Preaching Hebrews

The End of Religion and Faithfulness to the End

Webster

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532608070
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

Hebrews is a powerful meditation on the gospel. It is a sixty-minute sermon delivered to a worshiping congregation. The spiraling impact of theological exposition and pastoral exhortation is impressive. Hebrews weans us away from our preoccupation with the start of the Christian life and focuses our attention on the perseverance of faith. Life is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Faithfulness to the end affirms faith from the beginning. If we let the word of God have its way with us, Hebrews will deepen our faith in Christ and strengthen our faithfulness.Like Jesus in the Gospels, Hebrews sees the fundamental difference between apostasy and faithfulness as the difference between a religion about God and a Christ-centered relationship with God. Any form of Christianity that competes like other religions for the attention of its adherents through its rituals, practices, pastors, traditions, and sacred spaces, has fallen back into an obsolete and worldly strategy. The pastor calls for a decisive end to religion, even the best religion ever conceived. The flow of reasoned argument for Christ and against religion, along with the pulsating emotional intensity of ultimate issues laid bare, and heart-felt warnings against complacency and unbelief, deliver a powerful and timely message.

1

A Preaching Challenge

“Cause my mind to fear whether my heart means what I say.”

Martin Kähler’s pulpit prayer1

Before Hebrews was a letter it was a sermon. The early church grasped this well-crafted sixty-minute sermon in a single worship service. Believers, probably living in Rome, understood then what we recognize today. Hebrews is unique. It has been described as “the most extensively developed and logically sustained piece of theological argumentation in the whole of the New Testament.”2 Hebrews is a powerful proclamation of the gospel. The finality of Christ’s revelation, the efficacy of his atoning sacrifice, and the everlasting encouragement of his faithfulness energizes the sermon’s spiraling intensity of exposition and exhortation.

Hebrews weans us away from our preoccupation with the start of the Christian life and focuses our attention on the perseverance of faith. Life is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. Faithfulness to the end affirms faith from the beginning. “Today we emphasize the New Birth,” writes Peter Gillquist, “the ancients emphasized being faithful to the end. We moderns talk of wholeness and purposeful living; they spoke of the glories of the eternal kingdom . . . the emphasis in our attention has shifted from the completing of the Christian life to the beginning of it.”3

Hebrews is a tour de force for the person and work of Christ and a manifesto against respectable, self-justifying religious habits. The sermon counters those who seek, under the guise of tradition, to smuggle back into Christianity the ceremonies and practices that stand fulfilled in Christ. Religion is transcended by the finished work of Christ. There is no hiding behind ancient traditions and cherished rituals. The invisible truths of the gospel take on an altogether new visibility. Hebrews calls for the end of all religion—the very best religion—even as it calls for a living faith and faithfulness to the end. If we let the Word of God have its way with us, Hebrews will deepen our faith in Christ and strengthen our faithfulness.

Overcoming a Bias

On the subject of Hebrews some scholars open their commentaries with the intellectual equivalent of a cold shower. Hebrews is cast as an “enigma” that “poses more problems than any other New Testament book.”4 The work has “baffled” commentators through the centuries.5 If you like puzzles, one writer claims, you will like Hebrews.6 Another commentator warned that those who study this “strange and fascinating” epistle will quickly find “themselves lost in its serpentine passages and elaborate theological arguments.”7 To explore Hebrews is to trek “through beautiful but imposing theological and homiletical terrain.”8 The great Reformer Martin Luther had some high praise for Hebrews but he also called it “a disorderly mixture of wood and stubble, gold and silver, not representing apostolic levels of thought.”9 Another biblical scholar warned that if you “descend into the murky cave of Hebrews,” be ready to experience the frustrating secrets of authorship, destination, date, and audience.10

But what if the problem is not Hebrews, but our bias against the unfamiliar terrain of this powerful sermon? “We live in a ‘googlized’ world,” warns Missiologist Timothy Tennent, “which is inundated with information, but most of it trivial. We live in a day which resists serious, long-term, reflection. We live in a time when Coptic Christians are being beheaded and the next morning’s headlines are still about the Kardashians. The trivialization of information, the reductionism of all things sacred, and the shockingly short attention span, all confront you as bearers of the sacred gospel in the 21st century.”11

Hebrews challenges our retreat from the Word of God. Sadly, we have acquired over time and with remarkable ingenuity a calculated incapacity to think and communicate about anything other than the shallow level of small talk, sound-bite snippets, and instant messaging. “Our capacity for reflection and understanding has retracted, as our ability to sort through the data has expanded,” asserts Nicholas Carr. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. . . . The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”12 The impact of retreating from the word, scanning over reading, cobbling together a customized worldview, and preferring images over words, has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we think.

