken as creatures to be able to comprehend what the Lord has in store for us for all eternity.

Whatever the reason(s), an earthly sanctuary is, at one time or another, on everybody's wish list.

Who doesn't want a place of safety and peace? Who doesn't want to be enclosed and protected within a place of unassailable power?

It is no accident, then, that God provided His people with detailed specifications for the construction of an earthly copy of the true heavenly sanctuary. He did it out of love and a desire to instruct His people.

From the earliest history of the Children of Israel, God established a means (animal sacrifice), and a place (the Tabernacle - and later the Temple) where His people could come to meet Him. It was both a symbolic edifice, a picture of stunning and meaningful truths about the Promised Messiah, and a physical anchor, a concrete, tangible, and sanctified meeting place where sinners could draw close to their holy Creator.

It was an unprecedented gift, a noble condescension on the Father's part indicating, perhaps above all else, His ancient longing to reestablish fellowship with fallen mankind.

He designed it as a place of both awe and protection, judgment and mercy, incalculable glory and eminent approachability. This place of worship, this earthly sanctuary, became the central focus of Israel, and remains so to this day, even though the physical building was destroyed almost 2000 years ago. Astonishing!

Yet, the emphasis in these verses is not on the magnificent Temple built by Solomon, but on the humble Tent of Meeting in the wilderness, so far removed from the writer of Hebrew's experience that he felt unqualified to delve more deeply into its physical aspects beyond a summary description (Of these things we cannot now speak in detail).

His purpose, I believe, is to yet again highlight the superiority of the New Covenant over the Old by contrasting Christ, the Cornerstone of the Living Temple - the eternal church, with a portable, temporary construction made of badger skins, cloth, metal coatings and wood.

He is not in anyway denigrating the Old, but is again using it as a signpost that has always pointed to the New.

Everything about the Tabernacle represented a foreshadowing of the work and ministry of Christ, from the lampstand that was never to be bereft of flame (Jesus being the Light of the World), to the Showbread and Manna (Jesus is the Bread of Life), to the purposely hidden gold (His divinity cloaked in humanity), to the second veil separating the sanctuary from the Holiest of All (the veil being His flesh, as Hebrews 10 will tell us), and ultimately leading to the mercy seat, where the justice of God and the grace of God came together in complete harmony through the Cross of Christ.

That mercy seat, though adjacent to the earthly sanctuary, was only accessible to the High Priest once a year on the Day of Atonement (itself a pointer to Christ's atoning death), and then only after rigorous and diligent animal sacrifices were made for both the Priest and the people.

But the new Covenant has none of those restrictions. That veil of separation between us and the Mercy Seat has been ripped in two forever, and we are commanded to come not once a year, but always and boldly to the throne of grace to find mercy and help in time of need.

However magnificent and satisfying and gracious the earthly sanctuary was to the people of the Old Covenant, it is nothing in comparison to the New.

We who are in Christ are not restricted to a geographic location, or a calendar date to draw near to God. Nor are we dependent on the officiation of a priest, or even a king. We are His children who worship God in spirit and in truth anywhere and everywhere and anytime.

We are, ourselves, the Temple of the Living God through faith in His Son.

Our sanctuary is incorruptible, always accessible, and is not a place, but a Person, who is our all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, Lord, King, Savior, Priest, and Friend.

There can be no greater safety.

Faultless

2011-08-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second. Because finding fault with them, He says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah-- “not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they did not continue in My covenant, and I disregarded them, says the LORD. “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. “None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. “For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” In that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. (Hebrews 08:07-13, NKJV).

Christ is the Mediator of a better covenant established on better promises. In fact, that better covenant is the faultless replacement of the first covenant that was not kept by Israel throughout its long and checkered history.

It was during the time of the Exodus from Egypt that God through Moses gave the nation His Law. In effect, it was a contract: do these things and live; disregard these things and suffer the consequences. Israel repeatedly suffered the consequences.

But God - the two most encouraging words in Scripture - in His mercy gives that nation (and through them the world) a second chance, a second covenant not founded on frail human performance, but on the faithfulness and obedience of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Knowing beforehand that Israel would fail, God declared in the beginning, long before Abraham or Jacob, that He would send the Promised One to crush the head of Satan (Ge 3:15). Provision would be made for Israel's future failure, and in their failure, salvation would come to the whole planet.

And it was not the Law itself, but those under the Law that proved weak and insufficient. Fault was found with them again and again, and they did not continue in that first covenant. The result: God disregarded them - a truly horrible fate. But even as He did so, allowing Babylon to conquer them, He, through the prophet Jeremiah, declared that there would be a new covenant, a better contract, not founded on faulty human works, but on the magnificent and faultless Son of God.

That long ago promise of hope foreshadowed so many things; the reuniting of the Divided Kingdoms (the house of Israel and with the house of Judah); the radically different nature of the new covenant - written not on hard tablets of stone, but put in the minds and written on the hearts of the people; the abolition of the priesthood (“None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them."); and the incredible mercy and forgiveness of God through His Son (“For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” ).

So radically different and infinitely superior is this new covenant over the old, that it was possible only through the Savior's obedient death on the Cross.

The gospel of justification by faith is as far above the conditional promises of the law as the Heavens are above the earth, which makes the agent of that new covenant, Christ, far superior than Abraham or Moses or Joshua or angels or anyone.

Now, [in] that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete is also an important facet of the revelation of Hebrews, this obsolescence of the Old Covenant. That which is obsolete is necessarily incompatible with what replaces it.

No rollback is possible. Reliance on what God has done away with, on what He has purposely abrogated, is merely another form of rebellion, as disobedient as any other sin, and even more so, since it is not just codices of law, but the Son of God who is being disregarded. It is not a matter of benign preference, but of belief and obedience.

To believe that all roads lead to Heaven is to say that Christ did not have to die. To question whether or not God would condemn "good" non-Christians to the eternal punishment of Hell, is to question the veracity of God Himself, and to cast doubt on His judgment in sending His Son to die in the first place. In fact, to disregard this New Covenant is to declare that God's plan of redemption was faulty from the start.

It is saying that you know better than the Infinite Intelligence who designed your finite intelligence, and made your thinking anything at all possible. It is equivalent to you, a mere creature, placing yourself on the throne of your Creator and decreeing in your mortal foolishness what is right and wrong.

I can think of nothing more arrogant.

To reject this New Covenant on any grounds at all is to cement your rebellion against God, and ensure your eternal damnation. These are not just words, but an unthinkably hopeless destiny, the horror of which cannot be rightly conceived by the human mind.

One final thing to notice, indicative of the many treasures hidden in Scripture, and it's this: Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.

