Clough Hebrews Lesson 28

The Author of Eternal Salvation – 5:9-10

Tonight we’ll be able to finish this section of Hebrews. This section goes from Hebrews 4:14 to Hebrews 5:10 and deals with Jesus Christ as a sympathetic high priest. The problem that the believers to whom Hebrews was written, their problem is sticking with Christ under pressure and the pressure they experienced is a pressure to defect back to the old order and the point that the author of Hebrews is making, that Jesus Christ has come in the progress of revelation, there’s no further turning back, the new revelation has come into history; it is the final word, there can be no turning around. Now you can amend revelation by further revelation but Jesus Christ, according to the author of Hebrews, is the final piece of revelation. There isn’t going to be any more to Israel until they cope with Jesus Christ. And this means there isn’t any more revelation, period, in history until Israel copes with her Messiah; until Israel submits to her Messiah.

So we’ve come to the final chapter and this is a theme that’s prevalent throughout. You remember, this is how the epistle started. “God, who at various times spoke…has in these last day spoken unto us by the Son.” And it means that the revelation of Jesus is final and the idea is that these believers must stick with it. That’s why in Hebrews 4:14 he says, “Seeing, then, that we have a great high priest, that has passed into the heavens,” and the point in verse 14 is that Jesus Christ is now physically in place. And in verses 15-16, “we have not an high priest who cannot be touched with our infirmities,” and [16] “Let us, therefore, come boldly unto the throne of grace,” so not only is He in place physically, but He is also functioning in that place. He is functioning at the mercy seat. You notice the “throne of grace” in verse 16 is the real version of the ark of the covenant that existed in the Old Testament economy.

Now Jesus, at the Father’s right hand, is doing a work that seems, if you think it all 20^th century like, it seems that the work that Jesus is doing at the Father’s right hand has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem the believers are facing, because the problem the believers are facing is one of pressure, just normal pressure in the daily life, but a particular kind of suffering, suffering because they are being ridiculed, since they have (quote) “left” (end quote) Judaism, and because of this they are to stick with it. It seems a little incongruous that the author of Hebrews keeps pointing to the high priesthood of Christ; what’s that got to do with it? It has all in the world to do with it because of the problem of guilt. The epistle to Hebrews says that you cannot solve your problems until guilt is erased. And guilt cannot be erased until you personally appropriate Jesus Christ’s finished work. Now it is finished in heaven by Him, without your asking but subjectively in the human heart it is not dealt with until we decide to confess our sins and consciously rely upon His grace.

Now to show you a modern repercussion of why guilt does underlie the, what appear to be disconnected problems, let me read a section from a book that’s come out tying this to social problems and guilt, called The Politics of Guilt and Pity and I want you to notice the tactic because it’s the same thing. Now the epistle to Hebrews, if you recall, from Hebrews 2:14-15 says that Jesus would destroy, or neutralize Satan, who had the power or death, [15] “And deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” See, that’s talking about believers. Well, it could also apply to unbelievers, but the principle is that men who are guilty legally before God have certain repercussions. We have moral guilt which shows in guilt feelings; we have fear, we have indecision, such as we have seen in the David series; guilt is the cause underlying all of these things and the problem that we have as moderns is that we like to draw a neat little line around all that and we deal with the guilt feeling and we deal with the fear, we think, we deal with the indecision, but we never deal with the guilt that causes all three of those. And when you have unresolved guilt it plays out. And so we have the use of guilt as a stratagem in modern politics.

“Wherever false responsibility,” this is page 43 of this particular volume but it’s a very interesting application of the principle we’re seeing in Hebrews. “Wherever false responsibility is promoted an ugly strategy of power is present. This strategy can be briefly summarized,” and he gives four points in the politics of guilt. “First, make men feel guilty for all things and for everyone; whatever happens on any continent or country is their responsibility and their burden; all the starving, needy, oppressed, and all the indigents, criminal and diseased of the world are their burden and they are guilty of evading their responsibilities if they do nothing about them. Second, it is obvious that men cannot do much more than care for their own families, therefore ask them to exercise this imposed responsibility for the world by delegation, to delegate it to the state and to the elite planners. Once a man is convinced that he has this world responsibility he will want to do something about it and this second step becomes an obvious and easy solution. Third, by being given this world responsibility, the state and its elite planners become God, governors of all things. They can now begin to remake the world in terms of their superior wisdom; God after all hardly had their superior and scientific intelligence. Fourth, salvation has thus become the work of man; man remakes man by statist law and action; this is the goal of false responsibility to be God, controlling and remaking man. In this strategy guilt is necessary and the politics is the politics of guilt in every sense.”

