Hebrews - Part 3

Won't you pray? Will you pray for us, Tom Lawson? Sure. Dear Lord, you take care of us in so many ways. You love us much, much beyond what we deserve. I thank you for so many ways that you do that.

I thank you also for your word. And all of us have just gotten up a little early to talk with other men about your word. Your word is valuable and it's truth. And I just ask that in this study you would reveal that truth to us and help us apply it to our lives and make us more like you. Amen. Amen.

Well, good morning, men. This is, I think it's week three. So, again, because we're not doing it every week, I forget the details. But this outreach of Covenant Bible Church. So I think you all know that Jason and Jeremy and I are members at Covenant Bible Church in Canal Winchester. And we meet three o'clock on Sundays.

And so you will be during these mornings, you'll be hearing what we believe there, which we think is in accordance with the 1689. so if you join a hebrews study with a lot of other pretty good christians actually you get a couple different perspectives um but just to let you know that again in case you forgot we were in hebrews one and we discussed the first six verses uh for the most part now to this point and so if we look at verse seven he says of the angels he says he makes his angels winds and his ministers of flames of fire hold on i'm going to open my phone because i've got all the cross references there and they're not in this computer program i use there we go he says but of the sun he says your throne oh god is forever and ever the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom you have loved righteousness and hated wickedness therefore god your god has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions and then there's more we'll look at in a second but one of the things we have to be careful of when we read the bible is reading it as if it's being written to us or like like we're the object of these sentences. So when, you know, I could see somebody having a calendar in their house or like a little picture on their wall that says Hebrews 1, 9, you have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore, God, your God has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.

And it's actually kind of a sweet sounding verse. And to some extent, because of union with Christ, a lot of the things that God says about Christ are sort of true about us too, but this is written about Jesus Christ. And so sometimes we can easily make the Bible about us. It feels good. You know, God certainly anointed us and he's caused us to love righteousness and hate wickedness.

And so, you know, we could see that. But as Bible men in 2021, you know, when you're looking at how are we going to be a witness to a fallen society, our problem in our society is not that people don't think highly enough of themselves. Even though we live in probably the self-esteem, the society that has the collective lowest self-esteem in the history of time, probably, it's actually the opposite.

People actually think really highly of themselves, which is why self-esteem is such a big deal. and so when we just want to remember when we teach the bible that it's really better to just teach what it says it's really better to cut cut it straight with people and let them know that this is about jesus and it's not about you and if people are truly seeking christ in his glory then the whole bible is going to actually encourage them we don't need to find little verses to make people, you know, feel a lot better. And there's enough verses about God's love toward his people that we don't need to twist one. But again, this paragraph, this beginning, really a lot of the whole book of Hebrews is one big contrast, right?

Remember in school, we used to do compare and contrast. And what the author's contrasting is really everything else and Jesus. And specifically, he's building up to the point where he's contrasting the old covenant and the new covenant. And so we'll talk about that several chapters from now. But he's trying to get these people who have this Jewish mindset.

These are Bible believers. They're people that follow the Old Testament to the letter. Most of them at this point, he's writing to Christians, they're actually in their heart. They're lovers of Jesus Christ. And he's trying to point them to the fact that Jesus really is the fulfillment of all these things. He wasn't just a good teacher.

He wasn't just a magician. He wasn't all these things that people want to say he is sometimes to avoid his divinity. Oh, I just joined in. Great. Jesus Christ is better than everything. He is the fulfillment of the Old Testament.

And so when he says in Hebrews 1 7 of the angels he says he makes his angels winds and his ministers flames of fire That a quote And I like looking up the quotes i know that can get a little bit um cumbersome at times but that psalm 104 for here according to my esv look up i don't have all these references memorized sometimes i read a verse and i can remember where it came from but a lot of times i have to just use the notes you know in psalm 104 if you guys want to turn there it starts out bless yahweh oh my soul oh yahweh my god you are very great you are clothed with splendor and majesty and it's talking about god covering yourself with light as with a garment stretching out the heavens like a tent he lays the beams of his chambers on the waters he makes the clouds his chariot He rides on the wings of the wind, and then he makes his messengers winds, his ministers of flaming fire. So the entire point of the beginning of that psalm there is just telling you about what God does. You know, God's the one who covers himself with a garment.