When was the letter to Hebrew penned? Some say one date, others say another date, but to me this last phrase is a clue that it was written just a bit before 70 A.D., and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, making formal continuance of Jewish practice impossible.

In anticipation of that final closed door back to the old ways, God inspired this marvelous letter as a profound encouragement, and a solemn warning.

Truly we serve and worship a God who cares for us in ways we cannot fathom.

The Promised One

2011-08-29T08:16:00.001-07:00

The amazing thing about the Father's plan of salvation is how unbelievably old it is, and how early he made it known to fallen man.

From Genesis 3 onward, the Bible speaks to us of the Promised One, the Seed of the Woman - the Messiah. Over and over again throughout the Old Testament He reminded us that the One Who Saves is coming, and His name will be called Wonderful, Mighty God, Counselor, Prince of Peace, and Everlasting Father.

Then in the gospels, we are told that His name will be called JESUS, which means God is Salvation.

There is nothing about the human condition that comes as a surprise to our God. He knew Adam would sin, and that mankind would need a Savior, and that the Savior would be His Son, and that Jesus would have to die on the Cross to save us from the penalty of sin. Yet, He created us anyway.

In Romans Chapter 1, Paul reminds of us of all these things in his introduction and greeting.

You see, His prophets in the Holy Scriptures wrote about Jesus long before He was born to Mary. Some of them may not have even understood all that they were told by the Holy Spirit about this Promised One, but a few, very easily proven things were written more than once so that we could believe it all.

Who His ancestors would be was one of these things. We were told that He would be a Jew and be descended from the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. In fact, God chose Abraham, and made a nation out of his descendants so that the Jewish people would to be recipients of His Word, and be the nation from which Messiah would come.

Paul also reminds us that Jesus would be the only God-Man in the universe, meaning that He would be a human Son of David according to the flesh, while at the same time being the Son of God. This is a great mystery the details of which are hard to explain and understand.

God knew that our smallish human minds would have trouble in this, so Jesus did many signs and wonders to prove who He really was, with power according to the Spirit of holiness. The Lord said many times that He did only what the Father told Him to do, and said only what the Father told Him to say.

All the wonderful miracles He performed were done by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is God, just as Jesus and the Father are God (another mystery hard for our brains to understand). The Lord Jesus never did anything by His own power when He lived on the earth, even when Satan tempted Him in the wilderness to use His power as God to do things.

He needed to live and die as a Man in order for His death to pay for mankind's sins. Otherwise, we could not be saved.

But He did one thing, beyond all His other miracles, that proved that He was the Promised One - He rose from the dead. That's what Paul meant when he wrote that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.

You see, because the Lord never committed any sin, death could not hold Him, because only sinners can die. Jesus voluntarily offered Himself on the Cross for us, dying in our place, so His sinlessness and death paid the death-debt for our sin.

He loved us very much to do that, even before we knew and loved Him.

Being resurrected from the dead is not the only thing Jesus did for us, but it is one of the greatest things that He did, and it showed that He was who He said He was: the Son of God, the Savior.

It is very important to understand that He was born exactly according to what was written about Him beforehand in the Scriptures, and that He died according to the Scriptures, and that He rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures.

All just as God had planned before the Universe and everything in it was created.

That is how great our God is, and that is what Paul is reminding us of here in the beginning of his letter to the Romans.

Separated to the Gospel of God

2011-08-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God (Romans 01:01, NKJV).

The Apostle Paul used to be the Pharisee Saul.

That's interesting in that the name, Saul, means "Desired One", while the name, Paul, means "Small" or "Little".

When he was Saul, he was a rising professional LawKeeper, taught by the most prestigious teachers of Judaism, including the famous Gamaliel. His career path was a pure trajectory upward, receiving promotion and acclaim far beyond his years.

When Christianity first became known as a rival to Judaism, at least in the Jewish ruling counsel's (the Sanhedrin) collective wisdom, Paul was appointed bounty hunter by the High Priest himself, and was instructed to go about the cities and towns and arrest the first Christians for the crime of blasphemy.

On the road to Damascus one day, in fulfillment of his new job description, the Risen Lord knocked Saul off his high horse (literally) and opened his eyes to the truth by blinding him for three days, during which time Christ changed his name to Paul, and told him what the truth really was - that Christianity was what all of Jewish history was really pointing to.

So, from "Desired" to "Little", from bounty hunter to blinded fugitive, Paul went from an up and coming religious ruler to a bondservant of Jesus Christ.

That is also a very interesting transition, especially since the word translated bondservant is duolos, which means slave, and brings us back to the ancient Israelites during the time of Moses, some 1400 years before Jesus walked on the earth.

Back then, Jewish household slaves were to be set free after a certain time of servitude unless they chose to remain with the family. In that case, voluntarily and out of love and gratitude to the master of the household, the slave would have his or her earlobe pierced, and be given a golden earring. This signified willing service for life.

And a willing slave of Christ for the rest of his life is how Paul introduces himself here in Romans; such an astounding transition, from arresting Jesus' followers to becoming one of the Lord's most significant church leaders!

Next, the Apostle writes that he was called to be an apostle. That word, called, is like being invited to a banquet or feast, rather than being commanded to go someplace or do something. And Paul was more than happy to accept the invitation. In fact, in another letter to believers, he tells us that he would be full of woe and sadness if he could not go out and preach about Jesus to people.

In other words, if the Lord had not sent him out, which is what apostle means - to be sent out, Paul's life would have been empty and without purpose in comparison.

Finally, he tells us that he was separated to the gospel of God.

You see, his mission was very specific. All that Paul was, from beginning to end, from being knit together in his mother's womb, to his growing up as a Roman citizen in Tarsus, to his being trained in the Old Testament writings in Jerusalem, to his brilliant and scholarly mind and his extremely logical and persuasive way of communicating, all this was entirely for the purpose of preaching the gospel of God.

It was the package the Lord had put him, the boundary of his life and energy, in order for him to be able to carry out that one vitally important purpose God had planned for him from before the foundation of the world.

Now, gospel means good news, the good news of God sending His Son, Jesus, to die for forgiveness of our sins, to pay the penalty on the Cross that we could never pay. He died so that we could live. And rather than earn our way into heaven by our own measly and faulty works, something we could never do, we must believe that Christ died for us and rose again from the dead on the third day, and now sits at the right hand of the Father in Heaven.

That is the gospel of God - that we are forgiven of our sins if we believe in the work of God's Son on the Cross. Telling people all about that was Paul's life and love.

It is why he wrote this marvelous letter that we call Romans.

