Clough Hebrews Lesson 25

Christ in His Sympathetic Priestly Role – Hebrews 4:14-15

Tonight we turn to Hebrews 4 and we move into a very, very interesting verse. In order that we can kind of slide into this with reference to the context, let’s just think back what we have observed so far in this epistle. We have seen in chapter 3:1-6 that Jesus Christ is the faithful high priest. We have seen that this is a comparison with Moses and that Moses was declared faithful in Numbers 12 and it’s very enlightening to observe why Moses was declared faithful in Numbers 12; he was declared faithful in the context of being challenged as to his leadership authority. And when this challenge was made God very distinctly and unmistakably made it clear that Moses was His man and therefore Moses being His man you’d better watch out what you’re saying against God’s man. And that was the context of Numbers; that’s the same idea brought over into Hebrews 3:1-6 concerning Jesus Christ because Christ is a faithful high priest and the implication is that Christ in His humanity is God’s man and you’d better watch out about violating His authority.

Then in Hebrews 3:7-4:13 we have the second warning passage in this book. By way of interpretation this warning applies to people who profess salvation and who are going to shortly reveal the fact they never were Christians, and by application it also refers to Christians who are in extreme forms of carnality and it’s a warning against them. The principle is the sin of unbelief. And the issue that the readers of this epistle faced was were they or were they not going to submit to Jesus’ authority just before 70 AD. Were they going to go back to old Judaism or were they going to go with Jesus’ words. And this man points out that if we rebel against Jesus Christ then we are going to reap certain repercussions. And I went back and I think I’ve got those verses that I lost last Wednesday night when I was trying to show you the sword. I showed you some of the verses, I want to show you a few more to show you how this comes out again and again and again.

We’re on Hebrews 4:12, “The Word of God … sword,” now this is often taken as a promise that the Word of God will have a benign effect but in the interpretation of the context it’s anything but benign. When it says, “The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword,” we are talking about a very bad effect that the Word of God is going to have on certain individuals. And we developed this from the sword of the cherubs in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3:24; we developed it from Isaiah 49:2 and how Messiah has the sword that goes out of His mouth. Now if you’ll turn to Revelation 1:16; I want to show you four verses in the book of Revelation where Jesus Christ is connected with this mysterious malevolent sword, the sword that destroys.

Apparently after last Wednesday night we had a few people all shook up and irritated that they weren’t so sure of their position as Christians, and they weren’t so sure of what was going to happen to them personally because they fell in that category. Well, they must have thought I was teaching personally at them; I don’t, I’m just presenting the text, but as I’ve said before, if the show fits you know what to do with it. Revelation 1:16, Christ is pictured as having in His right hand seven stars, “and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shines in its strength.” Now the seven stars are defined in verse 20 as the pastors of the seven churches to which Revelation 2 and 3 were addressed. So Jesus has in His right hand the seven pastors and out of His mouth goes the sharp two-edged sword, and the very next two chapters deal with judgment and evaluation on the work of those pastors, that is, the local churches. So the sword is going to appear time and again.

The next time we see it in the text is Revelation 2:16; He is talking to the church of Pergamos and notice in Revelation 2:12, the beginning of the report to the church at Pergamos, these are a series of inspection reports. “And to the pastor” or “the angel of the church in Pergamos write: These things says He who has the sharp sword with two edges. [13] I know your works, and where you dwell, where Satan’s seat is; and you hold fast My name and you have not denied my faith, even in those days in which Antipas my faithful martyr, who as slain among you, where Satan dwells. [14] But I have a few things against you, because you have there those,” now notice the people, the group of people in verse 14, “those who hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, [and to commit fornication,” and so on. This is apostasy, religious apostasy, false prophets.

And then He says, [15] So hast thou also” another group, “them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, [which thing I hate],” which is a big involved thing in the early history of the Church, but the point is that both of these groups, to be in summary, both of these groups are teaching false doctrine. And so in verse 16 he address the church as the Church and He says I want you to repent, change your mind toward those who are teaching the false doctrine, “[Repent], or else I will come to you quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of My mouth.” Now who is it that Christ is going to fight against with the sword of His mouth? Apostates. So the sword here is not benign at all; the sword here is a sword of punishment, a sword of judgment and a sword of destruction.

The next place we observe the sword in the book of Revelation is 19:15 which we showed you last week but nevertheless, turn back there to refresh our minds. When Christ comes back, this is built on Isaiah 49:2, it’s simply the Messianic picture of Isaiah brought to maturity by the Holy Spirit, and it says, “Out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should smite the nations, and He shall rule them with a rod of iron,” and so on. Again, is the sword benign or is the sword destructive? It’s obviously the sword that’s destructive.