And he goes on to describe many, many instances in our American history where American people have been hoodwinked into giving power to the federal government because of guilt feelings. So what we’re seeing in Hebrews, the idea that guilt underlies a lot of what appear to be superficial difficulties is a true principle. Now Jesus Christ is resolving guilt at the seat of the problem, which is in God’s presence. And if that is solved, then there is hope for solving all the other ramifications.

And so we come to this sympathetic high priest of Hebrews 4:14-5:10 and we have seen thus far that Jesus Christ meets two of the qualification of a high priest; He is called by God, after all, one can’t serve in God’s presence unless He is invited into God’s presence, and don’t minimize that qualification. A priest must be called; it is a privilege to stand in God’s presence and He does not have to open the door because everyone knocks. God opens the door to whomsoever He pleases. So whomever it is that we see there serving in God’s presence must be an invited guest; there are not uninvited ones. And if that’s the case, then priests must be invited by God; a priest cannot walk into God’s presence and demand a hearing. In fact, God won’t even tolerate demonstrations outside the veil. So we have the first qualification that the priest is called.

The second qualification is that he has to be sympathetic, that he has to have compassion. And by the way, this sympathetic nature of Jesus Christ shows in two areas; it shows in the application of particular points of forgiveness. Now that means that Jesus Christ… you see, when we become Christians part of our eternal possession is forgiven, that’s our legal state before God. But, Jesus Christ can apply forgiveness in such a way that we become conscious of His forgiveness. Now you see, when you become a Christian, when I become a Christian, if you take all of our sins we’re conscious of “about that much,” and as we go on in the Christian life we may become conscious of about that much, and Jesus Christ may choose to work in your life to reveal areas of sin and this line is actually a variable, He may expand in some areas and not in others and He’ll let you in on it, so to speak, let you visualize very carefully and unambiguously where you are in rebellion against God’s laws. He does that in order to let you also know where He forgives. So it’s a consciousness sin the heart of what has already been worked out in heaven.

And then the sympathy shows up, not only in the fact that He chooses certain areas but that the choices that He makes are determined by your whole overall personal plan. In other words, God has a wonderful plan for your entire life that goes on to eternity. And it’s that plan that He knows and that He is aware of. Turn to Romans 8:34 [“Shall Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us?”], compared with verse 26, just to review a parallel passage in God’s Word. Here’s the sympathetic nature of the high priest’s work. You see in verse 34 Christ is at the Father’s right hand and now making intercession for us; that’s constant action, but the intercession He’s making isn’t unrelated to what’s going on down here. His intercession is up there in heaven but it is not disconnected from what’s happening down here. And if you look in verse 26 where the Holy Spirit is teaching us, is helping our infirmities, He’s not teaching us to pray there, the Holy Spirit does teach us to pray but you can’t get that out of verse 26 [“Likewise, the Spirit also helps our infirmity; for we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”] Verse 26 is talking about the Holy Spirit making prayer for your particular difficulties and then verse 27 is Christ, “He that searches the heart,” and that is a title for the Lord Jesus Christ, “He that searches the heart knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”

So you have the Holy Spirit making intercession down here, from down here up, if you want to visualize it this way, and at the Father’s right hand you have the Son and the Son knows what is the mind of the Spirit because together, both of them know that there’s a certain plan for your life and therefore certain things have to be accomplished in your lifetime. And God the Holy Spirit knows what has to be accomplished and God the Son knows what has to be accomplished and they take it before the Father. So you have this one plan and it is that sympathy with your individual personal situation that is such a precious truth at the Father’s right hand.

Now let’s go to the first section that we were dealing with last week, Hebrews 5:7-8 and Hebrews 5:9-10 because both of these are parallel in grammar. First, in verses 7-8 we have participles; Jesus Christ was offering prayers and He was heard, both are participles and both modify the main verb which is Jesus Christ “learned,” and again it is necessary for us to take very, very seriously the fact that Jesus Christ had to learn something. Now again, let’s review. What part of Jesus Christ’s nature is that which learns? Human. Can you state the doctrine of Christ’s hypostatic union? Jesus Chris is undiminished deity and true humanity united without confusion in one person forever. Now you remember that because that defines Christ’s nature. Can anyone remember, can anyone remember the doctrine of impeccability as it applies to the person of Christ? What is the doctrine of impeccability say? [someone answers] Both.

