Clough Hebrews Lesson 13

Christ: the Only Redeemer for Man – Hebrews 2:3-5

…before we go into the exegesis tonight, one refers back to the evening that we dealt with the angelic conflict and the review of it. In 1 Thessalonians 4:17 you made the claim that the word used for cloud was singular, indicating a singular global cloud. However, looking at the passage I find that it is plural. Also in Matthew 24:30 it is plural. Could you please, therefore, explain your statement of the global cloud? The global cloud, the global dimension of the cloud, is inferred from the fact that this prophecy is going to have to verify globally. And obviously to verify globally you can have one global cloud. The reason why you have a difference between singular and plural, and why it’s not really significant as far as clouds are concerned, is because if you ever look at clouds you can’t define cloud elements. In fact, in my previous profession to this one of the biggest problems we have is the defining the nature of clouds and it gets kind of… well, people who are working on the international field of libration have been working on this thing ever since 1945 and the League of Nations was working on it for decades before that, and so far to the best of my knowledge nobody has yet come up with a system of handling the problem.

So ultimately it’s… the prophecy of 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and Matthew in order to verify must occur at many, many points on the earth’s surface, which indicates that the earth is covered at the point of the rapture with a cloud. Now we don’t know what that particular cloud is except as I pointed out in that series, clouds are taken in Scripture to be indicative of God’s presence in some way. And some scholars have suggested it’s just a globe girdling cloud that would be very, very high in the atmosphere due, say, nuclear exchange or something like that that might just happen to coincide with the rapture. But a globe girdling cloud is not something that is to be too unexpected, if you read your history I think it was in 1901 or toward the end of the 1800s there was a great volcano in what is now Indonesia that blew up, Krakatoa, and it was so explosive and violent that it caused a dust cloud to occur over the entire globe and dropped the temperature, the average surface temperature in the northern hemisphere dropped two degrees. And this is very, very significant when you think this is a two degree temperature drop all over the entire northern hemisphere. And the amount of calories of heat was in the billions and it was just simply caused by dust being thrown up into the stratosphere. So you can imagine if you had a nuclear exchange between nations with the modern weapons we have today, you’d have quite a lasting effect for a while.

Another question is since angels can be physical phenomena, which ones are in the witch’s wands or water wands that some people use to locate water before ground. They are so closely associated with stars, does that in any way lend some validity to being born under a sign or other phenomena. First, as far as the witch’s wand and so on, it’s not clear what is going on with these witch’s wands. However, Curt Koch in his book, Christian Counseling and Occultism, if you read that book will give you in the footnotes references to studies done. People laugh at it but that’s usually because they’re ignorant but this happens; this really does happen that these will have peculiar sensations to them and I’m just not qualified to comment on that, I haven’t studied it.

If they’re so closely associated with the stars, does that in any way lend some validity; this involves astrology. All I can say is that the Bible warns us against a determinism. I think one of the reasons that God wants to stay clear of astrology is that it always sets up a certain mentality in which you become determined by nature; it puts man back underneath the powers of nature. And this is anti-Scriptural. As far as [can't understand word] being born in this sign, I don’t know, again I haven’t got any studies one way or the other. I am not at this point willing to repudiate the concept entirely because something that’s widespread must have some sort of basis in fact.

Where does the idea of our existence bring a result of Satan’s plea to God, or charge, that God’s condemnation of Satan was unfair? This goes back to something that, probably the best way to handle it would be tonight at the end when I work with the next set of verses.

Let’s go to Hebrews 2:1-4 again, this is the warning passage and it’s one of the many warning passages in the epistle and it’s this kind of warning that is the norm in the Bible for exhortation. The word “exhortation” does not mean something that is gentle. It means something that is quite strong and quite pointed. And in verse 1 you recall it says, “Therefore, we ought to give” and in the Greek it is dei, which is not a moral necessity, it is what we would call a metaphysical necessity. In other words, it’s actually necessary for this to happen. It’s no, you don’t have any choice. “On account of this it’s absolutely necessary to pay more careful attention than we have the Old Testament.”

And then we dealt with verses 2-4 last week, showing that “For if the word spoken by the angels became steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience” in the Old Testament, “received a just recompense of reward, [3] How shall we escape,” and the “we” refers to believing Jews in the time just before 70 AD when Israel faced the fifth degree of discipline. And the nation corporately faced the dilemma that Christ has foretold in a parable. I think if you’ll look at this parable it’ll set you up with the mentality that the author of Hebrews wants us to have and that’s Matthew 21:33.