So in all these passages, whenever we see, and it’s explicitly noticed at several places here, the “sharp two-edged sword.” That was said back in Revelation 2 so it’s the same sword that comes from the mouth of Jesus and that sword is the sword that judges those who have heard the Word of God and who have turned their backs, once having heard.

Now turn back to Hebrews 4, just by way of review and trying to make this specific as to how the sword shows up in our experience. He cautions these readers in verse 11 to make sure they are going to enter the rest, and the way they can do this is to believe and trust God’s promises that they know already under the pressure they face. And the pressure they face are the trials in 70 AD by way of interpretation, but application of the principle holds repeatedly in history. And then the reason or the motive for this is that the danger that if they rebel against God’s promises at the time of need in the critical hour they’re going to suffer the same kind of judgment the people suffered in the wilderness wandering, when they were excluded from the land. They faced the sharp two edged sword and how was the sword wielded against the people of the forty years wandering? It was wielded against them in making them fail; it was designed to frustrate their every activity and to leave them just wandering almost aimless in sand for forty years. In other words, the sword didn’t literally appear to the people who were judged and excluded from the land of Canaan, but the effects of the sword literally appeared, and it was a physical exclusion from the land.

And last week we terminated on the idea that we have at least three ways in which the conscience makes itself known. First and the normal way, the first channel, so to speak, of feedback from your conscience is when the conscience identifies to you mentally that something is wrong. And when the conscience does this there will be a guilt sensation that something is wrong and displeasing to God. And if that doesn’t work, because we’ve been very skillful at not listening, the conscience has a second channel and that is it begins to remove your emotions from the control of your mind and your emotions go out of kilter. And the solution here again is restoration to obedience. I’ve just come back from Brownwood and the young people down there are no different than they are up here and several who have difficulties are having them strictly because of the same old problem of disobedience.

And we have the third way that the conscience has, if channels one and two fail, then the conscience can attack us so that we have psychosomatic effects or bodily illness. Those are three internal ways that the conscience has of pestering us, and if those don’t work then the sword that comes from the mouth of Jesus Christ can be exercised against us externally by various failures in the life. In other words, we are Christ’s and those who have heard the Word are responsible to what they have heard. Those who are unbelievers, and that’s the prime interpretation of the passage, those who are unbelievers who have never personally accepted Christ, yet have heard, are those that bear the greatest threat of this sword coming against them.

Then in verse 13 we pointed out how all creatures are opened and the word “opened” was the wrestling hold to grab someone around the neck and stretch their neck out so the very next move in combat would be slicing their throat. And it’s very appropriate coming after verse 12 which deals with the sharp two-edged sword. In other words, what verse 13 says is that there is not one creature who is not vulnerable to Christ and His exercise of His sword. There’s no defense against it. Now all of this has been very bad and very discouraging, and frankly if you follow with it very carefully, it’s very scary because he’s making no bones about it there’s just no middle ground here.

So now in Hebrews 4:14 we begin a new section. Remember in 3:1-6 Christ is our faithful high priest, we’ve just completed the warning passage and now beginning in 4:14 on through 5:10 we have a doctrinal section. The first doctrinal section was Christ is our faithful high priest. This doctrinal section stresses that Jesus Christ is our sympathetic high priest. And these doctrinal sections are given for our encouragement, a tremendous amount of encouragement. And verse 14 and 15 really have a lot of doctrine in them so as usual our policy in Hebrews is to go slow, it’s a difficult book. And I’ll try to remember to turn it off early enough tonight so we can have some questions so we can catch up on this.

“Seeing, then, that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. [15] For we have not an high priest who cannot be touched with our infirmities,” literally, “but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Now this is the basis for making certain claims about Christ that were made, if you’ll observe for a moment, back in Hebrews 2:14. In Hebrews 2:14-18 Jesus Christ’s priesthood was introduced. And back when we studied that section I made certain points that we will have to review again. Remember 2:14, “Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also likewise took part of the same, that through death He might neutralize him that had the power of death, that is the devil. [15] And deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage. [16] For verily He took now on Him the nature of angels, but He took the seed of Abraham. [17] Wherefore, in all things it behooved him to be made like unto His brethren, that He might,” and it doesn’t say “be,” it means become, in the Greek there are two verbs, one is eimi, the other one is ginomai, and ginomai is the verb that means to become, to change in status. That’s the verb in verse 17, it is not the verb to be, it is the verb to become, and it means that this, whatever is happening in verse 17 has not reference to Jesus’ deity because deity is immutable and never changes. So whatever is changing about Jesus Christ must have to do with His humanity. And what we read there is “that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. [18] For in that He Himself has suffered being tempted, He is able to succour them that are being tempted.”