A More Excellent Ministry

2011-08-26T19:02:00.001-07:00

For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices. Therefore it is necessary that this One also have something to offer. For if He were on earth, He would not be a priest, since there are priests who offer the gifts according to the law; who serve the copy and shadow of the heavenly things, as Moses was divinely instructed when he was about to make the tabernacle. For He said, “See that you make all things according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, inasmuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises. (Hebrews 08:03-06, NKJV).

Revealed as more worthy than angels, as having more glory than Moses, as being more of a conqueror than Joshua, as a member of a better priesthood than Aaron, as a bearer of a better hope of drawing near to God, and as a greater High Priest than any before or after Him, we are now informed that Jesus has obtained a more excellent ministry, and is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises.

The superlatives are of an endless supply, all lovingly presented so that we are given irresistible weaponry to fight any temptation to leave the pure and simple faith of the gospel for something we may have believed in the past, or something that appears outwardly more compelling.

This is as effective for us today as it was for the original audience two millennia ago.

Jewish priest served in the things of God as temporary pilots on an endless sea of sacrificial blood. Their ministry was one of conditional blessing based on human performance. The hereditary High Priest was a shaky bulwark against national calamity and corporate spiritual decline, inasmuch as he, too, was a frail sinner in need of cleansing.

He ministered in the earthly place of worship, modeled precisely after, but only a faint copy of, the true heavenly tabernacle. He was the necessary mediator of the Old Covenant of works that provided conditional promises that could be forfeit by human sinfulness.

Our Savior, a fulfillment of what the old priesthood foreshadowed, much like a full-colored photograph fulfills a quick pencil sketch, now sits and intercedes on our behalf at the right hand of the throne of God with command-level access to the true Tabernacle not made with hands, that is not of this creation.

Without doubt then, His ministry is more excellent.

But there's more. As the High Priest was mediator of the contract between God and man based on Law, Christ is Mediator of the new contract based on the Law of Faith. This contract is not dependent on mere human works, but on the singular work of the Son of God Himself, beginning on the Cross, and continuing eternally through His indwelling each one of us who believe on His name, sanctifying us and conforming us to His glorious image.

The old promises of once-yearly fellowship with God and blessing were founded on ritual animal sacrifices that must be repeated daily. The new promises of eternal life and intimate every-moment intimate relationship with God are founded on the once for all offering of Christ Himself.

So that all things were done in orderly fashion and in accord with the Father's magnificent plan of redemption, Christ's ministry must align with the prophetic pictures embodied in Judaism. Therefore it is necessary that this One also have something to offer. And that offering was not the blood of bulls and goats that could never take away sin, but it was His own blood on the Cross - the sinless Son of God becoming sin for us that we may become the righteousness of God in Him.

This momentous, unparalleled offering was so vastly superior to all the millions of ceremonial offerings that had gone before, that it did away with the requirement that any future blood sacrifice be made. It removed the stain of sin, rather than merely covering it over.

Everything that had gone on before that moment was only a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, providing both forewarning and confirmation of a far more excellent ministry.

Rejecting Christ, or turning away from Christ to something inferior is a reenactment of the rebellion in the Garden, but with this one solemn and terrifying difference.

Adam's sin, though one of the most tragically significant events in all universal history, and resulting in severe and long-lasting punishment, could be forgiven in Christ.

Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? (Hebrews 10:29, NKJV).

Unlike the many disqualifying acts that would forfeit the promises of the old covenant, there is only one sin that will abrogate these better promises of the new, and it is the sin of unbelief.

God died on the Cross to take away our sin. Willfully, stubbornly denying that truth removes all possibility of hope or remedy.

To die in unbelief is to activate the default destiny for everyone in this life.

Do nothing about Christ and suffer eternally. Do this one thing about Him - believe - and become the undeserved, yet guaranteed, recipient of the glorious promises of everlasting life in God's Presence that He purchased on your behalf.

The choice is up to you.

Seated at the Right Hand of the Throne

2011-08-26T19:00:00.001-07:00

Now this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man. (Hebrews 08:01-02, NKJV).

No High Priest throughout Israel's long history could sit down in his service of the Tabernacle or Temple. There were no seats in the Sanctuary, save for the Mercy Seat reserved for God Himself.

To sit in the Presence of the Most High was considered the height of blasphemy.

To sit would indicate that the work of the ministry was done.

To sit was to presume equality with the One who rightfully sits on the Throne.

No sane High Priest would dare.

But Christ, our Great High Priest, is now seated in that very place, the place of co-regency and of power, and the writer of Hebrews wants us to know this because this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man.

He is now not only Priest, but Minister, in the sense of governmental responsibility. And His rightful place is in the sanctuary of the true Tabernacle, designed and built by God Himself, and not that earthly copy built by men.

This is of the highest significance, particularly to those who fear coming to Christ because of a previous fealty to some lesser faith. The logic is simple and profound.

Christ is in the place of ultimate authority, except for the Father Himself, and reigns as co-regent of the Universe.

Do not fear leaving all remnants of the old system of works-salvation behind, whatever its name or venerability, for it is a hopeless prison purposely destroyed by the One who died to make men free. It is a leap not of faith or recklessness, but of the utmost reason, since the work of redemption has been completed for us - that work that could never be done by us.

In the face of this knowledge, to stay behind, to remain imprisoned by dead works, is to reject what God Himself has made clear in both prophecy and history about His beloved Son. It is a blasphemous act of rebellion worthy of eternal condemnation.

And this is precisely the stumbling block that Christ is to the world.

Many believe that Christianity is arrogant and bigoted, and that it is the epitome of intolerance and fanaticism for its adherents to condemn non-Christians to Hell forever. But they get this wrong in so many ways, starting with their myopic view of Christ and His work of redemption, and ending with the mistaken assumption that it is Christians who do the condemning.

God forbid that we who follow the Christ should think we are in a condition to condemn anyone for anything in this present age. Those who love and follow the Lord know His greatness and our lowliness and depravity. If we are not actually guilty of all that we could be, we are certainly guilty of failing to do all that we should. And many of us are guilty of far worse than we even know.

The more you know of Him, the less inflated view you have of yourself, and the more value you place on who He is and what He has done. It is not saved sinners who condemn those who reject Christ, it is the Father who does so, and it is perfectly just for Him to do so given what He has done to save us by sending His Son to expiate our guilt.

To reject that is to say that Jesus needn't have died on the Cross to cleanse us of sin.

Given the immensity of that cost, it becomes evident why nothing less than full acceptance of that sacrifice provides an escape from everlasting torment.

To believe otherwise is to put yourself in God's place, which is far more arrogant and presumptuous than any tenet of Christianity.

Perfected Forever

2011-08-26T18:58:00.001-07:00

For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever. (Hebrews 07:28, NKJV).