It wasn’t new with the writer of Hebrews because Christ Himself taught this. Matthew 21:33, “Hear another parable,” Jesus said, “There was a certain householder, who planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and dug a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen [leased it to tenant farmers], and went into a far country.” So there’s the renting of the land. [34] And when the time of the fruit” the harvest “drew near, he sent his servants,” now the servants in this parable are the prophets, “he sent his servants to the husbandman, that they might receive the fruits of it. [35] And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. [36] Again, he sent other servants,” in other words more prophets into the vineyard of Israel, “more than the first; and they did unto them likewise. [37] But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. [38] But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. [39] And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. [40] When the lord, thereof, of the vineyard comes, what will he do unto those husbandmen?” Jesus asked the people who had listened to the parable. [41] “And they said unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let [lease] out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, who shall render him the fruits in their seasons.” And then of course, Jesus Christ goes on to apply it.

But that parable is a warning to the nation Israel that God has had enough and that God in His grace tolerates negative volition up to a point, and then He doesn’t tolerate it any more; then he begins to do something about it. Now that’s the principle of exhortation, that’s the context of exhortation in Hebrews. And that is that believers, we all have a tendency to misinterpret grace. And since we do, since God is gracious, believers always tend to misinterpret. And exhortation, if you want another kind of approach to it, Hebrews is full of these little approaches to exhortation, you’ve got a little facet of it here and a little facet there. If you want to get another approach to it, exhortation is a warning against misinterpreting grace, that just because God has not clobbered you in the past for mental attitude sins, for pride, for rebellion against His declared will, does not mean that you will always be free of such judgment. Exhortation is a warning that grace does not mean you’re going to get away with it. And it’s a pointing back to the many, many times that God has lowered the boom against people who tend to, well, shall we say presume on His grace, just because I got away with it 25 times I will therefore automatically get away with the same time the twenty-sixth time. Huh-un, if God reaches the point where He decides something is going to be done it’s going to be done and this parable shows it.

For example, in verse 37-38 the difference between sending his son to the farm versus sending his servants to the farm was that their negative volition came out more clearly against the son. See, negative volition is very interesting although it’s there, and God in omniscience knows it’s there, sees it and deals with it, nevertheless, the negative volition becomes clearer with increased amounts of revelation, so that when God increases the amount of revelation of His character, then the negative volition comes out very, very clearly, and then you will find God has less grace capacity, so to speak; I mean His capacity is infinite but He puts up with it for a less time period.

To give you an illustration of this let’s look in history. You take the nation Israel, they had, from 1440-586 BC. They had roughly nine centuries of time to make up their mind what they were going to do with the Word of God. And they made up their mind and God finally called a halt to the whole process in 586. Now they had nine hundred years to make up their mind. All those nine hundred years the Word of God was being added to. Now the next era of history, 596-516 was a period of time when God purged them from idolatry. One of the remarkable things of history, and this is another without parallel in any history, never has a nation had a complete change in their religious faith that was not due to either imposing upon them beliefs by conquerors or something. Here Israel had a complete eradication of idolatry. After this her sin was legalism but it wasn’t idolatry. During these seventy years that nation was completely cured of idolatry and the Jews down to this day have never gone back to idolatry. Something happened over the seventy year period of intense suffering that God turned it off.

Now after this period you have another period from 516 to the time of Jesus Christ. During this period of time you have about 500 years. During this time you have more of the Word of God available to the nation, more of the Word of God can be seen, it’s all laid out, the prophecies are all written. God gives them five centuries to digest it and do something about it. Then when Jesus Christ comes, from the time that He comes until the time that God decides to do something about it is forty years. So the time interval gets smaller and smaller and smaller toward the nation, depending on the amount of revelation, the amount of exposure they have.