The implication of verses 17-18 is that Jesus Christ, in His humanity, was not born sympathetic. He had to become sympathetic. And Jesus Christ, during His lifetime faced trials and pressures, as a man, that were necessary to turn Him from an unsympathetic human to a sympathetic human. And the only thing that turns Him from an unsympathetic priest to a sympathetic priest was the experience of temptation Himself. That was the prerequisite for being a sympathetic priest. So Christ had to go through many, many areas of life, if for no other thing that He can exercise His priesthood.

Now there are two parts to Jesus’ priesthood in our salvation; one that we’ve stressed over and over again is the perfect sacrifice on the cross, that’s finished, that’s over, that’s the offering of the priest. But the offering of the priest has to be offered, and so a second part of Christ’s priesthood is not just bring about the offering but to apply the offering to those who need the results of the offering. So part one of Christ’s priesthood is to die on the cross to render the perfect sacrifice. And part two of His priesthood is in heaven where He is now applying the results of the cross.

Now it’s important to see that the results of the finished work of Christ are being applied on a personal basis, on an individual basis today. In other words, of all the people sitting here right now there are no two of you who have had the finished work of Christ applied in identically the same way. Each one of us is an individual and God, through the high priest Christ, is working to apply forgiveness of sins in utterly unique ways in people’s lives. Now positionally our sins are forgiven but in experience they must be forgiven and thus 1 John 1:9 goes back to the cross. God, so to speak, holds the cross up; every time we are out of fellowship and we have to confess our sins to be restored to fellowship, we have to go to the cross.

And the technical vocabulary for this is the forgiveness of sin. It’s the freedom from guilt. And I’m going to stick with that terminology because certain other teachers devised various terminologies and I understand why they do it, but on the other hand, this Brownwood trip was an interesting confirmation of my philosophy of not to proliferate vocabulary because if you proliferate vocabulary in terminology you’ll find yourself splitting the sheep from the sheep, and so I’m trying to stay with standard voc, Biblical vocabulary. And the Biblical vocabulary we’re dealing with is the forgiveness of sins. That’s the application of Christ’s objective work to your personal account. Now it doesn’t happen by computer. Though Christ finished the work outside the city walls of Jerusalem, the results of that work, in experience on a moment by moment basis, are not applied automatically. They’re applied by sense of position, yes, but as far as the personal revelation of what He has done for you, how that plugs into various sin problems that you have, all of that is being engineered by a human priest, and a priest who is not just a human but a sympathetic human, and a priest who understands all of us because He too is part of one of us.

Now it’s that truth that now emerges in this new section in verses Hebrews 4:14. “Seeing, then,” “then” is a conjunction, oun, a very important one in the text. In fact it was considered so important at this point that Tyndale and Luther’s Bible begin chapter 5 with this verse, verse 14 is chapter 5, verse 1 in Luther’s Bible and also in Tyndale’s and the reason is because these men saw the oun, and they broke the section, as many of the ancient Greek manuscripts broke the section here. “Therefore,” we’re moving to a totally new thing, the three verses you see, verse 14, 15 and 16 and you see the break with chapter 5; you shouldn’t see that break. Verses 14, 15, 16, verse 1, 2, 3, 4 are all one. The chapter heading confuses you. Don’t break the last verse of chapter 4 from the first verse of chapter 5. That’s just put in there, those chapter headings are not inspired. In fact, the verse numberings aren’t inspired. They never had verse numberings till the last four or five hundred years so don’t get hung up about verse numberings and chapter headings.

“Seeing, then, that we have a great high priest.” What’s the main verb of verse 14; we’ve got participles and main verbs, let’s first anchor ourselves to the main verb of the sentence, then we’ll go shooting for the participles and tie them in. Let’s get this action pinned down so we can be specific. What’s the main verb of verse 14? [someone answers] Hold fast. That’s the exhortation, “hold fast our profession.” Now let’s look at “hold fast our profession,” then we’ll deal with these participles because the participles are going to, believe me, get very thick very fast. So let’s anchor ourselves on the easy part first. The easy part is “let us hold fast,” meaning grab unto, keep holding, “the profession.” Now the word translated as “profession” in verse 14 occurs again in Hebrews 13:15 and I want you to notice the context there because something very specific is on this man’s mind. He’s not just writing a spiritual life course, this is specific counsel and exhortation to a historic group of Christians facing a real specific trial.

In Hebrews 13:15 this defines what is on our author’s mind when he uses the word “profession.” “By Him, therefore,” he says, “let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His name.” Now there is where you have this concept defined. He is talking about public praise. And those of you who went through the Psalm series, please remember that public praise is not going around saying praise the Lord, praise the Lord, or some other idiot goofy thing. Praising God means doing what the psalmist did when they praised God. And what did they do when they praised God? They narrated specific acts that God had delivered them from and then they generalized to this is how God works until they finally adored Him and His attributes.