The Book of Hebrews perhaps reveals more about Christ than any other portion of Scripture, and it does so provocatively.

While presenting a soaring and lyrically compelling argument for Christ's unprecedented superiority, it simultaneously shocks us with the Son of God needing to learn, and to be perfected (Heb 5:8,9; 7:28).

How can Deity lack knowledge or perfection?

By raising and answering these questions, the writer illuminates even more of the glories of Jesus and His immeasurable love for the Father and for us.

What experiential knowledge could all-powerful Deity lack?

Obedience through suffering.

Contemplate the wonder of this for a second. Incomparably authoritative Godhood, for the first and only time in all eternity, and solely for our benefit, learned obedience by the things which He suffered.

He subjected Himself cooperatively, lovingly, to human life and all human temptation, so that He could demonstrate for us the way back to God. I believe the suffering in view encompassed not only the Cross and the misery of life in a fallen world, where hunger and illness, deformity and death ravaged frail existence, but also the endless pain of temptation itself.

And the obedience subsequently learned was in that striving against sin, not as God who cannot be tempted, but as Man, surrendering His will to the Father, and endlessly battling the enemy's enticement to rebel. Only as Man, could God learn such painful surrender.

This is difficult for us to understand, since, though we may think we battle mightily against sin, in reality we succumb to its subtleties and covert attacks on a daily basis. For we have not yet resisted to bloodshed, striving against sin. (Hebrews 12:4, NKJV). But He has. For us. And, unimaginably, in doing so, He learned to obey. In one sense, this is a mystery as deep as the Triune Godhead itself.

How then was He perfected?

He became for us the complete and perfect remedy for sin by voluntarily offering Himself as the complete and perfect sacrifice required to take away the sin of the world. He was thus perfected as both Offering and Mediator, Man and God in mysterious tandem, Priest and King, Suffering Servant, Savior and Lord.

And one of the final contrasts between merely human priests who have weakness, and the Son who has been perfected forever, is a reminder of both the before, and after, prefigurement of God's redemptive plan, and Christ's absolute and perfect fulfillment of that plan.

Foreshadowed in the person of Melchizedek, typified in the establishment of the ritual sacrifices, and confirmed by the oath recorded by David which came a thousand years after the Mosaic Law, Jesus is the embodiment and the pinnacle of perfected redemption.

He is the only way back to the Father; the Door, the Good Shepherd, the Torn Curtain that flings open for us the way into the Holiest of All and to the Throne of Grace.

He has bridged forever that uncrossable gap between God and Man through His perfect work on the Cross of Our Salvation.

And all this sublimely revealed to us in Hebrews so that we can know for certain that the bridge into eternity during this present age will never fail.

Until one day, there will be a New Heaven and a New Earth.

“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4, NKJV).

Once for All

2011-08-26T18:56:00.001-07:00

For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever. (Hebrews 07:26-28, NKJV).

In regard to Christ's propitiatory sacrifice for sin, the phrase once for all appears 4 times in the New Testament (Ro 6:10; Heb 7:27; 9:12; 10:10), and 3 of those 4 are in Hebrews.

It is a phrase which contrasts the repeated ceremonial animal sacrifices with the sublime, ultimate sacrifice of the Son of God. It is a phrase that speaks to the complete efficacy of that sacrifice in taking away the sin of the world. It is a phrase that again points us to the ineffable superiority of Christ to any and all that came before.

The priests of old officiated at the altar of blood. Their role can be likened to a ritualistic butcher, killing the offered animal, carving up the anatomy in accord with the proscribed regulations handed down by God through Moses.

It was an intricate and detailed job description, that encompassed not only desired results but required attitude and apparel. It spoke of God's micromanagement of the entirety of Judaism, and it was for one ultimate purpose: to sanctify the LORD God in the hearts of the priests and the people.

It's graphic dismemberment represented the heinousness of sin, and the holiness of God and repeatedly emphasized the necessary shedding of blood to atone for rebellion against God's goodness and graciousness.

In Western culture today, the majority of people have nothing to do with this bloody aspect of either religion or nourishment. For the most part, our meat is pre-butchered, pre-packaged and sanitized. We are far removed from the lowing of the livestock, the pouring out of the blood, or the thud of the expiring beast gasping its last, and collapsing under its own dead weight.

Not so the ancient Israelites. They saw the death, heard the rasping expiration of air, and smelled daily the offal and the coppery aroma of blood. And for centuries, in and around the focal point of their worship - first the Tabernacle, and then the Temple - these indelible sensory perceptions were purposely associated with the wages of sin.

It was blatant and overt conditioning, planned and executed by God Himself, for the sole purpose of revealing in as graphic and as effective manner as possible, the seriousness of sin.

We are removed from this, as well, in our Western prefabricated way of life. So much so that in our world, the word sin itself is in disfavor, fallen out of use, and diluted in its original catastrophic meaning.

And in losing this, we lose also the inherent level of awed appreciation for what our once for all High Priest has done on our behalf.

He not only officiated over the attenuated altar of blood, the Cross, speaking forsakenness and forgiveness while Himself impaled on the blood-blackened wooden beams, but He, as both Priest and sacrifice paid the incurred and future sin debt, once for all when He offered up Himself.

Don't overlook the blood-soaked magnificence of this one act, nor its epoch-shattering ramifications. It was a completing of the Father's long-awaited resolution for sin. It was a shutting of the door on further sacrifices, not unlike God Himself shutting the door of the Ark as the Flood of Judgment descended upon a God-hating world.

Yet, unlike the millions, perhaps billions, of human casualties from the flood, this time there was only One - the Son of God Himself.

What is a human soul worth?

Popular and cynical wisdom would declare that life is cheap.

Popular wisdom is worthless and inaccurate in this and so many other areas of knowledge.

The truth is that eight human souls were worth a planet to their Creator and Judge.

And now we know that your soul, and my soul, and each and every one of us, is worth far more than we can conceive - the death of God Himself as our substitute, individually and collectively.

Christ put Himself in our place and voluntarily took upon Himself the sin of the world, to wipe the slate clean, to cancel the debt which each one of us owe by paying it Himself.

Once for all.

And forever.

Fitting for Us

2011-08-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

For sinners like you and me, it is necessary in the economy of God's redemption to have as our Great High Priest a Man whose essential humanity is of a superlative quality so that in every way He satisfies our desperate need. He must be fitting for us.

As a contrast between what we are and who Christ is, and what He did to save, this passage should fill our hearts with humble gratitude and overwhelming joy. To counteract before the Father our fundamental sinfulness, our Mediator had to be holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.

