The Book of Hebrews

We read the word of the Lord this morning. First of all, in the Old Testament, our reading is going to be taken from Genesis, Genesis chapter 22, and we’ll be reading verses nine through 19. As we’ll see in the sermon this morning, this is a passage to which the author of Hebrews makes reference in his encouragement to the church in Rome, the Hebrew Christians.
Genesis chapter 22, we’ll begin the reading at verse 19, and read through verse, or verse nine through verse 19. Listen to this word that the Lord speaks to us. If you’re able to stand, we stand for the reading of God’s word.
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac, his son, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham.
And he said, here I am. He said, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns.
And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, the Lord will provide, as it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.
And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice. So Abraham returned to his young men and they arose and went together to Beersheba and Abraham lived at Beersheba.
And then the passage, which is our focus this morning, is found in the book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter six, we’ll begin at verse nine, and pay particular attention to verses 19 through 20, or 13 through 20. Hear now again this word of the Lord. Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation.
For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name and serving the saints as you still do. And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope, salvation, of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, surely I will bless you and multiply you.
And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. For people swear by something greater than themselves and in all their disputes, an oath is final for confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise, the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath.
So that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. May the Lord bless this reading and our hearing of his word this morning.
You may be seated. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, you may notice at the beginning of the reading in chapter six that the writer of the book of Hebrews, and the book of Hebrews is really an extended sermon. I love the quip of Charles Spurgeon.
He once said, sermonettes are for Christianettes, little Christians, little sermons. Well, the book of Hebrews is not a little sermon. It’s an extended sermon, and it’s not a sermon that preaches to the choir.
It’s a sermon that speaks to the need of these Hebrew Christians. Now, why Hebrews? This was a Jewish Christian community, probably a small church, from what he says at the end of the book, the end of his word of exhortation, as he calls it, his sermon, greet the friends who are in Italy, that is a little house church, probably smaller than your congregation, in the shadow of Rome. And I say, he’s not preaching to the choir because this was a church that was losing hope.
Some of their number were saying, it’s not worth it. Following the Lord Jesus Christ causes too much trouble, and they knew trouble. We’re told in chapter 10 of Hebrews that when they first believed, many of their members were either thrown into prison or they were stripped of their worldly possessions.
And remarkably, the preacher, the author of Hebrews said, you took it gladly because you said to each other, we have an inheritance in heaven. We have a new and better country to which we are headed. So whatever we might lose in this life, we have a treasure in heaven that is being held for us as our reward.
But nonetheless, they were losing hope. They were losing their grip on the gospel. Some of their number we read in chapter 10 said, we’re not even going to church on the Lord’s day.
They ceased to assemble with the people of God for worship so as to encourage one another in the course in love and good works. So what does he do? How does he preach to a congregation, like many congregations of the Lord Jesus Christ in our day that are losing their early enthusiasm, that are thinking to themselves, is following the Lord Jesus Christ really worth it? The cost is too high. The benefits are negligible.
So let’s just throw up our hands and give it up. What he tells them, don’t you know what you have in Christ? The sure and certain hope of the gospel that is yours in him. Now, you know that language hope is an interesting term.
When we use the word hope, we usually mean something like wishful thinking. You know, if you’re a Bears fan, you’re hoping that next year is going to be better than last year, right? And the paper every week is full of all kinds of hopeful signs that this is going to be the year. Well, if you’re a Chicago Bears fan or a Chicago Cubs fan, you know that that hope soon dies and it doesn’t live up to the expectations that you had.
Now that happens often in all kinds of areas. In our business, we have great hopes and they’re dashed and it comes to nothing. In our marriage, in our family, sometimes it’s hard to be hopeful that better days lie ahead and things are going to go well for us in this respect or in some other respect.
Well, in the book of Hebrews, hope is not wishful thinking. It’s solidly rooted in two things that we’re going to look at this morning. First of all, in the promise sworn on oath that God makes to his people.
As the author of Hebrews says, by two unchangeable things, God has promised us an inheritance in the Lord Jesus Christ as he promised Abraham. And he will do it. Hope, says the author of Hebrews in chapter 11, is the substance of things hoped for, faith is, and the evidence of things not seen.
So the first thing he tells us is that we’re heirs of a promise that God has sworn on oath that he will do it. And secondly, we have in Christ a hope that is anchored. The anchor of our soul is Christ himself who’s gone before us behind the curtain as a forerunner.
Now let’s look at that together. First of all, we’re heirs together this morning of God’s promise and God’s oath. Notice verse 13, for when God made a promise to Abraham since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself saying to Abraham, surely I will bless you and I will multiply you.
Now we have to put on our thinking cap and remember the story, the background to which the author here is referring. These are Hebrew Christians. So they went to Sunday school and took their catechism classes and they knew the Old Testament scriptures.
And this would remind them of something. You remember Abraham? Abraham who lived, he was a Chaldean in Ur of Chaldees, the father of all the faithful was called by God to come to and to whom God would give the land of promise as his inheritance. But how did that actually unfold? Well, when God called Abraham, he was 75.