In other words, the praise in Scripture is never an ecstatic utterance; it is always contentful. Very important! Because why is there public praise? So other creatures can join us. If your praise is going to be an ecstatic nonverbal utterance then other people around you can’t join with you when the whole objective of the praise is to communicate and rejoice and celebrate together a definite truth. Now how can you celebrate and rejoice together a definite truth when somebody is going through frothing at the mouth and rolling down the aisle. How can that happen? It can’t happen. The only way you can join in with someone else is to plug in by means of a sort of communication with content.

Now what is the historic problem, why do you suppose, with a little imagination tonight, what do you suppose is the trouble at this point. Why is he saying let’s hold onto that? Can you mentally guess? We can’t be definite here but can you use a little sanctified imagination to visualize what the problem is and why he has to exhort these believers to hold on, keep it up. What was the pressure? [someone answers] All right, these believers were being worn down by constantly getting attacked over and over. And it wasn’t a vicious kind of attack, it was this constant harassment, snide remarks, this kind of thing, and they were letting this long barrage of never ending, kind of unspoken harassment, get to them. And they were just getting weighted down, and so the man says believers, when you are in this kind of situation, you “hold fast” to proclaiming the Word of God. Keep it up. If it irritates them, then so what, irritate them, but keep up the teaching of the Word of God, no matter who you irritate. So “hold fast.” Now that shows you, these believers are human and he wasn’t writing to an ideal church of plastic saints because they had all the problem we had and they were tending to just phase out.

Let’s go back and look, what else happens, because he’s going to bring in a most astounding reason. He says “let’s hold fast our profession,” now again using a little sanctified imagination and so on, can some of you try to visualize yourself as one of the people attacking the group of Hebrew Christians. What would you be saying to them? You’re a Jew, and you’re trying to… can anyone think of some things that might be on your mind as a non-Christian Jew about these Christian fanatics? What would be some things that would be on your mind that you’d like to do to these people and why? Can you visualize the historic process a little? Let’s see if we can get this so we can really see what he’s going to make; I want to set you up here for what’s coming.

[someone answers] As far as the Jewishness of these Hebrew Christians, that was fine, but every time they’d get concentrating on the person of Christ, this Jewish carpenter, they were making too much of a deal out of Him, so they were trying to, you can imagine, they were trying to absorb the Hebrew Christians because they were fellow Jews, but on the other hand, they were trying to push down anything that had to do with Jesus Christ. It focused on Jesus Christ. Now if you were a non-Christian Jew, probably, in 70 AD, what would be your image of Jesus. You obviously, unlike liberals today, knew that He existed, you had no doubt there, but what would you do? [someone answers] All right, very good, you would consider Jesus Christ to be a blasphemer because as a monotheistic Jew, wouldn’t you resent somebody that walked around claiming Himself to be God? Obviously. What would you as a non-Christian Jew think Jesus really was? [someone answers] Right, you’d expect to see some glory, some power. All right, now let’s look, and he’s going to feed us some glory and power right now.

“…we have,” and “having” is a present participle, the action of the present participle is a condition that parallels the main verb, so he’s saying look, all the times when you get in those pressure situations and you’re tempted to just fag out and forget the whole thing and to lay off teaching the Word of God, when that happens, at that very moment it happens, you have this, you have “ a great high priest.” Now just pause there for a moment. The word high priest is a normative word; it’s a normative word, it’s one that is used in the Septuagint and so on, but there’s something very abnormal about this particular expression. The “great high priest,” and when he prefixes the standard vocabulary, “high priest” with the word “great high priest” he’s starting to raise some flags, watch out, something’s coming because he’s deliberately contrasting Christ with all the other high priests. Can any of you think of the names of one of the high priests when Jesus Christ was crucified, one of the biggest goons that ever lived in Jerusalem. Caiaphas. So you have all these series of priests and when he says the “great high priest” he’s really knocking the whole bunch of the high priests here, as contrasted to you Jews and your low class high priest. See! This is definitely not the Dale Carnegie approach on how to win friends and influence people. This is how to destroy the presuppositions of your opponents.

Now he makes this statement, and here’s a lot of doctrine tied to one word and we’ll be lucky to finish this one verb. “Who has passed into the heavens,” now this is in the perfect tense, meaning it has been accomplished in the past with results that continue into the present, and this particular verb for motion has a prefix, dia, plus the verb tense. And when you see this it motion through, piercing through, “the one who pierces through the heavens,” and “one that has passed through the heavens,” and the idea is that it’s a process, it took Jesus time to do this. This was a space/time motion, and He passed through and through and through and through and through and through and then finally He finished passing through and He now sits at the Father’s right hand.