He had to be holy, which in this context means free from all wickedness. This is a quality which we can think about but not fully understand, since we are by nature, and inclination, steeped in wickedness. It is the brew from which our fetid aroma arises before Heaven. Everything about our fallen nature, our unregenerate selves, obscures from our view what it means to be wholly free from that which is debased and evil.

The stuff and atmosphere which is our natural sinful habitat, like water to a fish, can only be seen for what it is when we are lifted out from the midst of it. Until then, it is impossible for us to conceive of life lived without our inherent depravity. Unregenerate man is blind to true goodness. In fact, as Paul writes in Romans 3, we are so debased that without the Law handed down from Mount Sinai we would have no conception of what sin is.

This is a perverse twisting of how we were made, a perversion of our nature brought about by the heinous rebellion of our forefather Adam in the garden. So bent are we in this regard that most of us look upon the first human sin as a moral and ethical failure, rather than the holocaust that it really was. In our depthless and specious view, we see Cain's murder of his brother as the first recognizably criminal act, but we could not be further from the truth.

Murder and murderous intent were the natural offspring of Adam's action, less in that they are derivative evil, and not the corruption of human nature itself. It was Adam who was capable of not sinning. It was Adam who, with the potential for wisdom beyond any except for Christ Himself, chose to willfully misuse those incalculable gifts of life and will and intelligence given to Him by God, and who thus destroyed for all his descendants the ability to be good. And the full knowledge of what good is.

So Christ, to free us, had to be our holy High Priest absolutely unsullied from and by wickedness.

Furthermore, as an infinite counterweight to our natural inability to be good, our High Priest also had to be harmless, meaning Jesus must be without guile or fraud, free from guilt, fearing no evil from others, and distrusting no one. Again we can barely imagine such a Person. Whatever shallow picture we might conjure up in our sin-darkened minds can not begin to compare with the radiant fulfillment of these qualities in Christ.

At our natural best, if we are ever any of those things embodied in the word harmless, it is because it serves our own selfish and corrupt purposes, or feeds our malignant and cancerous pride. Even the most apparently innocent among us, young children, are only innocent in regard to their inability to conceive of greater evil due to lack of life experience. In fact, an "innocent" child's true motivation is purely selfish until the mitigating factors of moral instruction and human politics tempers that purity with a kind of ruthless practicality.

Undefiled is the next requirement for our Savior. In order to cleanse us and make us new in Him, Jesus must be unsoiled and free from that by which the nature of a thing is deformed and debased, or by which its force and life-energy are impaired.

Sin is a fatal ailment, robbing the afflicted of everything and anything beneficial. At its most elementary level, it is entirely negative, consuming the gift of life itself and excreting in its place a fundamental defilement that is more toxic and irremediable than any conceivable man-made substance.

Only something, or more precisely, Someone, who is the antithesis of such defilement can cleanse us from it. There are no halfway solutions. No lesser solvent.

And finally, because of the depths to which we have fallen, only Someone completely separate from us, and from our naturally toxic character, can stand on the firm ground necessary to provide us with the means of escape. No sinner could possibly save us. It would be like a man mired in a pit himself trying to lift another man out. Both would merely sink further down.

All these characteristics point us once more to the superiority of our Savior. He is so much more than we can conceive of; so beyond our current ability to comprehend, that it will take an eternity in close fellowship with Him to glimpse His complete reality. And it is only through His immeasurable and eternal superiority that we can hope to have life through His once for all cleansing of our sin when He offered up Himself.

For us.

Do you see what all this means?

We can take pride in nothing about ourselves, and can and should boast in every true thing about Him.

Without Him being precisely who He is, in all His magnificent humility and incomparable superiority, we would remain hopelessly doomed to a fate far worse than mere death.

Without Him as our High Priest, without us coming to Him for that cleansing and renewing work that only He can accomplish in us, it would truly be better that we would never have been born.

Saved to the Uttermost

2011-08-26T18:52:00.001-07:00

Also there were many priests, because they were prevented by death from continuing. But He, because He continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood. Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. (Hebrews 07:23-25, NKJV).

Saved completely, perfectly, utterly; that is what uttermost means - no area untouched or left in the darkness. No shackles of our imprisonment left unshattered. We are free beyond any remnant of our prior condition of slavery, and freed because of Him who loved us and gave His life for us.

This is the deepest cry of the human heart, expressed in as many voices as there are humans born on this benighted world. From the weak simpering of a helpless old man looking for hope and a meal, to the collective bellow of rage from a ravaging mob, we humans want something that cannot be properly articulated, but plagues our souls each waking and sleeping moment.

This unnameable thing that we seek entails a desire for peace and safety and warmth, and a place to call home. It involves an ephemeral, yet all-encompassing longing to be loved so deeply, so utterly that it is as the air we breathe. This thing, whether we know it or not, is salvation.

Look, inherent in each thinking being is the inescapable knowledge of the futility of life under the sun. Its most minimal outline is the simple fact that nothing of value lasts. No sweet and poignant relationship of parenthood, no passion and commitment of the most profound romantic love survives the ravages of time under the sun. All ends in the grave.

Cemeteries are filled with these reminders of endpoints. Edifices to the once-alive abound. But it all emphasizes, rather than obscures the oncoming emptiness of death.

Given this, it is a wonder that those without knowledge of Christ carry on day to day; that more do not succumb to the inevitable unspoken futility.

As I write these words sitting on a dock overlooking a peaceful lake on a beautiful late August morning, the longing, not for time to stand still, but for it to continue to flow as it is now invokes that wordless desire for something not possible in this life, however I might frantically search for its substitute.

And that's the thing. Without God to fill that void, we will act on our own understanding and seek in this world that for which it was bereft at the Fall - His all-satisfying Presence.

We were built to be in fellowship with our Creator - to walk in the cool of the evening in infinitely sweet communion with our Heavenly Father who delights in ways and to a depth that our delight in our own children is but the faintest shadow.

Our sin, the milieu into which we were born, separates us by an impossible chasm from the Person who we were made for, and who made the universe for us. Of all conceivable tragedies, this is the single greatest, and the hope-crushing fountainhead of all others.

And it is from this ensuing darkness that human beings blindly seek to escape with all their might until, with a silent scream lasting forever, they enter into a cold eternity of solitude and suffering.

I only wish these bleak words were a hyperbolic overstatement, but they are instead a woeful understatement. Each soul, born alive on this world has an unthinkable default destination into a horrifying eternity. Our desire for that something, that salvation, is by God's infinite mercy, the means He puts in our hearts to goad us to seek the only thing that will satisfy - His Son.

To be once again in His Presence, as intended from the beginning, is the uttermost goal of our existence, yet we are helpless to bridge the gap that exists. We need the Savior, our Great High Priest, the One who, in the fullness of time, made that ultimate intercession for us on the Cross, and who now lives forever to continue to make intercession for us.