That’s pretty old. That’s older than I am, do the math. He spent a number of years on his way to the promised land in the town of Haran, the town of his father, Terah.
He waited there until his father died. And then he goes probably now in his late eighties to the land of promise with Sarah, his wife and she’s barren. And the Lord has told them repeatedly.
You can read that in Genesis 12 all the way through chapter 22 actually of Genesis, repeatedly that they would have a son, a child who would be the father of many nations and his descendants through whose seed, the son, all the families of the earth would be blessed. Their descendants, there would be kings coming from his loins, his womb. And there would be a people without number like the stars of the heavens and the sand upon the seashore.
But it didn’t happen. At least not according to Abraham’s timetable. God’s made a promise and it’s reached a dead end.
And it was a real dead end because as Paul says in Romans, when Abraham finally received Isaac, their firstborn son, the seed of promise, his body was says Paul, Romans four, good as dead. I don’t know if I’m talking to anybody here who was a hundred years of age, but you recall how the Lord a year before Isaac was born, visited them again through three heavenly messengers. And Sarah’s in the tent while they’re speaking with Abraham.
And they say to Abraham, the Lord promises that within a year you will be given a son. Earlier Abraham had said, the Lord can’t do it. I’m gonna take matters into my own hands.
I’m gonna take Hagar, my concubine as my wife and we’ll have a son. And that’s the son through whom God’s promise will be fulfilled. Well, you know, he may have been like Frank Sinatra.
I’ll do it my way. I’ll live life my way. But that was not the child of promise.
But how did Sarah, she’s in her late nineties, Abraham’s 99, respond to that angelic message as she was lurking in the tent, listening to the promise repeated. She did what you would have done. And I point the finger, you know, they say, if you point a finger, four of them are pointed back at yourself.
What would we have done? Be honest. We’d said that’s too wonderful even for God. That surpasses even God’s doing.
He can’t do that. But he did it. Isaac was born.
They gave him the name Isaac. It means he who laughs. God has the last laugh.
But now in Genesis chapter 22, the context is God says something most mysterious and altogether impossible to understand. After all these years of waiting, not with patience always, but sometimes with great doubts regarding God’s doing what he promised, God says, I want you to take Isaac to a mountain in the vicinity of Moriah. And I want you to sacrifice Isaac upon the altar.
It’s rather remarkable in the context when Abraham is first told this, he says to Isaac, we will go up to the mountain and we’ll come back and worship the Lord. Maybe he knew something already at that point. But where we began the reading, he’s bound Isaac upon the altar and is about to, with a knife that he has in his hand, slay his son, his only son.
And what then of God’s promise? And it’s in that context that the angel comes and intervenes. The angel is said to be the Lord himself and says to Abraham, I will provide the sacrifice. You can’t help but recognize in this a type of the one heavenly father who did not spare his own dear son, his only son, but delivered him up for us all.
But he says to Abraham, I’ll provide a ram. And spare your son and multiply your descendants until they exceed your ability to recognize the number of them. Now, what the author of Hebrews reminds us is that God at that point did something very strange.
You know, if you go to a court of law and you’re a witness, you’re gonna tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, what do you do? Perhaps you lay your hand on a Bible and in God’s name and as your witness, you declare, I will not perjure myself. I will not tell a lie. I’ll be like Abraham Washington, the president, could not tell a lie.
I’m only gonna speak the truth. Well, God faces a bit of a difficulty. He can’t place his hand on a Bible.
God is truth and it’s impossible says the author of Hebrews for God to declare a promise that he won’t keep. Very much unlike you and me, Psalm 116 says, we’re all liars, all men are liars. We’re like lying rungs, lying rugs, liar, liar, pants on fire, we used to say to one another as children.
Not so with God. All God had to do was say it and it was done. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the word of the Lord, it never passes away.
It endures steadfast, sure, unchanging. But here’s the remarkable thing. In addition to the promise, God swore an oath.
I couldn’t swear by heaven or earth because they’ll pass away. But he condescended in his mercy and swore an oath to Abraham. As I live, says the Lord, I will do it.
What is the author of Hebrews wanting to impress upon us? The word of hope, the gospel promises that God makes to his people in the Lord Jesus Christ. Have been sealed in the blood of Christ. Have been confirmed, Paul says to the church in Corinth, all of God’s promises, name them one by one.
Count them one by one. Have their yes and their amen in Christ Jesus. In all the world, whatever a politician might promise, whatever the new coach of the Chicago Bears might declare is gonna happen in the season to come, whatever anybody, I don’t care if it’s Elon Musk or President Trump or whomever, you pick your favorite, all men are liars.
There is one who is altogether true. And when the word that he speaks to us in the person of his own son, that’s where the author of Hebrews begins the book of Hebrews. God has spoken to us in the person of his own son.