Now this operates today in the same way in individual believer’s lives, where you can have a believer who is exposed to, say a very minimum amount of Bible doctrine, they trot off to some place where it’s all program, we got a program for this and a program for this and a program for your dog and a program for your cat and so forth and they don’t have any doctrine, so for a long time this person can go on and on and on in sort of carnality and in out and out of fellowship in their life and God doesn’t seem to do so much about it. Then the person comes into a Bible teaching situation and they think because all this time they’ve got these learned behavior patterns, they’ve got these learned behavior patterns that I do with the Word of God as I please, period. And after all, I’ve gotten away with it so far and God hasn’t clobbered me so why can’t I keep on doing it this way. And they find something happens. They get into Bible doctrine where they have concentrated doses of the Word of God and try to go on living with these –R learned behavior patterns, and they go about halfway and then all of a sudden everything begins to have problems. Marriage goes to pieces, the family’s upset, the job falls apart, all sorts of pressures like that and you’ll hear them say gee, it wasn’t like this before I got into Bible doctrine, why is this happening now I’m in the Word, the more I’m into the Word the worse it gets. Right. And the worse it’s going to get because the increased exposure to the Word of God makes us that much more responsible and we can’t predict, God doesn’t operate like a machine, but generally speaking God has much shorter patience with people who have greater exposure to the Word than He does with people who don’t.

So this goes back again to this relative responsibility thing that you see in Hebrews, that these Jews to whom this epistle were written, were called on the carpet for not doing anything bout it. They had heard and heard and heard and heard and heard, still nothing, just sitting around, life is normal, with no response. And so the exhortation comes in the 11^th hour, warning them just once more, and of course within two or three years the Jewish community would be decimated in the ancient world. A million of them would be slaughtered in the city of Jerusalem and the rest in the ghettos around the ancient world would live very miserable lives. So this was the result of failure to do something about the Word of God once it was heard.

Let’s turn back to Hebrews 2, that’s the warning, “how shall we escape,” the “we” being the people to whom the epistle was written. This passage can also be applied. That’s the interpretation, “we” being professing Hebrews Christians. Verse 3 can also be applied to people who hear the Word of God and don’t accept Christ as Savior, people who think they can put that decision off interminably, people who think they can postpone that activity and can’t, and what this warns you is that just like a boat drifting downstream and someday you’re going to go right by the last place you can dock, and the picture for the unbeliever is a person who goes on in life and suddenly their life is taken, whether by disease or by accident, by some way and they’ve drifted by, it’s too late, and they’ve heard and they’ve heard and they’ve put it off and put it off and put it off, I’ll do that some other time, I’m too busy living for myself right now and when I get done with my little deal then the Lord can have His. And that’s not the way it works because you’ll notice in here that in verse 1, “lest at any time,” that phrase “at any time” is a phrase that indicates the possibility is just there, it may or may not happen. You don’t know… God does but we don’t, whenever this happens.

So verse 1 is your main point; verses 2, 3 and 4 is an explanation of verse 1. Verse 2 is “if,” verse 3 is the main clause, “how shall we escape.” Then after verse 3, “how shall we escape,” there is another clause that continues verse 3 and verse 4 and this is a participle clause, this is a conditional participial clause. What it means is how shall we escape, “escape” is your main verb, “how shall we escape, having neglected,” and the context here indicates this participle should be translated the condition. “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation,” why is it “so great salvation?” The so-greatness of the salvation is the fact that in the New Covenant God has spoken by His Son, not by a servant, not by an angel, this is the final Word. “…which at the first began to be spoken through the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him.” “Them that heard Him” are the eyewitnesses of the New Testament, the eyewitnesses, the apostles, which proves Paul did not write Hebrews. This verse clearly indicates that Hebrews was written by a second generation Christian, a person who himself never saw Jesus, his readers never saw Jesus, and they are much like we are, they are one step removed from the person of Jesus Christ in history.

Now tonight we want to finish the warning section and begin the next large section that follows and to do this we want to be very careful we understand verse 3 because the clause that begins with the word “which,” “which at the first began to be spoken of the Lord, and was confirmed,” I want to go back to this verb “confirmed.” It was “confirmed.” Now the word “confirmed” in verse 3 is the same word that is used in verse 2; it’s related to the word that is used in verse 2. In verse 2 it is translated “steadfast,” that’s the adjective form of it. And that’s the word that you remember the Law became “steadfast.” Now what was the process by which the Law in the Old Testament became steadfast? Why did we say last time that the Law, you could argue that the Law was steadfast in the time the immutable omnipotent sovereign God spoke it. What is the author of Hebrews saying “it became steadfast?” What’s he looking at? [someone answers]

All right, and how was the actual validity of the Law demonstrated. [someone answers] Okay, can anyone give an example of how the Old Testament Law was made firm by good historical demonstration. Anybody give one incident. [someone answers] All right, 586. In 586 what areas of the Old Testament explain what was going on in 586 and warned them and warned them and warned them and warned them century after century this was coming? But nobody paid any attention to it. What part of the Old Testament? Leviticus 26, that’s a very good chapter because that’s your whole philosophy of history. Leviticus 26 is a key chapter in understanding history; particularly it is a key for interpreting everything you find in the prophets. In fact, somebody was doing a study at seminary on this and they found out the words and phrases of Leviticus 26 are deliberately used by the prophets. The prophets go to predict the judgments they’re speaking in language of Leviticus 26. So the prophets aren’t making the threats up.