He gives us the only hope in the face of our own hopelessness. He serves as our continuing High Priest - His ministry on our behalf unending, transforming, enlivening, unstoppable.

Where before Him we were helplessly defeated without chance of victory, through Him we are more than conquerors.

The contrast could not possibly be more stark: unrequitable longing versus everlasting satisfaction - all in Him.

There are no human superlatives to adequately convey these magnificent truths. That is why I believe the divinely inspired writers of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul especially, were frequently overtaken by worship and adoration as they wrote God's word, and were compelled by the gratitude of their own hearts, to write soaring doxologies and benedictions to the One for whom are all things, and by whom are all things.

Our Savior is beyond compare.

Surety of a Better Covenant

2011-08-26T18:50:00.001-07:00

And inasmuch as He was not made priest without an oath (for they have become priests without an oath, but He with an oath by Him who said to Him: “The LORD has sworn And will not relent, ‘You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek’”), by so much more Jesus has become a surety of a better covenant. (Hebrews 07:20-22, NKJV).

In a very real sense, the Old Testament Jewish priesthood consisted of men who were priests by accidents of birth. They "happened" to be born of a certain lineage at a certain time, and if they met the minimum qualifications of not having any physical or mental disabilities or infirmities, and if they maintained a certain level of ceremonial righteousness, they became priests. Then they died.

In this way, oftentimes, the office of priest was held by worthless, evil, or incompetent men, who were malfeasant representatives of God to the people and of the people to God.

Some of these were outright scoundrels and thieves. Others were merely apathetic or unskilled, or lazy. It was only when good men fulfilled these priestly roles well that the nation prospered, and the Mosaic covenant between God and the Jews reaped blessings upon the people. When that was not the case, misery and disaster was the rule of the day.

As such, the Covenant of the Law, being dependent on sinful men who often failed, was a conditional contract that, while never broken by God, was frequently broken by the priests or the kings or the people. For the average child of Israel, the whole prospect was an unsure, risky business.

Even if it went well for any length of time, the transition from one generation of priests to the next was always of uncertain result. An unstable priesthood or an an unstable High Priest was calamitous.

This then was the bottom line of performance-based Law. It was established on the basis of heredity and dependence on fallible and frail men; shaky and easily shaken.

Jesus, in utter contrast to this, was made Priest, not by any genetic provisions, but by an oath of the Father Himself, as prophesied in Psalm 110 by David a thousand years before Christ's birth. And note the citation above - not only that the LORD has sworn, but that He will not relent, ‘You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek.

Clearly it is by so much more Jesus has become a surety of a better covenant.

By so much more than ancestry.

By so much more than conditional performance.

By so much more than fallible and fallen men.

By so much more than the imperfect activities of unreliable and weak mortals.

By so much than the uncertainty of time and circumstance.

By so much more than all that ever was or is or will be.

By that much and more so, Jesus ensures that the New Covenant in His blood is unbreakable, inviolable, and beyond negation.

Heaven and earth may pass away, but the word of the Lord remains forever.

For those of us who have entered into this covenant through faith in Christ, our eternal destiny is assured.

We have a High Priest empowered by an endless life and confirmed in His office by an oath from Heaven itself.

A greater level of certainty there cannot be.

There is no conceivable loophole.

Nothing has been overlooked. No contingency unforeseen or left unhandled.

We can rest in the knowledge that all that needs to be done has been done, and will continue to be done.

Forever.

Bringing in of a Better Hope

2011-08-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

For the priesthood being changed, of necessity there is also a change of the law. For He of whom these things are spoken belongs to another tribe, from which no man has officiated at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord arose from Judah, of which tribe Moses spoke nothing concerning priesthood. And it is yet far more evident if, in the likeness of Melchizedek, there arises another priest who has come, not according to the law of a fleshly commandment, but according to the power of an endless life. For He testifies: “You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek.” For on the one hand there is an annulling of the former commandment because of its weakness and unprofitableness, for the law made nothing perfect; on the other hand, there is the bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God. (Hebrews 07:12-19, NKJV).

The Mosaic Law established the ancient Jewish Priesthood. The Law and the Priesthood are interdependent. If one changes, so must the other.

That is the writer's opening point in this passage, as he continues his argument that Christ is better than all that came before, including the Levitical Priesthood begun with Aaron.

Throughout the long ages of Jewish history, the deepest heart-longing of faithful Jews was to draw near to their God. They, more than any, and all, other people groups, understood the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man. Their entire origin and purpose was founded upon God's revelation of His perfection, and man's iniquity.

God established a temporary remedy that atoned for, or more precisely, covered sin, via the shedding of innocent animal blood in anticipation of the shed blood of His Son that would take away the sin of the world.

Christ's Advent as Priest, King and Suffering Servant was foreshadowed in the establishment of the Law of Moses and the ceremonial sacrifices officiated by the Jewish Priests. Once He arrived in the fullness of time and completed the work that the Father gave Him to do on the Cross, the temporary sacrificial system was abrogated by a new, superior Priesthood - that which was prophetically symbolized by the historical episode involving the mysterious Priest-King Melchizedek.

The message: Rejoice O Israel! That which you have hoped for all your long history is now possible - drawing near to God through the Mediator, Jesus Christ, the realized Priest-King of Israel… and the world.

The Lord's superiority aligned perfectly, and superseded, all that went before. As King, He must come from the line of Judah, yet no King of Israel was permitted to act in the role of a Priest according to the order of Aaron. The prohibitions against that were explicit and the consequences severe, both for the man and the nation.

Yet, in accord with the prophecies outlined in the Old Testament, Messiah would fulfill all three specially ordained offices of Judaism: Priest, King and Prophet. Thus, woven throughout the exquisitely crafted tapestry of redemptive history was signpost after signpost pointing to our incomparable Lord.

Do not overlook the precision and consistency of God's plan, and its meticulous execution over the course of millennia. Melchizedek had to be who, what and when he was, as did Moses, Aaron, Levi, Israel, the Law, and all the other countless details of human history worked out in advance. And in becoming the glorious culmination these details, Christ demonstrated incontrovertibly His absolute, and prophesied, supremacy.

Christ's commission as High Priest changed the Law. As a physical descendant of Judah, He could not act in the role of Priest, UNLESS the Law was changed. His being called as Priest according to the order of Melchizedek, preceded the establishment of Aaron's office, and was thus of higher and more venerable precedence. His priesthood was not based on genetics and the Mosaic Law's heredity of mortal flesh (fleshly commandment), but was based on the power of an endless life.