Christ is able not to sin and He is also not able to sin. The last one we qualify so you won’t get the wrong idea. It’s not saying that Jesus Christ is immune from temptation. What it’s saying is that in God’s sovereign plan it was 100% certain that Jesus Christ never would sin because if Jesus Christ sinned what would happen to His deity and His humanity? You see, you’d have a whole complicated problem here with the incarnation. Jesus Christ was impeccable, that is, not that He wasn’t tested but rather that being tested He would never fall to the temptation. Now the impeccability of Christ is very important because the impeccability of Christ says that as Jesus Christ in His life faced the graph of pressure and the pressure mounted up and mounted and mounted up and mounted and mounted up and mounted up, an impeccable person always experiences temptation to the maximum because a peccable person does what? If you are not impeccable, that is you are peccable, and you face a temptation, what eventually happens? You yield to the temptation. All right, then the pressure of the temptation falls off. So peccable people would never have experienced the degree of temptation that an impeccable person experiences. So the doctrine of Christ’s impeccability means that He experiences far more temptation in His humanity than you ever have or ever will. Now this makes Him a fantastically sympathetic high priest because He has experienced the dregs of all human temptation. That’s why the doctrine of Christ’s impeccability is very, very critical.

Then there is a third doctrine; we’ve had the doctrine of the hypostatic union, the doctrine of Christ’s impeccability, and now the doctrine of His kenosis. By the way, before we leave the doctrine of impeccability, what verse that we have just got through studying is the statement of doctrine of impeccability. What’s the Biblical reference of the doctrine of impeccability? Where do you see verse that teaches impeccability, classic reference in all Scripture. Hebrews 4:15, impeccability taught in that last clause, “without sin.” There’s a location, if someone asks you for the doctrine of impeccability it’s there.

Now the doctrine of kenosis; what does the doctrine of kenosis teach? [someone answers] That’s one way of saying it, I don’t like giving up His deity to His will but… I see what you’re trying to say but it sounds more sophisticated to say that He gave up the independent use of His attribute to God’s plan in His life. Now why is the doctrine of kenosis a sister doctrine to the doctrine of impeccability? [someone answers] The doctrine of kenosis makes the pressure against Christ pressures against His humanity. Now what area of Scripture teaches the doctrine of kenosis, in fact the very word “kenosis” comes from this area of Scripture. It’s not here in Hebrews, it’s another passage. Philippians 2:5-8, there’s the passage that teaches the doctrine of kenosis. And it’s also taught, to a degree, in Hebrews 4:5-7. That is that Jesus Christ gave up the independent use of His attributes.

Now again, that you may visualize what we are teaching, can anyone here give us an illustration that you see in the Gospel narratives out of Christ’s life that shows what a temptation it was to break the doctrine of kenosis. Can anyone give any incidents out of His life? [someone answer] All right, Satan’s testing of Christ in the wilderness; what a temptation, out there in the horrible wilderness of Israel, in this area of the Dead Sea, that whole desolate region, in that area to be without food, to be without any comfort, to go on day after day after day and then have Satan come to you and tempt you and test you to do what? One of the things that Satan tempted Jesus to do, visualizing what’s happening now out in this hot, dry, God-forsaken place, and at that time, incidentally, we could almost say it was God-forsaken and mean it literally. What was Satan’s temptation? [someone answers] Which one in particular? [reply] Okay, omnipotence, He was tempting Christ, hey, You’re omnipotent, why don’t you change the stones into bread. Now the very fact that Satan could tempt Christ is proof of Christ’s deity; that wouldn’t have been a temptation to one less than God, right, because obviously he wouldn’t come up to any of us and say hey, you can turn that stone into… I don’t think so. So you see, the very fact that Satan could tempt Christ in that way means that Christ definitely was God.

All right, so you see Christ offering prayers and He was heard, answered prayer. In the middle of a suffering environment caused Christ to learn obedience. Let’s make some conclusions out of this because this is very, very critical to the Christian life. The key word in the Christian life is obedience, not anything else, because faith is only appropriation of grace so that you can obey. The Jews were freed from Egypt, not so they could eat sand; the Jews were freed from Egypt so they could obey God and His will. Therefore, when grace works it work in our hearts, the issue is not the working of the grace; I mean, that’s fine to have it, but the grace that is working in our hearts has a higher purpose and that is to bring us onward to the place where we owe our obedience to God’s will, which we should have been before the fall anyway.

Now we talk about obedience and we talk about this verse, we’re find it Christ had to learn it in the middle of suffering, we discover that obedience must and can only be learned under pressure. And so this is too bad for those who are interested in a very Casper milk-toast like Christian life but unfortunately you’ll never learn obedience by lying in a zombie sack and pretending you’re wrestling your way through the Christian life. That is not God’s will and you will never develop obedience doing that kind of thing.