God's very great. He stretched out the heavens. God is the one who actually makes his messengers, his angels winds and his ministers of flaming fire. And so when you look at Hebrews 1, the author then says in verse 8, but of the son, he says, your throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. The author of Hebrews is explicitly calling Jesus God here.

And so when you meet these people, and I think some of them are well-meaning, I can be sarcastic about some of these things sometimes, but I think a lot of people are well-meaning. They try to read the Bible a little bit. And I understand in people's hearts where they're at. I get the doctrine stuff, but there's different levels of people where some really, really openly hate God, and some actually are thinking about it, and they repeat something they've heard, which is, well, Jesus never claimed to be God, or the Bible never claims that Jesus is God, you know, and this is one of those verses that's just so clear what the author's trying to say.

He's trying to say Jesus is God in verse 8, and in verse 7, he's saying Jesus, because he's God, He is the one who actually appointed the angels to be flames of fire and winds, ministers, winds and a flame of fire. And so Jesus is God. And because Jesus is God, he's not just an angel. He's not just a man. And so when you're actually thinking about spiritual powers.

Right. I mean, if an angel appeared in any of our studies right now where we are like, you know, one of you, one of you would just drop off the call real quick, because that would be pretty intense and extremely fearful probably for us. Jesus is so much greater than angels. He created them. He appoints them to his service. He tells them what to do. and so the author's trying to draw the contrast with people who really believe in angels they believe in cosmic powers spiritual forces in the heavenly places and he's trying to get them to see look these are all things that god controls and they all are going to agree with that but now he's trying to let them see that this whole time jesus is god jesus was god jesus is God.

There's nothing, I have trouble using the past tense. I always like to say Jesus is God, but in the context, he was God in the Old Testament. And so that's Psalm 45, which is a beautiful Psalm, but of the son, he says, your throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness.

So go to Psalm 45 now and this is a really fun one and actually it was psalm 45 was one of the first places where i started to understand and believe uh the teaching of christ in all of scripture and so as a biblicist as a good um dispensationalist for a long time i didn't read the Old Testament as this is about Christ. I read it as about this is about something else at the time, and I have to take it as literal as possible. But a good teacher, Luke Walker, who helped me out a lot, you know, he showed me that in this psalm, first of all, in verses six and seven, the hebrews author quotes them about jesus christ and so i felt very challenged at the time when i was talking to other people who believed like me that we had to find a contemporary explanation for who this psalm was about when it was written so it had to be about solomon is what what we kind of thought but then if the hebrews author is telling us that in this psalm that begins with, I address my verses to the king in verse one.

And then in verse two, he says, you are the most handsome of the sons of men. Therefore, God has blessed you. And then in verse three, gird your sword on your thigh, oh mighty one. You know, the whole thing is written in this second person, where you're addressing another person as you. And I'm thinking, okay, this is Solomon, it's And then we get to verse five your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies.

And it's like okay wait a second. All right, Solomon wasn't a warrior guy was he. He was the king of peace. So now well maybe it about David now a little bit right gets confusing but then all of a the author of Hebrews tells me six and seven which is addressing the same guy as about Jesus And then we start to see this opens up like, well, wait a second.

Maybe the whole thing's about Jesus. And these kings that God placed on earth may all have typified him. Okay, so if you ever heard the phrase types, there were Old Testament types. So these kings in the Old Testament were all types of the one who was to come, Jesus Christ. And some of them were very good types, and some of them were very bad types. But either way, they all pointed to the ultimate king who would come.

So what you see then is that this psalm, although Solomon fits some of the descriptions. David fits some of the descriptions. And I'll leave it to you. If you want the sermon that my friend Luke did on this, it was just splendid. I love the sermon on Psalm 45. Just one sermon goes through the whole thing.

But if you look at these descriptions, you see that, oh, okay, God put this in print before people had Jesus revealed to them clearly so that people would know what Jesus would look like when he came on the scene. And that way, when he would come and he'd say, he who has an ear, let him hear. He's talking to people who he's telling them they should recognize him based on the descriptions of him that have already been clear in the Bible.

He's the most handsome of the sons of men. Well, you know we're told he wasn't handsome in an earthly sense but what can be more beautiful than the feet that bring the good news of peace to us right he's he's the beautiful one grace is poured upon his lips everything he said was had perfect grace therefore god has blessed him forever he girds his sword on his thigh he's the mighty one and splendor and majesty he rides out victoriously. And then of course, you know, keeping going down to six, his throne is forever and ever.