Aaron and all his priestly descendants died. Christ lives forever to make intercession for us, and is thus immeasurably superior, as eternal life is immeasurable in comparison to mortality.

The Law, which by necessity was changed when Christ assumed His role as High Priest, was thus annulled because of its weakness and unprofitableness, for the law made nothing perfect. No flesh could be justified by the works of the Law. It was a tutor that taught sinful man his helplessness and need of a Savior.

In it's place was the Law of Faith, which no longer covered sin temporarily through the letting of animal blood, but, through faith in Christ's sacrifice, removed sin forever.

Now, the barrier between God and man was broken down, and what was only the faintest of glimmers in all the long centuries before, now burst forth brightly in all God's holy radiance - the way into His presence was thrown open.

And that better hope of mankind, reconciliation with his Creator, was brought in by our Messiah, and made available for all time.

Beyond All Contradiction

2011-08-15T17:23:00.001-07:00

And indeed those who are of the sons of Levi, who receive the priesthood, have a commandment to receive tithes from the people according to the law, that is, from their brethren, though they have come from the loins of Abraham; but he whose genealogy is not derived from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. Now beyond all contradiction the lesser is blessed by the better. Here mortal men receive tithes, but there he receives them, of whom it is witnessed that he lives. Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. (Hebrews 07:05-10, NKJV).

Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek some 500 years before the Mosaic Law.

Abraham was the recipient of God's unconditional promises; that he would be the father of many nations, that he would prosper, that those who blessed him would be blessed and those who cursed him would be cursed, that through him all the nations of the world would be blessed, that the Promised Land would be his and his descendants forever, that his faith was accounted to him for righteousness.

And yet, the Patriarch Abraham, the founding member of the Jews, paid tithes and received a blessing from an otherwise unknown Priest in the desert. Thus, if the progenitor of the Levitical priesthood was inferior to the priestly Melchizedek, then the Levitical priesthood, descended from Abraham, itself is also inferior.

And since Christ was made a Priest according to the order of Melchizedek, and not according to the order of Aaron, the first Levitical priest, then Christ's priesthood is by that precedent is also superior, because beyond all contradiction the lesser is blessed by the better.

Hammering this point home, the author of Hebrews further reasons that Levi, who is the recipient of lawful tithes now, and pays no tithes himself, paid tithes then for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.

Further, the payments to the Levitical/Aaronic priests were from the people according to the law, that is, from their brethren, though they have come from the loins of Abraham, but Melchizedek, whose genealogy is not derived from them, meaning he was not even descended from Abraham, received tithes from Abraham, and even symbolically from Levi himself.

So long before the Law, long before the Jewish priesthood was established, the first Jew's actions confirmed the superiority of Melchizedek's role, and by extension, Christ's own singular royal priesthood.

Christ's every aspect is thus superior to all that came before or since.

Parenthetically, notice that receive, rather than take is the operative verb in these matters. Levi and his descendants received the priesthood and tithes. They did not pursue nor take either.

Likewise Melchizedek received tithes, as Abraham both received blessing and the earlier promises.

There is no taking in the redemptive economy of God, with the one exception of the proffered cup of salvation (Ps 116:13).

So we see from the writer's finely woven argument regarding Melchizedek, Abraham and Levi presented that Christ is superior beyond all contradiction in every way.

Jewish history itself portended His superiority, extravagantly decorated as it was with these prototypical foreshadowings, these venerable precedents, pointing prophetically to the exclusive and ultimate conclusion.

Christ's inheritance, His authority, His name, His character, His privilege, His everything, is beyond all compare and beyond all contradiction.

There is none like Him.

Nor will there ever be.

Accept and worship Him, and Him alone. Nothing less.

The Priest-King of Salem

2011-08-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him, to whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all, first being translated “king of righteousness,” and then also king of Salem, meaning “king of peace,” without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, remains a priest continually. Now consider how great this man was, to whom even the patriarch Abraham gave a tenth of the spoils. (Hebrews 07:01-04, NKJV).

Melchizedek is mentioned eleven times in the Bible, twice in the Old Testament (Ge 14:18; Ps 110:4), and the rest in Hebrews (Heb 5:6,10; 6:20; 7:1,10,11,15,17,21), explaining the significance of the Old Testament citations.

Every word, every diacritical mark, every nuance and subtlety of the Word of God has meaning. It is exceedingly abundantly comprised of treasures, both obvious and hidden. That is why devoting yourself to the study of it can change your life… forever.

Two thousand years before Christ, Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, encountered a mysterious figure to whom he gave tithes and from whom he received blessing. We know virtually nothing else about this Priest-King of Salem. Not his genealogy, nor anything about his time of birth or death, nor anything about other events in his life.

We do know that his name means King of Righteousness, and that he was sovereign over Salem, meaning that he was also King of Peace (which is what Salem or Shalom signifies). We know that he blessed Abraham, and that in doing so, showed his superiority to him (since the lesser is blessed by the better (Heb 7:7).

If nothing else, this godly priest of the Most High God is included in Genesis for the precise purpose of foreshadowing and prototyping the non-Levitical priesthood of Christ, and establishing it's superiority and precedence over the Aaronic priesthood upon which the Jews were relying, and because of which they were held back from full commitment to the gospel.

Do you see how brilliant this is? How utterly comprehensive the Father's plan of redemption is, how it anticipates every heresy, objection, and stumbling block?

The Book of Amos declares: Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, Unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets. (Amos 3:7, NKJV).

Thus, this singular encounter in the ancient desert of the Middle East was part of God's revelation of His plan to replace the yet-future works-based Judaic practice with the superior faith-based salvation offered through the Gospel of Christ.

Melchizedek's role as the Priest-King of Salem prior to the establishment of Judaism through Abraham, his very existence, eliminates foundation for the Jewish belief that only through allegiance to the Mosaic Law could a human being escape the fires of Hell. This set the precedent for opening the door of salvation to the Gentiles, as well, long before the establishment of Judaism.

Now some believe and teach that this mysterious ruler was a Christophany, a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus, similar to the Captain of the Lord of Hosts in the Book of Joshua, but I do not think this is a necessary conclusion. Joshua ended up worshiping this Angel of the Lord after the battle of Ai, and was not forbidden. Plus, Joshua was also instructed to remove his sandals since he was on Holy Ground, echoing the very command given by God to Moses when He spoke from the Burning Bush. No such similar occurrences or intimations are provided in the account of Abraham and Melchizedek.

But Abraham did pay undoubted homage to Melchizedek, therefore we are told to consider how great this man was, to whom even the patriarch Abraham gave a tenth of the spoils.

As a prophetic picture of the superiority of Messiah over all else, the Melchizedek incident is a wondrous hidden jewel, shining forth from the ancient Hebrew scriptures to be definitively interpreted 2000 years later by the divinely inspired author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, and spanning yet another 2000 years to further illuminate our understanding in the church.