You know, every once in a while people get the concepts the prophets are a bunch of alarmists, and they were going around making all this up that was going to happen to the nation. Not at all, the prophets were simply administers of the Word of God that had gone before. They were simply saying now’s the time for the Word of God to be fulfilled. Okay, Leviticus 26 then is the source of the prophecy. So if “the word spoken by angels,” that is the Law, “became steadfast,” and we find the verb of “steadfast” occurs in the last of verse 3, can someone guess what is meant here? The “salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard it,” the process of confirming in the context is talking about God speaking at one point and then something coming through at some future point. Now here’s the speaking, Jesus and the confirmation of the apostles. Now how did the apostles confirm the content of what Jesus taught? [someone answers] All right, can someone give us an idea of what the apostles pointed to as a fulfillment of Jesus’ words. Resurrection was one very obvious thing. Now in this passage, since it’s Jewish readers, he’s going to point to something and here’s where a little knowledge of the original language helps.

“Was confirmed” is the main verb, after the main verb you have a series of participles. And in verse 4, “God bearing them witness,” now that participle… the main verb is aorist, which is past, the participle “bearing witness,” is present, the participle when it is present and your main verb is past describes how that action was brought about. For example, if you look down further there’s an easy to understand illustration of this in verse 6. See in verse 6 where it says “But one in a certain place testified, saying,” that “testified” is the main verb, it’s aorist, past tense, that’s clearly past. By the way, it’s past tense and over with… over with! But “saying,” in other words, he wrote it in the past but the affects of that, when he wrote it it’s saying this, in other words the writing here is what he wrote back then. So this is one illustration of it. But in this passage you have the main verb, “was confirmed,” and “bearing witness.”

Now why am I making such a big point over the present and the aorist? Because now I’m going to deduce something that cuts right across the grain of every charismatic in Lubbock and every where else. This verse teaches that the sign gifts have stopped because it says that this “was confirmed” over a period of time in the past, and during that past period of time these gifts were constantly functioning; they were constantly functioning in [the] past, but now the consummation has been completed, the gifts stop. So the gifts that are mentioned in verse 4 have ceased; they’re not going on at the time of the writing of the epistle to the Hebrews. Now you remember that next time one of these kooky people walk up to you and try to build a theology on the book of Acts. Well, in the book of Acts they spoke in tongues. Well, in the book of Acts they went to the temple. In the book of Acts they had apostles. In the book of Acts Peter walked around with his handkerchief and healed everybody. Now which ones are you going to pick. See, you’ve got to pick your way through the book of Acts, don’t you. You’ve got to pick what you want and discard what you don’t want because you know you can pick everything in the book of Acts.

All right, the book of Acts is written in transition and the best education you will ever get in your life is to write out a list on a piece of paper of every New Testament epistle and go to a Bible handbook or a Bible dictionary and look up the dates of the authorship. Right one column on a piece of paper with the names of every New Testament book; then write down the next column the date that book was written. Then in the third column rearrange them in the order in which they were written. And then in the fourth column read, check as you read through in the order the epistles were written and you’ll see an amazing thing. All the sign gifts and all the speaking in tongues and all the rest of it occur on the top of your list, not the bottom, and as you go down to the bottom of the list where these epistles are written late, the emphasis is on doctrine, because the last epistles written were 1 and 2 Timothy and 1 and 2 Thessalonians and Titus. The pastoral epistles and they all emphasize doctrine, they don’t even mention gifts. So that shows you the tendency of the New Testament very clearly is against these gifts; these gifts are temporary, not permanent. And it can be shown if you just simply take ten minutes of your time you could show yourself the point.