The scepter of his kingdom is a scepter of uprightness. And so the Hebrews author is drawing our attention. And I think giving us clues, again, interpretive clues to how to read the Old Testament. Nobody in the New Testament wrote a complete commentary on the whole Old Testament. In some ways, I was going to say that would be nice, but we have what was sufficient.

God gave us the tools to work at reading the Bible to understand it ourselves. And so if you were an Old Testament Jew who was reading Psalm 45 and you were looking forward to a Messiah coming whose kingdom would be forever, when Jesus came and started fulfilling all of the scriptures about what was going to happen when Messiah came, you would have recognized him as having done all these things. And of course, the apostles themselves didn't totally get all this.

And I don't think any of us can pretend we'd have been the one that was like, oh, no, I knew from the beginning. You know, I think the whole point is God has to open our eyes and we should be humble about that fact. And everything we know, just remember this when you want to get all judgmental of some of these guys. Everything we know, we know because Peter and all these other guys made all the mistakes they made and said all the things they said.

I mean, you believe in Jesus faithfully. And one of the reasons is because Peter denied him three times and you got to read about that. That's how we're protected from doing it as Peter did it for us. And so we have that to draw on and so don't be too judgmental of these guys that didn't see it happening and so God compares angels to Jesus here in verse in Hebrews 1 7 to 9 and basically just there's no doubt in anyone's mind that they're different in verse 10 he says and you Lord laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning and the heavens are the work of your hands.

They will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment. I think that one was Psalm 102. And again, sorry, I was looking for my reference. Again, this is pointing you to an Old Testament scripture, Psalm 102. And I think that for us, it's instructive that we can read these Old Testament verses.

We can read the whole chapters in the context they came from, and we can recognize them as given by the author of Hebrews for us to understand the Old Testament Psalms in a Christ-centered way. and so and and i do and there's more there's more explanation for why but you know i do think this gives us license to do that with the entire bible and uh i don't think the author of hebrews referenced a few psalms and said well these were you know these were written for jesus and about jesus uh and they were the only ones i don't think i don't think the new testament authors gave us an exhaustive list. I think they were teaching us how to understand the mind of God through scripture. So verse 10, 11, 12, again, Jesus is the creator and Jesus is the one who's going to end everything.

He's going to roll everything up like a garment, but he'll never change. And so we have this beautiful contrast between God and angels, angels who are more powerful than we'll ever, well, I don't want to say we'll ever be, but more powerful than we are. We're frightened of angels, and they will, they are nothing compared to God and his power to create.

God is the creator and God is the one who will come back and end things And so you know if I was preaching through these I might take a whole week to do Psalm 102 or something But I don't think the author's point here is to teach the doctrines in Psalm 102 and Psalm 45, so much as to point you to the fact that these things we should already understand are Jesus. Jesus is the king. He is the God of creation.

He's the God of the end of creation. But now verse 13 sums it up. And to which of the angels has he ever said, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. now this particular verse is a little more exciting in my opinion because this is psalm 110 and psalm 110 i did not know this i learned this in the last couple years but psalm 110 people have called it god's favorite psalm because it's the most quoted passage of old Testament scripture in the New Testament.

And I never realized that until somebody else told me. So if you think that's kind of neat, then you're just benefiting from the same thing I benefited from. But in Psalm 110, it starts out with a Psalm of David. Yahweh said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. this is the psalm that peter explains and jesus also explained was about him when when the pharisees asked him well how can how can it be david's son yet david's lord and the idea here is is that david is is the one writing but it's yahweh talking to jesus and God the Father sending Jesus to save his people.

And so you see Psalm 110 is a psalm of victory. It's a psalm of God saving his people from their sins. It's a psalm of God being a priest for his people, verse 4. Verse 5, it's a psalm of his judgment. Jesus Christ himself will be judged but also God will judge the earth and he will build a people for himself I've heard different interpretations of a few of the verses in there there's actually some some Hebrew in there that some people have argued may mean something different than some of the translators have given us so that one's worth kind of reading different opinions on But again, the idea here is that the Hebrews author is just telling us over and over, Jesus is not an angel.