Now let’s just review a few things. Turn to Hebrews 1:3. Notice in verse 3, it talks about various things He did toward the last of verse 3, “…when He had by Himself purged our sins, He sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high,” in other words, at a specific location. It can’t be God who is doing the sitting here, it is Jesus Christ in His humanity. What was the definition of Jesus Christ? God and man, undiminished deity and true humanity united in one person without confusion forever. All right, deity has the attribute of immutability and immutability can’t change. So whenever you’re talking about Jesus in Hebrews and you see something that He’s doing that change His status, that has to do with His humanity. So here when He sits, that has to do with His humanity and when it says He sits on high, that’s a place, a location, a point location.

Now let’s look at another verse, Hebrews 7:26, “For such an high priest became us who was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heaven.” So the priest has moved to a point location, “higher than the heaven.” Turn to Hebrews 9:24, and to get the context let’s go to verse 23 just for a moment, “It was, therefore, necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these,” now what is “the pattern of the things in heaven?” The pattern was the tabernacle, the tabernacle was a model and so he says “the pattern of the things in the heavens should be purged with these, but the heavenly things themselves,” so you have two points, we have the type and we have the antitype, we have what I will call from this point forward in the lesson tonight the model, and the antitype is the reality. And so he’s saying look, here’s the model of what happened, over here, these things occurred thus and such… Now Christ purged the real thing and you will notice in verse 23, “the heavenly things themselves,” that’s the real thing, not the model, and that is one of the verses that Jesus didn’t have to go to 8,000 different planets in 45 different galaxies to render His atonement for different groups of creatures in the overall universe, but rather, at one fell swoop by dying for sin on this planet, the results of that atonements are cosmic wide.

But then 9:24 goes on to make an assertion about Jesus in His humanity. “For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands,” that’s the model, He is not entered into those places, “which are figures” or “types of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.” So you have the model, Christ in the Holy of Holies. Here’s what the model looked like; you had a compartment called the Holy of Holies; you had a compartment called the Holy Place. In the Holy Place you had the showbread, you had the candles, and you had the altar of incense. You had Christ’s work depicted by means of furniture in the Holy Place. Worship occurs in the Holy Place, but behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies was the mercy seat and the mercy seat was the place where the Shekinah glory dwelt, and the high priest would come into the holy place but he couldn’t get into the Holy of Holies except once a year and then only with blood. He had to apply a sacrifice to qualify to get into the Holy of Holies. In other words, the worship occurred out in the Holy Place but not in the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies was the presence of God Himself.

Now Hebrews is shot through and through with this rocking motion, back and forth, between the model and the real, between the model and the real. Now I said earlier in this Hebrews series I was going to try, as we go through here, to fill you in on how some of the people, from the time that this epistle was written, were interpreting the Old Testament. He dealt with angels and we saw how they were interpreting angels it helped us, remember in that passage in Hebrews 1, how the angels transformed themselves into figurative phenomena, we think of angels as appearing as men, possibly you think of angels appearing as animals but the Bible says that the angels appear as impersonal figurative phenomenon also. And that was a new thought and is a new thought to many Christians but it wasn’t, it was very prevalent at the time this epistle was written, known and understood. And so the author freely uses that concept.

Well, here we are with another one. And so what we’re going to do now is we’re going to ask ourselves this question. Since there’s this rocking motion in this epistle, back and forth between that tabernacle and the reality, and since we know the tabernacle didn’t exist at this time in history because Herod’s temple was not a perfect imitation of the tabernacle, why was there such an interest in the tabernacle. Why not just talk about the temple? Solomon’s temple or Herod’s temple. Why go all the way back to the original tabernacle? Why is that made the type to contrast with Christ and he could have very easily referred to the ripped curtain in the literal Herod’s temple. But this author skipped all the way back, centuries and centuries and centuries back. Here’s why. It was commonly understood in Jewish circles at this time in history that the tabernacle, originally designed by Moses, was a model of the entire universe.

Now I’ll say it again and then we’re going to develop this theme. They understood the tabernacle to be a model of the cosmos, they understood it and you can see this, if you want reference… I’ll give you what the model was and then we’ll talk about two references. The Holy of Holies was understood to be the third heaven. There was an analogy being drawn between the way the model was and reality, and the Holy of Holies in the Jewish tabernacle originally designed by Moses, not Solomon, not Herod, but the original Mosaic tabernacle had been given by God by divine revelation as a small finite model in a very manageable state, of the universe. And so the Holy of Holies would be the highest heaven or what we will call the third heaven. There were three heavens, explained in 2 Corinthians 12:2, but basically it’s this way, the first heaven was considered to be the air immediately around us; we’d call it the atmosphere. The second heaven is what we would call deep space, that which is extra terrestrial, the moon, going out beyond that the planets, the sun, going out beyond that the different galaxies, going all the way out and encompassing all the realm of the stars. That was the second heaven. But the people had a more graphic concept of heaven that existed beyond the physical universe and that was the third heaven and that was the Holy of Holies.