An owner of a book store in Lubbock told me today, he said the book sellers have a little survey they run on how many Americans read, by reading they mean you read a hardback book or a paperback that’s a revision of a hardback book. Do you know what the average percent of Americans that read in this country? 1.5%. Isn’t that sad; 1.5% can’t get away from the boob tube long enough to read one book. That’s the literacy. I don’t know why they have schools, frankly. Why bother to teach people to read, you don’t have to read to look at television. Just sit there and look at television, you’d be a lot happier than struggles in school, learning how to read. Bologna, you don’t have to learn to read, they’re lowering the voting standards down so you don’t have to write your name. And you can just walk in and vote, you may not know who is there but that’s all right, people will just tell you who to vote for so that’s simple. You don’t have to read to get along in this country any more, ridiculous. But that’s where we’ve come in the short 200 years from the days when people used to read things like the Federalist Papers as common material. And now 1.5% of Americans read. Real sad. And if that’s the really habit of the American public guess what it’s fallout is in Christian circles. How many people read the Word of God. See, that’s where we are.

All right, these people, by the way, [can’t tell if it’s did or didn’t] know how to read, but you know they knew a lot of doctrine and they did it by memory of words that they heard. And here it talks about how it was so let’s go through verse 4. “God was constantly bearing them witness,” constantly during this period of confirming, “with signs and wonders, and with various miracles,” now how did these signs confirm the truth of salvation? Let’s take some of the gifts that were temporary and see how they worked. First, the gift of apostleship. The gift of apostleship was temporary. The apostles were spiritual dictators. They had the authority to condemn believers to satanic discipline. This shows you how powerful the authority of the apostles. All an apostle had to say, all right Lord, that one, right over there, I want to turn him over to Satan. An apostle could do it and that person would suffer, right there, just like that. Now that is the power the apostles had. You could obviously see why, when they went into a congregation, they were [can’t understand word], the apostles were spiritual dictators and they exercised this authority on numerous occasions. The apostles, when they wrote, had authority that exceeded angels, Galatians 1:8 and they had the right to damn any person who rejected apostolic authority. So apostles were very, very important people.

Now today, the apostleship phased out and today the only thing we’ve got that compares would be what we would call church planters. These would be, and they’re a dying breed, missionaries who still have the concept that the local church comes first, and they will go into a pioneer area, win people to Jesus Christ, teach them, teach them how to set up a church, and then move on to another area. Now they are doing a thing that’s very similar to the first century apostles and so many evangelicals say that the gift of apostleship continues today but they don’t mean in the sense of the original apostles. We’re not saying these are dictators. The gift, if you want to argue it’s continued, it’s been very, very radically modified.

Another gift that was temporary is the gift of healings, notice this is plural, the gift of healings, which obviously indicated that people who had this gift could only heal certain diseases. In other words, certain people would be good on certain diseases and this operated in the early church. Why do we say it’s temporary? Again, study of the epistles in the order in which they were written shows that this gift faded out. And today the only thing that corresponds with the gift of healings is the so-called prayer of faith. And that is that God at certain times with certain individuals would give them the illumination necessary to pray in faith that so and so be healed and so and so will be healed and there are supernatural healings that occur as a result of this prayer, James 5. So we do have healing but it’s not like the early gift of healings; distinguish sharply between the two. And I’m not talking about faith healers that trot around and have 8,000 people come forward or something. The apostleship and the healings were unique things and today we only have just a little bit of what that was like in those early days. And it’s not due to the fact that the Church has less faith today than it did before. The Church knows more doctrine now than it ever did.

“…discerning of spirits,” this is another gift that is listed that was temporary in the primary sense. Now it was temporary because of this. You had to have the gift of spirits because how did the early Christians get their New Testament before it was written? See, each congregation, say the Corinthian congregation, the congregation in Crete, the congregation in Jerusalem, congregation in Galatia, they had people who had the gift of knowledge and the gift of prophecy and they would start prophesying in the congregation. And they’d have bits and pieces, so you’d have a little bit of New Testament truth here, a little bit of New Testament here, a little bit here, a little bit here and a little bit here and then you’d have the apostolic writings circulating around. And so the people in that day got their doctrine in bits and pieces. But they had to watch because Satan was interested in confusing. For example, at Colosse they had Gnosticism and they had Gnostic demons that promoted this Gnostic teaching. And that got into the congregation and so Paul had to write the epistle to Colossians to get rid of that mess. So there was always this danger of heresy creeping and they had to have these people with the gift of discerning spirits who would perceive whether this new doctrine coming was of the Lord or not.

Now today the only thing that corresponds with this are certain people do today manifest a very unusual sensitivity to truth and error and there are some Christians, many of whom are not well-educated, yet they seem to have almost a fifth sense that something’s wrong and they will spot something that’s wrong faster than anybody else. People can be reading this thing and not see anything wrong with it and yet they just know there’s something wrong and they’ll spot if. Now this apparently is related just not identical to this early discerning of spirits. Sort of like the healings and the apostleship.