Now there’s one parallel passage… [someone asks question] The question is how does the prayer in verse 7 lead to the verb “learn.” The prayers in verse 7 include the Gethsemane prayer but not just the Gethsemane prayer because it’s written as though it’s general, and so apparently the man who was the author of Hebrews had other instances he knew in Christ’s life where prayer was very intense other than just Gethsemane. Where he got this, nobody knows, because it’s not recorded in the Gospels, but at other points in Christ’s life apparently He had this great prayer battle and the prayer battles were cases where Jesus Christ faced God’s will and obedience was not natural to do that; it was a repulsiveness about what God asked Him to do. And so the process, we don’t know anything else to give you content to verse 7 apart from what we an discern in the Gospels which is the Gethsemane experience; if we can think back through the Gethsemane experience, what this author is saying is that Christ goes to the Garden of Gethsemane and if we could chart this… I hesitate to even chart it but if you visualize a chart of obedience, His obedience was like that; then faced with the fact that He had to go to the cross and faced with the fact that He was free not to go to the cross, because it was a genuine temptation addressed to His volition He had to make a choice. And He made the choice when He prayed; the prayer was part of that positive volition, the prayer was, if you recall, not get Me off the cross, the prayer was if it’s in Your will to get Me off the cross then let Me have it. And so we have this kind of a prayer. Here’s God’s will, visualize it’s going on and on and having many parts to it, and Jesus in His humanity knew only this part of God’s will for Him and what He was praying wasn’t for something outside of the overall will of God, He was praying if there might be something beyond His knowledge of the will of God in His plan, and so He prayed is there something up in here that is still within Your will but not that I see now.

By the way, this also shows you there is a legitimate domain for prayer when you think you see the will of God and there’s a test in your life, Jesus Christ did not accept something that was just the will of God if it were in a test situation, He prayed when faced with this kind of a thing that there might be something else within the counsels of God that could be brought into the situation, which shows you that Jesus was not passive. You very frequently get the idea of passivity in this faith business, that you just trust it’s all resting, it’s never doing. And yet when you see men like Paul, in Romans 1, who prays that it might be within God’s will that he come to Rome. See, Paul faces the same kind of thing, he gets a negative answer, no you can’t go to Rome; no, you can’t go to Rome, no you can’t go to Rome. And Paul says I want to go to Rome but I want it inside God’s overall will for my life. So I pray, Lord, is there a part in Your will that says I can go, can we kind of work a deal. Prayer, in this sense, and I don’t know any other word to describe it is bargaining. And you have to kind of restrict this, it’s not absolute bargaining, but is a bargaining, a definite bargaining is going on here or the whole prayer becomes meaningless.

How else do you explain what Jesus…this isn’t a dumb show he’s putting on in Gethsemane to impress people because they were all asleep to begin. So it couldn’t have been there to express people. So whatever Jesus did in the prayer in Gethsemane it was valid and bona fide. He wasn’t passive and He demanded other parts of God’s plan to be brought into the situation, and when faced with the fact that no, there aren’t any other ways, there’s only one way and that’s the cross and there aren’t any other bypasses to the thing within My will, then Jesus said, “Nevertheless, not My will but Yours be done.” He shielded His demand.

So keep in mind then, there is an activity, let me try to draw it out here because Christians waver either side of this. On the one hand you’ll have somebody like this who will demand something from God. They’ve got the idea you come to God and demand something. Okay, that’s fine, but what they fail to realize is that you have to hedge the demand by the overall will of God, “Nevertheless, not my will but Yours be done,” because God can very easily answer your petition with something out here that lies beyond the domain of His direct will for your life and you’ll be sorry you ever prayed for it. And there are instances in the Scripture where people have prayed prayers boldly and got answers to it and been sorry God answered the prayer. So you have an aggressiveness here that is an uncontrolled aggressiveness. And this turns into white magic, what it does is I’m going to rub God’s belly like a genie and we’re going to make miracles of something. Now that’s white magic, and that’s a distortion. On the other hand you have sheer passivity, when we just say oh, God’s will be done. And that’s fatalism. You don’t find Jesus trotting into Gethsemane, oh, fine, Your will be done…, just walking around like that. There’s an activity about Him, there is a genuine bargaining going on. So the only way you can keep these two parts together is this way, that make aggressive demands on God but you’d better be careful to indicate that whatever the answers you want them… you’re not coming to God out of an autonomous spirit, you’re coming to God submissively but you’re coming to God aggressively.

[someone says something] That’s right, Jesus had the twin desires to deal with the immediate problem but the overall desire to stay within God’s will for His life. So if you can balance this you really have got something. But as I say, the tendency on the part of all Christians is to oscillate back and forth, you lose one element or you lose the other one, never can keep the balance going. But the balance is there and it’s a very delicate balance and I might add, a very difficult balance to keep hold of.