He's God. So everybody knew he was a man. These people in the book of Hebrews would have known Jesus walked the earth and that he did something significant. These people savingly believed. I mean, the author of Hebrews treats them like, hey, you're believers. but now he's trying to make sure they understand like he's not only a man he wasn't a mere man in that sense he is god and in hebrews 1 13 we're reminded that god never said that to angels he said it to his son and then in verse 114 are they not all ministering spirits okay just like earlier their winds his ministers were a flame of fire they were sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation and so what we see is that god in the beginning of hebrews he really just repeated his argument a few different times so you know if you've ever done a paper yourself or a sermon or if you listen a lot of times the guy's making one or two points in a sermon, and then he'll go to a dozen verses to prove it.

He's not teaching you something new 12 times. He's trying to get you to see the impact of the fact that, no, this is so utterly clear in scripture, and it abounds, we'll say, in scripture. So whoever sends out a servant, they are greater than the servant, right? So if the angels are ministering spirits sent out, By God, Jesus, God is greater than they are.

And then they're sent out for the sake of those who inherit salvation, which has a little bit of an additional idea here that they're servants for us. God's angels, even though in some way they're greater than we are, they're actually sent to minister to us and for us as God's people. and so Jesus Christ is the one who verse three I want I want to reverse of verse three he's the one who after making purification for sins sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high and then it's in verse 13 where we're told which of the angels did he ever say sit at my right hand Jesus Christ is the one who sat at God's right hand. He's the one who God told him to sit at my right hand.

And he's the one who the angels were sent out by to serve those who were to inherit salvation. So God has a plan to save a people for himself. He has a, he had a plan and he has a plan. Sometimes it's hard to talk about God in past or present tense because everything was from the beginning and everything still now that he's decreed. But the idea is this, that God was going to save a people for himself, and he used anything he wanted to use to accomplish that.

God owns the entire universe. He created it. He calls the stars by names. God made the earth. If God wants to flood the ocean with plastic bottles, he can. He's not subject to our environmental laws.

And God uses the earth the way he wants. He killed thousands and thousands of sheep and goats and bulls over hundreds of years to get us to point it to Jesus Christ one day. God will use whatever means he deems necessary, and he will use his angels the way he wants. And the point is, is he's allowed. And when I say he'll use them, I don't mean that in the negative sense that we sometimes think of using people.

What I mean is that God can employ any any of his creation to do his bidding. All of creation is at his service. And interestingly enough, we are the only part of creation that isn't happily at his service. We're the part of creation where we have to be changed by him in such a way that we would actually submit to the creator. And, you know, dogs and cats and all these things, they just do what the creator tells them.

They've got their moments, but they're not sinners like we are. And so we, in a sense, can learn from that and be more submitted to him. And so when you read the Bible, something else to remember is that none of the authors of the Bible put in chapter breaks. Well, except for the Psalms, there was, you know, each Psalm's a different chapter. But so when you get to Hebrews 2.1, it's not like when we read a book and, well, it's the end of the chapter, this is probably a good stopping point because the next chapter is going to start a new thought or maybe be on a different scene or topic.

When the author of Hebrews would have delivered Hebrews, either spoken or written, some people think it was a spoken sermon that was transcribed, he would have finished the last verse of Hebrews 1, and then he would have immediately said the next verse of Hebrews 2. and so that's instructive for us that he just finishes talking about this those who are going to inherit salvation so then in verse two chapter verse one chapter two he says therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift away from it and so we'll continue with that more next week. But the lesson on just this verse now is when you are in the scripture and you get to a transition word, you need to understand language enough. And if you don't, you need to go study grammar a little bit The easiest way to learn grammar is to learn a different language because you forced to think about things in different terms than we think about them in our natural language But you need to understand what these transition words are for, right?

The old saying is, what is the therefore, therefore? And I always ask my kids that and my kids know to say, because of what was just said, here's this truth that I can now tell you. And And so what we see with a therefore is that that's a very logical term. And so if you are a Christian, you are expected to be a rational, critical thinker. And you're expected to be able to do logic.

God is the inventor of logic. In some ways, logic is just a reflection of the fact that God cannot deny himself. the law of non-contradiction would simply be a reflection of God. And so when we think logically, we are thinking along the lines of God. Now, we have to make sure we have the scripture to guide us or we can get off track. But when we see therefore, it's telling us matter of factly, I just told you something that is propositionally true because God doesn't lie. and you can understand what it says.

And I told you these things, not just for the sake of you hearing them, but so that I can now explain either this other thing that logically follows from it, or now I can give you an application of how to use that knowledge in your life. So there may be somewhat more ways to use the word therefore. But ultimately, it's either because of what you just heard, here is more truth that maybe we wouldn't have been able to work out without first laying this foundation and groundwork.