So that on the model, when they built the model and they acted the drama out century after century after century and God gave His Shekinah glory down into that Holy of Holies, what He was really doing was saying look, this Holy of Holies is like My heaven is and I’m going to make that into a model of heaven itself for you. And there’s a throne in the Holy of Holies and it’s the mercy seat. Now this is why later on you’re going to see the “throne of grace,” you’re going to find out what that throne of grace is. But in the Holy of Holies, in the model, there was a mercy seat there. And over the mercy seat was the Shekinah glory. Now that model is in one to one correspondence with the structure of the universe itself.

So therefore, that being the case, then the Holy Place, the Holy of Holies was analogous to the third heaven, the Holy Place then became the place of worship which was heaven and earth, the place where men live and exist, the place where the finished work of Christ was worked out. Remember; look at the analogy in the model now, in the Holy Place what was the furniture showing in the Holy Place, not in the Holy of Holies, in the Holy Place. The furniture there was depicting three things, the bread, the light and the prayer of incense. The incense would rise as it was burning and it was a picture of the prayers emanating from the altar. And so the Holy Place here was the place where the throne was being done, on earth obviously. The light is where God sent His light into the world. The bread is the bread that God gave to the world so they could eat.

So the Holy Place, the earth, one to one correspondence now between the model and the real thing, the model depicts in the Holy Place the finished work of Christ and the communication of men with God. In the real scene the earth was the location of Jesus Christ’s death in public, in front of men and the place where men publicly pray and worship. But the Holy of Holies was barred and the high priest couldn’t go into that Holy of Holies in the model except once a year he had to go in there to make atonement for the sins of the nation and that was an exception, but generally speaking all men were kept out of the Holy of Holies. In fact, when they collapsed the ark and they moved it they had to do it in such a way that they always kept the curtain in front of them, they could never gaze inside, and they had a very ingenious technique of collapsing the thing so they could get that cube collapsed without looking inside the cube.

So it was absolutely off limits to men, men were not permitted to go into this portion of the model. And so in reality men are not permitted into the third heaven until something is going to have to happen. So let’s look on the side of the real: third heaven and here we’ll just put the earth. Now have we made this up? No, if you want the references, Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 3, chapter 6; Josephus gives here the tradition of what they believed the tabernacle was. But we don’t have just Josephus, we have a rabbi, Rabbi [can’t understand name] A Talmudic Faith of the Second Century, writing this: The house of the Holy of Holies was made to correspond to the highest heaven. The outer Holy Place was made to correspond to the earth and the courtyard was to correspond to the sea. I have in my office a book written by a Jewish scholar who reviews all the Talmudic traditions about the temple, and not only does he say that this is the standard Jewish interpretation but if you go far back enough in history this was the interpretation of all temples in all the ancient religions of the world. Their temples were a microcosm of the universe itself.

Now let’s see what we can do with that analogy? What is the author of Hebrews doing? When he says in verse 14, when you are tempted, Christians, to forget it, and to forget that Jewish carpenter by the name of Jesus, He never came in power and glory, remember who He is, He is the man who has penetrated through outer space all the way to the point of the Holy Place, the first deep space probe was conducted by Jesus Christ and his launch was described in Acts 1. I’m not trying to be facetious when I make the analogy, I’m trying to deliberately make it as physically graphic to you as I can. Don’t think of Jesus as some sort of a mirage that after He kind of disappeared from everybody, he just went plink and disappeared into the 8^th dimension some place. Wrong! Jesus Christ moved and He was physically in motion towards a place. And this man says that place in the universe that we observe, relative to us, is in the same place the Holy of Holies was to the Holy Place in the tabernacle. We have an high priest, in other words, who busted through. And He’s made it beyond the limits of the universe into the very throne room of God. And He’s sitting down there.

Now don’t you see that this does something to Jesus? Don’t you see that this makes Jesus into a titanic cosmic Savior. Christ is no longer just even confined to the planet earth, He is the Lord, man and God, of the entire universe, all the galaxies, all the celestial extraterrestrial bodies that [can’t understand word] because He’s penetrated beyond outer space into this dimension, wherever it is, the throne room of God.