Let’s go back to the original question, what about Jesus as He goes into the Garden of Gethsemane. All right, He walks in there with, say that amount of obedience; after the crisis He walks out with that amount of obedience. See what’s happened? He’s been trained through the historic struggle. He has been, then, trained, and the implications are titanic for the Christian life. The implication simply is that there is no way for us to learn obedience except by these kinds of situations in your life. We wish there were easier ways of learning obedience but if Jesus Christ, as the sinless Son of God, had to go through this kind of experience to learn obedience and so much more than we; now obviously we don’t have this titanic decision that He faced. But we, on a small scale, because we too are part of Adam, we’re human, we have to learn obedience by these kinds of struggles.

This is the key to a verb used in Romans 12:1-2, it you’ll turn there, this famous passage, which represents again the same principle of obedience, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Now it doesn’t say: I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that after you get through with your bodies and whatever you want to use them for, then bring the pieces back to God. He wants living instruments that He can use. People have the idea that you can go trotting on through the Christian life until age 62 or 65 or 82 or 85 or something and when you have one foot in the grave then you’ll dedicate your body to Christ. Well, He doesn’t want used cars, He wants people who are in the prime of life to use their prime of life for Him. This is not knocking old age incidentally, so don’t interpret it that way. This just knocking a certain attitude young people have and the attitude is that I can put off, put off, put off, put off, put off, but here you have it very clearly stated in verse 1, and it is that you “present your bodies” and that means your whole life, that’s what it’s talking about.

And as I have said numerous times before if you are seriously involved in this kind of a thing, somewhere in the struggle there’s going to be a though like this pop into your mind, that if I really commit my life and hold it up to God and say do with it as You please, that He’s going to put the most obnoxious plan into operation that the world has ever seen. Now it’s humorous to think about it but I don’t know of anyone who’s gone through this experience that hasn’t had this happen to them. You can go through with it on various areas of your life; if you turn over an area that is critical, central, critical in your life, the idea is if you kind of let go of it and God grabs it, man, He’s going to really plow you under with something. If you trust God to bring your right woman or your right man they’re going to through ugly school first before they come on the scene. Or if you trust God with your job you’re going to be sweeping out some place with a toothbrush or something for the rest of your life. Where do these thoughts come from? God does not reward His children with rocks, and that’s what Jesus is pointing out. If you ask God for something He’s not going to give you rocks.

But the principle of Romans 12:1 is that you present your bodies a living sacrifice as the instrument in real history and then it makes this interesting statement. “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God,” and the verb to “prove” is a very, very interesting verb because it is the word to test by fire. And fire is always conceived in Scripture as pressure against the believer, “that you may prove.” Now the idea is very, very simple, easy to understand, no big theological difficulty, it was just the idea of taking just raw ore from the mine and subjecting it to heat so that the precious metal would drain away from the rock matrix, and the heat would be applied and controlled, the level of heat brought against the rock and you can put off various metal. So you have this rock matrix and you have various kinds of metal in there that you want to get out, so you elevate, according to melting point, you can control what kind of metal is going to melt out of that rock by elevating the temperature brought to bear on the rock. If you want to get lead out of the rock, then it’s a low melting point. If you want to get something else out of the rock then it’s a higher melting point. So you can control what you get out of the rock by controlling the degree of heat against it.

Now that’s the picture of Romans 12:1-2, “Present your bodies a living sacrifice … that you may prove out,” in other words, the idea is this. Here you are, and the plan of God is visualized as inside you. You’re a lump of rock and when you present your bodies a living sacrifice God will bring testings into your life just like fire is brought against that rock, and He controls the pressure so the whole thing isn’t going to go bloop, He’s going to take care of it so it won’t overdo it. But as the pressure is brought to bear on the rock there will be parts of the plan of God that become historically visible. Now that’s the point of “that you may prove what is that perfect, and acceptable will of God.” The will of God is brought out of us, it has to be brought of us by heat, and the heat is basically that which compels or makes room for obedience.

So Jesus Christ learned obedience through suffering. Now what about Jesus Christ’s life; turn it around to make sure we’ve got the point. Let’s turn it around, for get what we’ve said, come wholly over to a new point of view and look at Christ from another side. Look at Jesus Christ as you read about Him in the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as you read through that life of Christ, what is it that’s attractive about it? Now the ethics of Christ, much of them have been taught by many teachers down through history. What is attractive about Jesus Christ’s life is its obedience pattern. So as Jesus Christ was subjected to the fire and the pressure you have these beautiful “metals” coming out of His soul, which are obedience. And together they form a beautiful pattern of obedience. So when it says “Christ learned the obedience,” He didn’t learn about obedience, He learned obedience through the things that He suffered.