The miracles, the gift of miracles is another one that was a temporary gift and in its original primary sense was very spectacular and you could walk around, such as Peter, and have these miracles occur, people rising from the dead and so on, all sorts of things going on. Today miracles still occur in isolated areas for various reasons. But they don’t occur like they did in the first century. Then finally we have a cluster of four gifts, tongues, knowledge, prophecy, and interpretation of tongues, all four of those were phased out as taught in 1 Corinthians 13:8-9. they’re phased out because they’re not needed any more. There’s no need for a gift of prophecy, no need for a gift of knowledge. Why? Why don’t we need it any more. We’ve got the completed canon of Scripture.

Now here’s something, just notice this, and those of you who haven’t had the experience just write it on your notes and five years from now you’ll see what I mean. But you will notice if you get around these people who are always talking about they’ve got the gift of prophecy and they’ve got the gift of knowledge and they’ve got the gift of this and they’ve got the gift of that, if you just watch them long enough you’ll notice something very interesting. You’ll notice they have no love for an in depth concentrated dosage of the Word of God. You’ll always find this true. I know this because is when I was going to college is when the glossolalia broke out on the East coast, it broke out at Yale University and I knew the boys that were involved. So I watched these people; you’re not telling me anything on the tongues movement, I’ve watched this thing all the way back to 1960, maybe 59 I saw this. This is when it broke out at Yale and I knew the boys that were involved in that and not one of those, they were an Intervarsity group and not one of them had any interest in the Word of God whatever. And those who from Harvard and MIT that were engrossed in the whole thing, the same way. They would go and hand-hold and everything else in these prayer groups but they would never get into the Word of God systematically. And since 1959 I have watched the charismatic group and I have seen no information and no data to the contrary that would refute that observation, that these people despise the Word of God; they want to substitute an experience for the Word. Said in less theological terminology, they’re just lazy, spiritually and all other ways. It does take time to sit down and read; they’re part of the 98.5% of the Americans that don’t read, and it’s just the human viewpoint of the culture enabling them to make some excuse why they can’t read the Word and study it.

So these are temporary gifts and they’re all phased out. We don’t have them operating today, we don’t need them. We’ve got the New Testament. And in case you are around these people you might remind them of something some time and that is there’s enough in the New Testament to keep you busy from now until the time you die. You don’t worry about, you know, you can master the New Testament when you don’t have anything else to do, you’ll be bored. Well, you’ll never master the depth of the revelation of the New Testament because to do so you have to know the Old Testament. And the Old Testament will keep you going for many, many years. So you don’t have to worry about you’ll run out of material, you’ll always have plenty of material, plenty of it. So life will never be boring if you’re interested in the Word of God; you’ll always find something new, always find something exciting in the Word of God, that is, if you’re interested.

Then the last phrase in verse 4, most important is, “according to His own will,” which indicates that the Holy Spirit sovereignly distributed these gifts and that phrase knocks out about half the charismatic group right there. Do you know what that phrase says? Who is it that determines whether you get a gift or not? The Holy Spirit. Whether you like it or whether you don’t, whether you want it or whether you don’t want it, in the end it is the Holy Spirit that determines these gifts. So even if the gifts were valid today, let’s just forget everything we’ve said, even if the gifts are valid today you could not ask for them because the Holy Spirit gives them sovereignly. And that eliminates immediately the idea that we sit down in our bathtub and draw water at 70 degrees and lie back and blatta blatta blatta blatta blatta like this and finally we have the gift of tongues. It eliminates that completely. The Holy Spirit probably has a good sense of humor and He thinks it’s pretty funny too.

But the Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit sovereignly gives these; they’re independent of your volition and mine. And believe me, when you know your gift well and you know the calling to which God has called you, and you know the training it takes to develop your gift, sometimes you wish God never gave it to you. So this is very interesting; the more spiritually mature you become oftentimes the less enthusiastic you are, at moments, about the gift that God has God has given you simply because the gift conveys responsibility and our natural tendency is just to shirk responsibility, we just don’t want it.