Now to show you that it’s very physical and must be conceived physically let’s go to a few other passages in God’s Word. Let’s start in Revelation 19 when He comes back. In Revelation 19 Christ is going to return from the Holy of Holies and He’s going to walk back into the Holy Place, that is, He’s going to come physically from wherever He is now back into the physical universe that we observe, and when He does so there is motion. Revelation 19:11, when Christ returns and there are several places in God’s Word where this same concept appears, it says, “I saw heaven opened,” ... “heaven opened,” now all through the Old Testament the heavens are pictured as a tent cover. You can easily see why a nomadic people, where would they sleep at night? They’d either sleep under the stars or they would sleep under the tent, and so they’d look up at the stars and they’d say that is God’s tent and the very word to create heaven means to open the tent in the Hebrew. So they’d conceived, as they looked up into the heavens, the same way they would have conceived of sleeping on the ground looking up at the top of the tent. They didn’t believe like the Greeks, some big hairy [can’t understand word] or something. They just believed it was a tent cover. And the reason that is a significant concept it because at the end time when Messiah comes He rips the tent cover open and He comes through it.

What that means is that when Christ bursts back into the universe it’s going to be very physically noticeable, when it says the heavens are ripped aside, it’s going to be pictured just as in Herod’s temple what happened when Christ died? The curtain was physically rent from top to bottom because there was somebody moving from the Holy Place into the Holy of Holies and now when that reverse motion is indicated it says and the heavens are opened. Isn’t it interesting that in all these visions that are given by God the Holy Spirit to His prophets, in every one of these visions, if we are to believe in our doctrine of verbal revelation, we believe that the Holy Spirit selects vocabulary; we believe that when God gives a vision to these people that vision is not just a dream out of his own figment of his imagination, the very symbols of the vision itself are deliberately given by the Holy Spirit to correspond to reality so that when those believers are there at that time and place and the prophecy is fulfilled they say oh, of course, yeah, this pictured that. Now they wouldn’t be able to say this pictured exactly if the vocabulary wasn’t accurate. So isn’t it interesting that the vocabulary is consistently this way, opening of a curtain and Christ comes through it.

Now let’s look at it. Revelation 19:11, “I saw heaven opened,” and through the opening in heaven I saw “a white horse: and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True … [12] His eyes were like a flame of fire….” And then in verse 14, whole vast armies are coming pouring through this opening into the physical dark universe. And then that’s when the war begins and that’s when they say that the kings gathered together, in verse 19, “the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army.” This is a cosmic war; it involves not just the planet earth, it involves a titanic battle of the cosmic itself, with all the evil principalities and power gathered together, headquartered on earth with the beast, that’s his command post, the earth. And yet you have heavens genocide and the armies of Christ leap into the universe to take it over by force. Now these are the cosmic pictures that were well understood in the first century. Now let’s turn back and see the application, and while we’re turning back there’s several other passages which I’ll just note: Ephesians 1:21 is also another passage of Paul where this same thing comes up.

Hebrews 4:14, “Seeing, then, that we have a great high priest,” present participle, present participle!!! Meaning that when you are a discouraged believer, figure it’s all over and you haven’t got an ounce of strength left to be loyal and faithful to the Word of God, what he’s saying is at that moment, believer, think who Jesus really is. And meditate on where He is, and if you’ll think where Jesus is at this moment, beyond the limits of outer space, you automatically have to think well then, He must be qualified because He got there, because He was at one time on this planet and He moved from this planet to wherever this other place is. So then he says, now that we have a high priest that is passed through the heavens, all the way out to the outer limits, now he says, in the light of this, let’s hold fast our profession. Now don’t you think that’s a pretty good [can’t understand word]. Do you think he gave [can’t understand word] sufficient reason for remaining faithful to the Word of God?

And then he goes on and if you stopped at verse 14, we won’t finish verse 15 but I just want to start it here, if we left at verse 14 we would still get the sensation, yeah, but the thing is that Christ is so far away, because Christ in His humanity can’t be present here and present in His heavenly place. Christ in the heart is not where the action is. Christ in the Holy Place is where the action is, in the Holy of Holies, the difference between Protestant thought and charismatic thought. Charismatic thought always dwells on the human heart; Protestant Reformation thought always dwells in the Holy Place, the Holy of Holies.

So, we have in verse 15 the fact that we not only have a cosmic high priest, a great high priest, but now he comes down to the personal level, but there, at that place, way far away, He’s sympathetic. “For we have not an high priest who is not able,” literally, “to be touched,” and this is the very word from which in English we get the word sympathetic, sumpatheo, “who cannot be unsympathetic,” not “with the feeling of our infirmities, but “with our infirmities” literally.