Consider the astounding magnitude of God's planning evidenced by these historic threads, and stand in awe at the immeasurable intelligence displayed.

This is who we serve and worship.

One final thought, and it's this: God always preserves a remnant. Although the descendants of Noah largely turned away from God after the deluge, requiring that God call the pagan Abram from the land of Ur to establish an unmistakable witness to the world by making of him the Jewish nation, the Priest-King of Salem shows that some remained faithful to His word no matter what. Whatever else he was and did, the presence of Melchizedek in human history should encourage us in the world today, where faithful witness seems fewer and farther between with each passing day.

Soul Anchor

2011-08-13T15:53:00.001-07:00

This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. (Hebrews 06:19-20, NKJV).

Hell is a place of infinite separation from God, unrelenting agony, and perpetual restlessness.

It is the default destination for every human being who dies in unbelief. All roads save one leads there, and while it may be possible to purposely head in that direction, most individuals arrive there by not thinking about eternity at all until it is too late. They drift along in life until at death they are pulled inexorably down into the irresistible whirlpool of judgment that is the promised end for all who reject the gift of salvation through faith.

There is only one remedy. Christ in us, the hope of glory (Col 1:27).

The writer of Hebrews reveals that this hope is the only means of escape from eternal punishment. It is the only anchor of the soul that will resist the inevitable tidal forces of judgment into which we would otherwise be pulled, like matter, energy, light, and time itself is sucked past the event horizon of a Black Hole.

And this hope, like all Biblical hope, is not mere wishing that something be so, but a guaranteed future outcome that is both sure and steadfast.

Interesting and significant are the divinely inspired word choices here. Sure is asphales (as-fal-ace'), which is the absolute negation of failure, rendering even the possibility of coming loose or breaking completely and utterly impossible.

Steadfast is bebaios (beb'-ah-yos), signifying foundational, immovable, like something that has its anchoring root in the center of the planet, or at the core of all existence.

Together the picture is one of unparalleled certainty.

But there's more, for we are now given the marvelous insight that the hope is not something that we drum up ourselves, but it is the Person of Christ, even Jesus, who, as our forerunner, our Captain, our Author, enters the Presence behind the veil.

This is a statement of unlimited access to the throne of God Himself, foreshadowed by the ancient sacrifice officiated by the hereditary High Priest of the Children of Israel, who could only approach the Mercy Seat of God in the Tabernacle, and later, the Temple, once a year, and then only after making ritualistic atonement first for his own sins, and then for the peoples'.

And this human High Priest was fallible and mortal. He was a priest only by virtue of genetic inheritance, and only until he inevitably died. As a vessel of hope, thin and fragile, the antithesis of an immovable anchor, since any failure on his part would render the all important once-yearly propitiation of God's anger against sin null and void. Not only for himself, but for the people as well.

But God appointed Jesus as High Priest, not according to the genetic order descended through Aaron, but according to the mysterious order of Melchizedek, different and far older than that established within Israel. And this appointment, as we will see, was confirmed by yet another oath from God Himself.

And rather than a temporary, mortal priesthood, Jesus became High Priest forever.

Do you see the infinitely superior hope embodied in Christ and His one-time, once-for-all work of attonement on the Cross? Do you see how vastly superior He is as our sure and steadfast anchor?

Immovable, unfailing, eternal.

When we believe, He becomes our anchor who saves us from the unthinkable torment of everlasting Hell, and beckons us to come boldly to the Throne of Grace.

Strong Consolation

2011-08-13T05:38:00.001-07:00

For men indeed swear by the greater, and an oath for confirmation is for them an end of all dispute. Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us. (Hebrews 06:16-18, NKJV).

God knows what we need. He calls Himself Jehovah Jireh, the LORD WHO PROVIDES, as Abraham discovered on Mount Moriah when God provided a ram for sacrifice in place of Isaac.

That phrase strong consolation is derived from a pair of Greek words, ischuros (is-khoo-ros') and paraklesis (par-ak'-lay-sis), together meaning impervious comfort. It paints the picture of a mighty one who comes alongside a weak, hurting, and beloved creature to provide indomitable protection, shelter… and rest.

It also gives the connotation of the Lord of Comfort, and in that sense brings to mind the Parakletos (par-ak'-lay-tos), the Divine Comforter, a designation of the Holy Spirit, who indwells believers at the time of their coming to faith, and who will never leave nor forsake us.

The Lord knows what we need. And what we need in all circumstances, beyond anything or anyone, is Him. So he swears on Himself to be that for us… always.

Read the verses above again and let them immerse you in His incomprehensible grace and love.

In His mercy toward us frail and easily broken creatures, He has determined to show more abundantly the immutability of His counsel, His unchanging and unchangeable promise to be all that which we need forever, especially comfort and refuge in this life; refuge that we flee to, knowing that the gates of His protection will be flung open to receive us NO MATTER WHAT.

Do you see how He longs for us to trust this very thing about Him? He wants us to know beyond all doubt that HE IS THERE… FOR US.

If this does not make your heart soar with unspeakable gratitude and joy, you are not paying attention; you are trampling on His magnificent Son who made such refuge possible.

God, who cannot lie, made us heirs of promise - the promise of eternal life with Him, and protection, shelter, and comfort in this life.

This does not mean that life in this dark and fallen world will be painless. In fact, it means the opposite: we will need strong consolation and refuge. Guaranteed.

“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33, NKJV).

The Lord confirms His oath in such an incontrovertible manner for an end of all dispute. Look, in times of inconsolable grief and heartache, in periods of unrelenting physical or emotional agony, in those endless hopeless hours of unrelieved fear, we will be tempted to seek refuge elsewhere. We will war and dispute with ourselves… and Him.

Acting in our own strength rather than waiting on Him. Losing that hope set before us rather than holding on for all we (and He) is worth. Desperately seeking relief and comfort from the empty and shallow things of this world, rather than going to the only Person who can, and will, provide exactly what we need.

He knows.

He cares more deeply than we can adequately comprehend.

He cries out from Heaven with the love of a Father to come to Him; to trust Him; to receive the only comfort that satisfies.

The extremes that He took to prove His love, sending our Savior to the Cross; the depth and strength of His commitment to us, these things He desires us to know above all other things. So much so that He confirms His oath according to all that is embodied in His name and Person. He puts Himself on the line.

The Lord God of All, whose mere word creates galaxies and stars and life out of nothing, graciously, humbly, and lovingly swears to us, His lowly and fallen creatures, that He IS our protection, shelter, and comfort.

There can be no stronger consolation.