That’s the warning. Are there are any questions before we proceed to the next section. [someone says something]. I would just say that verses 3-4 are dealing with those gifts that are particular sign gifts, and then I’d develop the argument that pastor-teacher, for example, wasn’t a sign gift, it’s given to sustain and it’s given as an ever continuing thing, plus the fact those people that are associated with the gift of elders, pastor-teacher, management and so on are rementioned in a later epistle. [Tape turns]

… Verse 1, the sentence, then verse 2 itself began with a for, “For if,” if such and such and such happened, then verse 2, “How can we escape, neglecting so great salvation…. [4] God also bearing witnesses, both with signs…. [5] “For” and beginning with verse 5 we have an explanation of the protasis, that is the “if” clause. In other words, in verse 2 you remember there was an “if,” if the… [small blank spot in tape] …the salvation, and did you remember what I mentioned last time in verse 3, that the word “salvation” is used simultaneously for doctrine. Did you not remember that, because remember in verse 3 the word “salvation” is an act. Salvation is not something you talk out, it’s an act, but the author in verse 3 takes the noun that refers to an event, an action, and he uses it to stand for doctrine. So now he’s going to do something new here; he’s introduced salvation, that’s something new that hasn’t been introduced yet. So it shouldn’t come as any shock now that beginning with verse 5 we’re dealing with the Savior. Here’s Jesus Christ in His saving ministry. So whereas before we dealt with Christ in His cosmic setting, remember He is greater than angels, now beginning with verse 5 we have Christ, yes He’s greater than angels, but now He was made lower than angels. Why? Because to work out our salvation. So the subject now shifts more from the essence of Christ over to His work, what He has done for us to secure the salvation.

“For unto the angels has He,” that is God the Father, “has not subjected the world to come,” now “subjected” is an aorist, it refers to the eternal decree, that God has not designed history so that the world to come will be administered by angels. Now today the world is administered by angels, 1 Kings 22 and other passages that I’ve gone over before. Angels are administering. How are angels administering? They’re administering physical phenomena. During the Tribulation angels administer God’s judgments geophysically to the planet earth, to the entire solar system and outer space, it is under the domain of angels. And they carry out God’s orders and judgments. So the earth is left, so to speak, under them now, but that is not true of the future. So, “unto the angels has He not put in subjection the world to come,” now in the Greek the word “world” looks like this; in fact, this is the word from which we get oikoumene, and that’s the word you get ecumenicalism from. And what it means is civilization or inhabited area. Now the word as it is used in this context refers to civilization; oikoumene.

Now civilization has occurred in four parts, or will occur in four different phases. There will be in history four civilizations and it’s interesting to notice what they are and how they start and how they end. The first one is the antediluvian civilization; the second one is the postdiluvian civilization, the third one is the millennial kingdom and the fourth one is the eternal state. Now these civilizations all start the same way. Do you notice anything in common. Does anybody spot how these civilization, how is it they always start off? All right, every time they start with believers. Believers, Adam; believers, the postdiluvian, Noah and family; believers in the millennial kingdom are the people that are left when the earth is judged by fire; Noah and his family were left on earth by the flood, all the other unbelievers were removed physically, destroyed. And so all unbelievers will be killed, destroyed and removed to make way for the millennial kingdom. The only way you can have peace is to get rid of all the non-Christians. Then at the end of the millennial kingdom you again have a purging of the earth and you get rid of all the unbelievers and you can start eternal peace. So every time these civilizations start they always start with unbelievers.

Now how do they end. Apart from the fourth one they all end in a gigantic geophysical catastrophe. The first one ended in a complete inundation of the planet earth. The second, the one that we are now part of, is going to end in a complete destruction of this planet’s surface, at least the earth’s surface is going to be tremendously destroyed and changed, the atmosphere will be redesigned for the millennium and so on. There will be a tremendous catastrophe and the millennial kingdom at the end, the entire universe is destroyed. So these civilizations are always terminated by cosmic disaster.

The author says, “that world to come,” remember the Jewish people had three ways to speak of and you’ll see this in your Gospels when you read. They’ll say the early days, the latter days, sometimes you’ll see this “the former times” like it occurs in the King James, these are slogans so let me give you the slogans and then you can pair them up. The early days are “the former times,” this can refer to the antediluvian civilization or it can refer to the early parts of Israel. The “latter days” refer to the days of the Messiah. And we would including that from the cross all the way to the Second Advent. And then the “age to come” refers both to the millennial kingdom and the eternal state. That’s it, the former times, the latter days and the age to come. The “latter days” are not used in the same way “the age to come” is, those are two distinct expression. So the angels are going to not manage the age to come, they do manage the latter days and they manage the earlier days but they are not going to be in charge of the age to come.