Okay, verses 9-10 parallel verses 7-8; again, the main verb is “became,” Jesus Christ became, two participles, one in verse 9, “being perfected,” that’s one verb, the other one is in verse 10, “being called,” those are the participles and the main verb is He “became.” Those of you who have taken Greek, here you will have an advantage, and don’t be embarrassed, you earned the advantage. There’s two possible ways, two possible verbs in the Greek that are often translated… verbs of state, one is eimi and the other is ginomai. Which one is used at this point in the text; it’s not going to look like this because it’s the aorist form of it. It’s ginomai; ginomai means He became something which He wasn’t before. If eimi had been used it would mean that Jesus Christ is the author of eternal salvation but that’s not the right verb. The verb is He became the author of salvation. The implication is that Jesus Christ couldn’t become the author of salvation if something didn’t happen first. What happened first? What happened first was He was perfected, Jesus Christ was perfected, teleioo, and this is a verb in the Greek that means to finish up, it is a verb used in 1 Corinthians 13:10, “that which is perfect is come,” and it’s neuter, and all the indications we have in the text it refers to the canon of Scripture. So you have teleion, that which is the mature thing, that which is the completed thing.

Looked at another way, Jesus Christ was not complete until He made the final act of obedience in dying for our sins on the cross. He wasn’t complete until that point. So Jesus Christ had in His life a certain set of acts that He had to obey, whether He liked to or not, He was tired in the Garden of Gethsemane; He was tired all that week; He was tired when He had to lift up the cross after being beaten up in an illegal trial in a Roman court and in a Jewish court. Jesus Christ didn’t feel like obeying any time during that week if you go on the basis of emotions. Christ didn’t go on the basis of emotions, He went on one simple thing, God says and I say “Yes Sir!” Obedience, that’s the concept.

Now when Jesus Christ was perfect, then He became something and it’s interesting, in the early church this teleioo was used for very special people. We have some writings of the church fathers where teleioo is used in the following context: so and so (you fill in the name) was perfected in giving his life for the faith. This was a verb reserved for many of the people who died because of their witness for Jesus Christ. And when they would have a martyr for the faith they would simply describe his life as “he was perfected.” And obviously it’s a conscious thinking back to the fact that Jesus Christ was perfected when He gave His life for the sins of the world.

Now there’s a further point about this verb “perfected.” Notice it is “being perfected,” it is passive voice, and this is a very important point of doctrine. If you miss this one all the obedience talk is going to turn around as a boomerang and hit you in the back of the head. This is passive voice means what? What does passive voice mean? [someone answers] All right, the perfection, Jesus didn’t say now let’s see, I’ve got to be perfect so I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this. Jesus didn’t sit down and do that. “Being perfected” means that Jesus Christ learned Bible doctrine in His humanity and as the situations arose in His life He was able to cope with them because He had first learned Bible doctrine.

You can’t engineer your circumstances; I can’t, but there is one area of your life that you can engineer and that is you can control your intake of the Word of God; you can take steps to get it on a systematic basis so that you never go more than 48 hours outside of the Word of God, for example. You can do that, but you cannot alter the circumstances of your life. So since you have no control over those circumstances, why not take up the slack by dealing with what you can and what you can is take in the Word of God while you can, then you’ll have something to cope with the situation when it comes. You don’t know what’s going to happen? You could have a catastrophe hit you tonight. And the only thing you’ve got when that catastrophe hits is the Word of God that you’ve taken in. It’s not feelings, it’s not even past spiritual experiences with God, you can’t even take those in. Think of the Mount of Transfiguration experience; there’s not one believer in the Church Age that ever had the spiritual experience Jesus did on the Mount of Transfiguration, but did that help Him in the Garden of Gethsemane? See, all He had was the Word of God in the Garden of Gethsemane, not the great Mount of Transfiguration experience.