The second way therefore is used a lot is here's how you take the knowledge I gave you. and knowledge is great but knowledge can just be used to puff us up and make us conceited here's how you take the knowledge and here's how you apply it to your life in such a way that shows that you you actually do by faith believe it and understand it and so we could come up with countless examples of of knowledge applied right you know like i know that eating healthy is good for me. And so therefore, you know, I should eat healthy, to lose weight, to be healthy, to, you know, take care of myself. There's all sorts of applications of the word therefore.

But in this case, it's telling us, how should you live because of what you were just told? Okay you were just told that God angels are ministers for those who are basically eagerly expecting his return Therefore we must pay closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift away from it He is warning the people not to depart from what they heard Because these things have happened, because God has done what he's done in Christ, it is vital that you pay close attention to it so that you won't drift away it is and you guys have seen this it is so commonplace for people to hear christ to hear the gospel to be told all the truthful things about jesus and for people to say yeah that sounds good. I believe that.

You just told me I can have all my sins forgiven. Okay, you told me Jesus is God. Well, I mean, most rational people will acknowledge that Jesus is God. They just hate him. But, you know, we live in an interesting society now where there's actually, I think, more people than normal who, in the United States at least, who actually don't seem to know who Jesus is.

Even 20 years ago, everyone knew who Jesus was pretty much. And we've gotten a little dumber as a society. But the point is this, that if we tell people about Jesus, they hear the good news. It's a good story. It's inspiring. It's encouraging to an individual.

Like, wait, my sins are forgiven. That makes me feel better even temporarily if you're a non-believer. and and then people will drift from it because what they'll do is they'll do what these hebrews are starting to do which is they will drift into relying on their religious works to be the basis for why they think god accepts them and you know you go to any abortion clinic in the united states and you're probably going to find catholics there and they're going to be out there they're going to be thinking that it's their good works that are going to get them to heaven. And if you ask them if they believe in Jesus, they're going to say, yes, amen.

Jesus is God. He made atonement for my sins. He died on the cross for me. He resurrected. He's coming again. Roman Catholics are going to affirm so many things that you're going to think, wow, it sounds like a brother.

But Roman Catholics, if they're holding the Roman Catholic doctrine, I understand there's people that get confused by all those things. The basis of why they think God will accept them is not solely because Jesus Christ paid the penalty for their sins. The basis of why God would accept them is their good works, just at least in addition to their faith.

They are drifting away from what has been said what they have heard And as we see in Hebrews 2 therefore because these things are so true because God has done in Christ everything necessary for salvation so that the angels are ministers sent to serve for the sake of us who are going to inherit salvation, because of that, you must pay closer attention to it. Instead of thinking, okay, I already did that, I actually should be more concerned with, with digging deeper into the unfathomable gospel all the time. And so that's, that's one of my concerns.

When I meet a person, you guys might know, I do a lot of evangelism and I try, try to give someone a gospel tract, or I try to talk to them about Jesus. And they say something like, yeah, I already did that. And I know what they mean. What they mean is that somebody led them to Christ and they prayed a prayer or they, you know, they accepted Christ or they believed that, you know, whatever phrase people use for salvation, people can argue about some of those.

I know what they mean when they say I already did that. And in some people's cases that maybe, maybe they really are Christian and they think they've already done the thing I'm trying to think, get them to think through. But what Hebrews 2.1 is telling me is you should pay closer attention to what you've heard, because some people will drift away. Not true believers, but the way that you will reveal your faithfulness, that you have actually been granted the faith in Christ that you need to be saved, is that you will pay closer attention to the gospel so that you don't drift away.

You will be a defender of the gospel. You will be willing to die for the gospel. you will be willing to stand up for the gospel you'll be willing to suffer for the sake of the gospel and so we will get into that more so we'll stop there and we'll really start at hebrews 2 1 again and uh maybe get to about verse yeah maybe we'll get to five maybe we'll go a little farther it's some there's a lot of chunks in Hebrews where it's a big chunk and it really only has one or two main points sometimes, so you don't need to dig in as deep. But I will stop there and we'll see if anyone wants to ask any questions or if anyone has any comments about what you saw and read this week.

Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website michaelcoghlan.net You can contact me by emailing me michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.