“…whereof we speak,” now this speaking here is where we’re going to stop. I want to take you on a chain reference of the book of Hebrews a moment and we’ll conclude here with the verb “speak” because the author now lets us in to his main point of exhortation. The exhortation of this author is related to prophecy and this is always the way prophecy occurs in the Bible. Now this is different, usually you get Christians that don’t have anything else to do and they always trot around from one prophecy conference to the next, just to see if somebody draws their chart differently and that’s not the way prophecy was ever intended to be use. Here, in this book, is how prophecy was intended to be used for the Christian in daily experience.

Let me show you the number of times this “age to come” comes up in the epistles, because he says here that “age to come, whereof we are speaking,” present tense. In other words, right now I’m speaking about the age to come, I’m exhorting you but I’m speaking about the age to come.

Let’s start in Hebrews 1:2, the Son, He is appointed heir of all things, that refers to when the Son is going to inherit that, the age to come. Verse 6, “And again, when He brings the first-begotten into the world,” remember we said that was the Second Advent, Christ comes into the world to set up His kingdom, all shall worship Him, that’s the age to come. Verse 12, talking about the collapse physically of the universe, “as a vesture You will fold them up, and they shall be changed, but Thou art the same.” Verse 14, the angels are “spirits, sent to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation,” an heir is one who hasn’t inherited but will inherit in the age to come.

Hebrews 2:14, “Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself took part of the same, that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is Satan. [15] And deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage,” the freedom, the redeeming occurs in the age to come. Hebrews 4:1, “Let us, therefore, fear lest, a promise being left us of entering into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it,” and in verse 11, “Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest,” though by application it refers to the present state of the believer, by ultimate fulfillment it’s the age to come. Hebrews 6:5, “Having tasted,” he’s talking about people here who have tasted “the good word of God, and the powers of the age to come.” In other words, part of their sign gifts were to give a foretaste of the tremendous freedom from the results of the fall and the curse.

Hebrews 6:11, “And we desire that every one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope unto the end.” In other words, the hope that enables you to stay with it, to stick it out, to ride out the rough places in life, to face the pressures, disasters and catastrophes come because you are rooted in the age to come. Remember what we said, the human viewpoint American will always be spotted because he thinks in terms of the present. The Bible-believing Christian who’s putting doctrine into practice can always be spotted to because he’s always thinking of the future.

Hebrews 6:18, “That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation,” see, the hope of the Christian in the middle of pressure, “who have fled for refuge” and by the way, look at verse 18 again, does that sound like what you usually hear in evangelistic circles, accept Jesus and you’ll have the joy, joy, joy. Look at what he says, we “fled for refuge,” does that sound like they’re trotting around high on Jesus? See, it’s completely opposite, people don’t read. [19] “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul,” look what he calls it, “an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, which enters into that within the veil,” it’s like a boat and the anchor has already been pitched inside the veil and it’s locked there and though we’re outside, we’re on the boat and the boat is outside of the veil, the anchor is rooted in the veil. And there’s the hope, the future hope, the future orientation to Christians.

Hebrews 8:10, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, God says,” He’s talking about the future in verse 11 and verse 12. Hebrews 9:26, “For then must He have often suffered since the foundation of the world. But now once, in the end of the world, has He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” Hebrews 9:28, “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for Him, shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation.”

Hebrews 10:13, talking about Christ at the Father’s right hand and it says “From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool,” referring to the age to come. Hebrews 10:35, “Cast not away, therefore, your confidence,” see what gets you through the pressures of life, “Cast now away your confidence, which has great recompense of reward. [36] For you have need of patience, that after you have done the will of God, you might receive the promise. [37] For yet a little while and He that shall come will come, and will not wait any longer.”

Hebrews 12:26, “Whose voice then shook the earth,” he’s talking about Mount Sinai, but now He has promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.” And this word, “yet once more” signifies the removing of those things that are shaken. Now Hebrews 10:28, the conclusion of the epistle on this theme, “Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved,” now why in the context can’t the kingdom be moved? Because the kingdom of which we are a part has no intimate contact with the present world system. The present world system will be judged but the anchor holds because the anchor isn’t in this world; the anchor is in the age to come. “Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.”

See, before you can serve God properly you have to know where your anchor is and you have to know about the age to come because that’s where your hope is; not here, there.

Father, we thank You…….