So passive voice, He “was made perfect,” and that means you are being made perfect and I am being made perfect and we don’t make the perfectness ourselves; it is not us, operation bootstrap trying to work our way up the sanctification ladder. Jesus Christ will take care of that so don’t do what a friend of mine did in Houston that prayed, God give me lots of trials, and the apartment burned down and all sorts of things happened and I knew his roommate, and his roommate said I’m quitting, and he just got out of that relationship because obviously if the guy wants to pull down wrath on his head he can but you know, he wanted to get out of category three suffering. So he was smart enough to move out. But don’t make some stupid prayer like that: God, sanctify me in a hurry. See, this guy had just come out of the Seals in the Navy and he thought he was pretty tough and so he decided he wanted to get toughened up a little bit under God’s program, and what he failed to realize is the fact that apparently those kinds of prayers do nothing except open you up to satanic attack, because he says see God, Satan talking to God, see, he just asked for it God so let me have him. And I think this is what goes because every time I have seen Christians pray those kind of prayers we’ve seen disasters; we’ve seen some around this congregation. So don’t pray them, you just let the Lord bring the fire against the rock. He knows what temperature to elevate so He can just the right metal out.

[someone says something] All right, the testing in the Psalms that David’s talking, “test me and see if there be any wicked way in me” and so on, David is doing that to clarify an issue that was not clear in his mind at that point. The testing may be a testing there but it’s mainly to clear his mind so he can confess sin, it’s more of that kind of a thing. David’s not praying to get clobbered. [someone else] Oh yeah, in fact that central passage is Psalm 139, “Search me, O God, and know,” and so on. Yeah, it’s an unknown sin that he was aware that might be there. And he was concerned with uncovering it and he thought that if there was a pressure or if God brought something in it would become obvious so he could deal with it.

[something else said] It’s hard to… temptation and testing are degrees of the same thing. In other words, God doesn’t tempt, Satan tempts. That’s James. Satan tempts and God tests but the same verb is often used for both. And it’s the idea that God is sovereign so God allows Satan… Satan comes to us to tempt us to evil; that’s Satan’s job. But the Biblical picture of this would be like the brothers of Joseph meant to kill Joseph, but God allowed it to happen to Joseph to get Joseph down to Egypt at the right time. So you have God testing us by means of Satan’s often temptations. Satan is deliberately after us and he doesn’t have our good will in mind, God does. So there’s a distinction, yet the two, the act is tired together with the same Greek verb in most passages. So you have to go on context.

All right, so we have a passive here on teleioo, and teleioo means to complete or to finish. Jesus Christ attained spiritual growth by obedience. Now do you understand why in our generation you see such weak spiritual growth, because what it is it that is precisely downgraded in our culture, by all areas of our culture, from top to bottom, one coast to the other coast, and that is obedience to authority. It’s not talking about authoritarianism in the sense of Hitler’s Germany. I’m not talking about that; everybody tries to say that’s the kind of obedience. That’s not the kind of obedience. But if you think back to a godly obedience it is lacking. And this country is going to fall apart at the seams until that kind of godly obedience is restored in the home life. And when the home, divine institution two and three have obedience once again then we’ll see something. But this evangelism that we’re having today is just makeshift, because the ultimate issues aren’t decided by an evangelist. The ultimate issues are decided by way of background of people in the home. So we can have evangelistic campaigns from now until the rapture but we’re not going to see a change until we see a more in depth and more comprehensive application of the Word.

Let’s see what else, beside being made perfect Jesus Christ was [10] “Called of God.” Now this means, the word “called” here is not the usual verb to call in the original language; it is a verb which means to be greeted or saluted. The picture here is that Jesus Christ is promoted, He is saluted into a position; in other words, He, when you salute and you greet somebody, you greet them in their office, so you might say, verse 10, if you want to translate it in a more contemporary way, “He was greeted as a high priest,” so think of this for a moment. Here’s Jesus Christ who was in the throne room for all eternity; the Father, the Son. The Son loved the Father, the Father loved the Son, you have perfect communication within the Trinity. Yet there was a time when the Son picked up humanity and became, then, God-man, and He goes to the throne room and at the time He goes to the throne room He is called something, “Greetings, high priest.” And that’s what this means, Jesus Christ is greeted as the high priest. Again it’s passive, God the Father does the action, He does the receiving. He is called the high priest Melchizedek.

And now we go to the main verb back in verse 9. We’ve dealt with the two participles, “He has been perfected” and “He has been greeted,” now “He becomes the author of eternal salvation,” the word “author” means the originator. It was used in Josephus in an expression like this, in Antiquities, Book XIV, “Antipitar was the author of their victory and also the author of their safety,” do you catch that, that’s an extra Biblical use of “author” in this same sense. Herod “Antipitar was the author of their victory and the author of their safety,” that’s how “author” is used here, the originator, the responsible agent.