Now it would be well to go back and review that thing we had to do in chapter 2. Remember I said there’s a difference between Adam before the fall, Adam after the fall, and Christ. Adam before the fall had to learn +R learned behavior patterns under tension. Adam was not born in innocence with obedience. Obedience had to be learned, even without sin. Before the fall Adam was still under tension. Tension is not sinful because Adam was under tension. If you’re going to say all tension is sinful you’ve got a problem because Adam was under tension. He was under tension whether or not he was going to obey God. So was Jesus under tension, whether or not He was going to submit to God’s will. So tension is not sinful. In fact, tension is the will of God until you get into the rest. Until the rest spoken of, when we finally can relax in the presence of God, we are always under tension. And the point of the author of Hebrews is don’t try to fake it as though you’re in the rest because you’re not; you’re going to have tension, tension, tension, tension, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, all the way until you die and are face to face with the Lord, then the rest begins, so don’t goof off now. So the tension aids in developing these patterns of obedience.

Now after the fall that mandate to obey doesn’t disappear. The fall is totally depraved man but it doesn’t remove the command. After the fall we all have it laid on us, that we too are to learn obedience. But we’ve got a problem because we have the old sin nature too that wants to go the other way. And not only do you have the sin nature inside but we have the external results of sin, the infirmities. Now the Bible distinguishes, this word is usually the word sin and this is the word infirmity or weakness. Obviously all infirmities have been caused by the historic space/time fall here, but the infirmity would be hunger, it would be things that corporately we all share as fallen creatures, every one of us here face these problems, the infirmities of the flesh. And we also have inside sin.

Now we have to learn obedience because the mandate to obey hasn’t been removed. But we’ve got obstructions that make it impossible for us to learn our original mandate, and that’s where salvation comes in. Salvation does not obey for you. The grace of God is not given to take the load off us to obey; the grace of God is given to take the blocks out so that we can obey, but the obedience has to still come from our choice. Grace simply removes the hindrances. So don’t think of this passages… this where a lot of these deeper life conferences…that’s a bunch of bull because they give this impression that you just have to lean back and let Jesus. Now that is wrong, it is seriously wrong; you don’t lean back and let Jesus, grace gets rid of the obstruction but grace doesn’t plant Adam’s garden. Grace dealt with Adam’s needs; God didn’t go, hey Adam, now look, you just lean on Jesus and He’ll plant your garden for you, lean on Jesus and He’ll till the Garden and take care of Eden. Was that there? No! Adam still had to till the Garden; grace can only suppress the weeds but the Garden itself still has to be planted, still has to be watered and still has to be brought to fruitfulness. So grace gets rid of this.

Now in Jesus case, since He was a true man, He too is under the mandate to obey and He too had to learn to obey. Now it says here, “who cannot be touched with our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we, yet without sin,” and that means Christ had no old sin nature but He did have the infirmities of living in a fallen world. So, Jesus Christ faced bona fide temptation. The theoretical doctrine that we’re teaching here, we won’t have time to amplify it, maybe we will later on, it’s called the impeccability of Christ for those of you theologians who want the proper title. The impeccability of Christ means that Jesus Christ not only was able not to sin but He was not able to sin. It was 100% certain from the very beginning that Jesus Christ would never fail one temptation because had He failed, the whole sovereign plan of God would have been dismissed, right out the window. Jesus Christ had genuine temptation but it was certain that He would never fail. Now that may sound to you like that made it easy for Him. The best rejoinder to that was done in the 19^th century by an English Anglican bishop, B. F. Westcott, and he wrote this, and this is about the easiest way I’ve ever seen it stated. “Sympathy with a sinner in his trial does not depend on the experience of sin, but on the experience of the strength of temptation to sin which only the sinless person can know in a full intensity because he who falls always yielded before the last [can’t understand word].”

Now put in a graphical way, here’s what Westcott’s pointing out. The impeccability, far from destroying the reality of Christ’s temptation goes like this. Suppose that we stand here and we have the sin nature, all right, the pressure increases, and increases, and increases, and finally we crack. Now when Jesus Christ faced the pressure would increase, and increase, and increase, and increase, and increase, and increase and He never cracked. So who withstands the greater pressure? Obviously Jesus Christ. Now that’s what it’s talking about, that in the Holy of Holies, in the third heavens tonight, there is a priest who for you has made a perfect, total, complete, sacrifice for your sins, and having done all that, not only that, but tonight He knows in His own humanity the pressures that you face, because He faced them in those areas and more so. So with that kind of a high priest you can’t go wrong, can you?

And do you notice where the center of action is; this is very critical, I’m very concerned, the charismatic inroads into evangelical Protestantism here, and do you notice the center of action in Hebrews, it’s not anywhere in the human heart. The center of action is what is happening in the Holy of Holies; it’s Christ in heaven that’s the point of the center, not Christ in the heart.

We ended again too late for questions…. Father, we thank You…..