So Abraham is adduced as an illustration as to how we ought to be sure, confident in all of the promises that God has made to us in Christ Jesus, that we are heirs of eternal life, of an inheritance in Christ that is unfading, says the author of 1 Peter, is kept for us even as we are kept for it. By the way, I don’t know if I’m talking to some folk this morning who are anxiously anticipating an inheritance. Maybe, maybe not.
Some of you might be disappointed. It may be the case that your parents are one of these people, they got this big expensive van and on the back of it says, I’m spending my children’s inheritance in my retirement. So there isn’t anything there when they retire, when you enter into what amounts to nothing.
But even if it is kept for you, you might not be kept for it. You might pre-decease that cherished inheritance that you were so anxiously looking to receive. And I can up the ante a little bit by saying, here’s the facts of the case.
The end of the day, life’s little day, as one of the hymn writers puts it, what are you going to have upon death? Exactly nothing. You’re like Job. You were born naked, you’ll die naked.
As the saying goes, you will not take anything with you. That’s not true of this promise. Regarding a new and better country, a city as it’s put by the author of Hebrews later that has foundations whose builder and maker is God.
Just as the Lord Jesus Christ for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, suffering at shame. So likewise, as the author and perfecter of our faith, we are going somewhere. And what lies for us in our future is something much better than the promised land that Abraham inherited together with his seed.
But now there’s a second thing here and it’s this. Our hope is anchored not only in a God who makes promises on oath that he will unfailingly keep, but it is also, as the author of Hebrews puts it in verses 19 and 20, anchored. It uses a nautical image.
Nautical just means having to do with boats and the water. I was in St. Joseph a few weeks ago, my wife and I and some of the children and grandchildren swimming, beautiful beach, silver beach. We noticed these big boats.
They’d come in to the shore so that they would be close enough, they could jump off and swim, but it was a bit of a windy day and so they’re throwing out their anchor. What’s the bed of the lake? Lake Michigan, it’s all sand. Not exactly the kind of thing that you can really get your anchor hooked to a solid rock that’s immovable.
So every so often they have to pull out again and throw down the anchor and then they kind of drift again toward the shore inexorably. Well, not so with you and me. Our hope is anchored in the solid rock of the person who has gone, as the author of Hebrews, behind the curtain into God’s presence, the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom we are tethered.
Notice the language of verses 19 and 20. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain. That’s language drawn from the Old Testament.
You know, there was this heavy curtain you couldn’t see through it, behind which was the Holy of Holies, which symbolized the place of God’s dwelling, God’s presence. Only one Israelite, the high priest, per year could go but once behind the curtain. But the author of Hebrews is telling us that our Savior, having made sacrifice for your and my sin, he has gone before us as a forerunner and he’s not leaving anyone behind.
I’m told by commentators that the word here for forerunner is a word that was used for the persons who would take the anchor of a ship on the Mediterranean and they would jump off the boat and carry the anchor to the dock to which the anchor would be tethered so as to then allow the boat to be drawn, the rope pulled so as to bring the boat home to the dock. Well, brothers and sisters, I’m here this morning to tell you that the Lord Jesus has gone behind the curtain in a manner of speaking of the heavenly sanctuary into the very presence of God. Earlier, the author of Hebrews says he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, but he never forgets.
Those whom he there continually prays for intercedes and for whom he has gone before them in order that they might be, as he says in the Gospel of John, you know that very familiar passage, you believe in God, believe also in me. My father’s house, there are many rooms, many mansions. It’s a big house, it’s a big city, it’s a new creation, it’s adequate to the need of a vast number of people who can dwell in my presence, live in fellowship with me, world without end, with every tear wiped from their eye, they will be home with Christ in God’s presence forever.
I don’t know about you, brothers and sisters, but when you’re talking to your neighbor sometime, maybe you could strike up a conversation with them that would go a little bit like this. You know what I hope? And this is no wishful thought. It’s rooted deeply in a solid, unbreakable promise that God swore an oath and has sealed in the blood of his own dear son.
I have a hope, not for an earthly inheritance, that fades, vanishes, you know, the portfolio can blow up in a day. I have a sure and certain hope, you know, when we go to the graveside of a loved one, what does the minister say at the grave? We commit our brother, sister in what? The sure, certain hope of the resurrection. The resurrection of the body.
So you can tell your neighbor, you know, you think maybe my house is a little modest and I drive a junky used car and don’t look like I’m all that well off. Let me tell you how rich I am. I have an inheritance in glory.
I am a son of God, a daughter of the most high God. I belong to the king and I intend to sit at the king’s table in the king’s new creation, together with a vast number of men and women from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation in a home that’s not a house. It’s here today, gone tomorrow.
An eternal home, full of life, laughter, joy, unspeakable, and full of glory where all the sorrows, distresses, sadnesses, and disappointments of this life are long forgotten. So brothers and sisters, as we sit here together this morning on the Sabbath day, the Lord’s day, a day of rest and gladness, an emblem of the day when we’ll all be home, drawn into fellowship with that anchor that has been thrown into heaven in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will stop at nothing to ensure that where he is.