Preaching Hebrews is our opportunity “to go forth and inhabit a robust, muscular, deeply rooted apostolic gospel.”13 Our aim is to interpret and preach Hebrews with such confidence and clarity that people’s common misperceptions about the Bible are proven wrong. We may be conditioned to think that “the Bible is an opaque book whose truths are hidden in an endless maze of difficult words, unfamiliar history, unpronounceable names, and impenetrable mysticism.”14 For some readers Hebrews is exhibit A. To the unsuspecting believer Hebrews can come across as a bewildering array of Old Testament references, heroes, rituals, and traditions, all jumbled up together. This is where the challenge comes in. “The best preachers . . . guide in such a way that their listeners discover that the labyrinth is a myth. There are no dark passageways through twisted mazes of logic. . . . Only a well-worn path that anyone can follow if a preacher sheds some ordinary light along the way.”15

What some find baffling about Hebrews was designed by its author to be compelling. When we find ourselves in the Spirit, mentally and spiritually alert, with ears to hear, Hebrews becomes a powerful meditation on the gospel. The flow of reasoned argument for Christ and against religion, along with the pulsating emotional intensity of ultimate issues laid bare, and the heartfelt warnings against complacency and unbelief, strike a responsive chord in us. We “feel” the message as much as we “think” it. The extraordinary well-crafted use of the Old Testament is heard more like a well-played symphony than a lecture. The momentum of the sermon is impressive. The running comparison between Christ and angels, Christ and Moses, Christ and Joshua, Christ and Abraham, Christ and the Old Testament sacrificial system, continues to build to a climax. The thrust of the message is straightforward: Christ is the final word, superior to everyone and everything. He is the better way, the better covenant, the better sacrifice, and the better word. Hebrews is an ancient model of good preaching and a modern guide to preaching today. Harold Attridge calls Hebrews “a masterpiece of early Christian homiletics, weaving creative scriptural exegesis with effective exhortation.”16 The pastor is a “masterful homilist,” a preacher whose “handling of structure, choice of vocabulary, wordplay, illustrative materials, and application strategies can teach us much about the importance of form and focus in making sermon content clear, forceful, and engaging.”17

A Passion for the Truth

“The witness borne to Christ by Hebrews is still clearer, stronger, better than that of all the commentaries written about or against it taken together.” Markus Barth18

The challenge begins when we delve into the biblical text. Read the entire text in one sitting. Read and reread, and then keep on reading. Country singer Johnny Cash reportedly said, “I read the Bible to understand the commentaries.” That’s good advice. Over several days read the text thro...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: A Preaching Challenge
• Chapter 2: Overture (Hebrews 1:1–4)
• Chapter 3: The Radiance of God’s Glory (Hebrews 1:3–4)
• Chapter 4: Seven Declarations (Hebrews 1:5–2:4)
• Chapter 5: The Pioneer of our Salvation (Hebrews 2:5–3:6)
• Chapter 6: Wilderness Generation (Hebrews 3:7–4:13)
• Chapter 7: A Warning Against Apostasy (Hebrews 4:14–6:20)
• Chapter 8: The Better Priesthood (Hebrews 7:1–10:18)
• Chapter 9: Perseverance of the Saints (Hebrews 10:19–39)
• Chapter 10: Life of Faith and Faithfulness (Hebrews 11:1–12:3)
• Chapter 11: The Lord’s Discipline (Hebrews 12:4–29)
• Chapter 12: A Faithful Family of Faith (Hebrews 13:1–25)
• Appendix: Practical Suggestions for the Household of Faith
• Bibliography