Now here’s something that again is a key to the epistle, it sounds like a small point but the more you meditate on it the bigger the point gets until the point gets so big that it encompasses the whole book of Hebrews and here’s the point: you have God the Father and God the Son; God the Son has deity, God the Son has humanity. What this verse is saying is that our salvation emanates from the humanity of Jesus Christ. He is the author of our eternal salvation, so that if there never was a Jesus Christ in history, no matter how gracious God is, there never could have been salvation. The humanity of Jesus Christ is that important. Said another way, the humanity of Christ shows the importance of humanity, period. So when you think about superior civilizations on other planets, I can save you hours and hours and hours of reading in science fiction; there is no superior race except the human race, and you can call that the bigoted biased version of an earthling but it is an earthling that is receiving the word of the infinite God. And the infinite God pronounces man’s earthly nature, the source of eternal salvation. And we’re going to see in a later passage, this is the salvation of the whole cosmos. So don’t worry about whether Christ died on another planet, He didn’t, I can tell you that also from the book of Hebrews. He died only once and it was on this planet, this planet is the theological center of the universe.

So Jesus Christ’s humanity is the author, is the source, or the responsible agent for our eternal salvation. Now just notice something about Hebrews. I want you to notice the word “eternal,” it doesn’t just say “author of salvation,” it’s “author of eternal salvation.” I’m going to show you three verses, then I’m going to ask you a question. You think of why is this “eternal” there, why is this eternal prefix always there? Turn to Hebrews 9:12, here we don’t have the word “salvation,” but we have the word “redemption.” “Neither by the blood of bulls and of goats, and but by His own blood He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Now why is the word “redemption” preceded by the adjective “eternal?” Hebrews 9:15, “For this cause He is the mediator of the New Testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they who are called might receive the promise of not “inheritance,” but “eternal inheritance.

Turn to Hebrews 13:20, this is typical of this author, “Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant,” eternal. Can anybody guess why this author keeps trying to underscore these words: covenant, redemption, salvation, by the word “eternal?” [someone says if it wasn’t eternal then the believer…can’t hear] or it would be yet future, for in the Old Testament didn’t they have an inheritance; in the Old Testament didn’t they have a redemption, yes they did. Well what was different about the old kind of redemption and the new kind of redemption? The new kind of redemption has nothing after it. Now there is a note of finality in this epistle. Jesus Christ is the last word; and that’s what is the urgency.

Now we have a few more passages and after that we’re going to stop at verse 10 and if you want to read ahead will realize that we’re coming up on the famous passage that everyone like to use to get shook about eternal security but if you will just, before you get too shook up, just understand how we’re heading toward the passage. What has been the author’s point over and over and over and over and over and over? When you have the last word spoken there is no court of appeal left. Theoretically you could have rejected Moses’ words and be saved by Joshua’s words. Theoretically you could have rejected Joshua and been saved by Samuel, the content of his message. You could have turned away from Samuel and be saved by somebody after him. But you can’t be saved by turning away from Jesus hoping for another one after Him because there isn’t any more. Jesus is the last one.

This is why in John 2 you have that verse that “He that does not believe is condemned already because He has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” There is no other chance. All religions after Christianity, such as Islam, Baha’i faith and all the rest of them that claim to be extensions of the prophetic program of God, are apostate because Christ, in the book of Hebrews is presented as THE last word. The epistle to the Hebrews is the central New Testament apologetic against all revelatory religion that is post Christian. There is no more prophecy; there is no more word from God. Jesus Christ has said it all; complete, period, it’s all over. And this is how we’re heading into this passage, it’s all over!

That’s why, and we’re going to close tonight by turning back to Hebrews 3:14 to a verse that illustrates the principle, and also one of our young people taking Greek pointed out a good thing and I hope more of you will do this, she was talking to some people apparently were upset over verse 14, “For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end,” and people who argue that you can lose your salvation say that the “if” clause in verse 14 is a condition of salvation. In other words, “if you hold on,” I’m paraphrasing, “if you hold on, then you’ll be saved.” Now that’s the conditional interpretation, and that would mean, if that’s true then we are in trouble, but do any of you notice something about the tense here. What is that tense? Future; the tense in the Greek of verse 14 says “if you hold on, then you have been made partakers,” what’s that tense? Perfect, past, do you see the difference.

See, to interpret verse 14 as though it means loss of salvation you have to make that a future tense verb. But this is a perfect tense; what it’s saying is “if you hold on,” that’s the evidence that you “have been saved.” So holding on or persistence is not a condition of salvation, it is the revelation of your salvation. I’ll say it again, very important contrast: persistence is not a precondition of salvation; it is post condition that shows it. “Holding on” is revelation of salvation not preparation for salvation. “If we hold the beginning our faith, confidence steadfast unto the end,” then we can conclude “we have been made partakers.” Do you see that? Persistence of the faith is the evidence of it. That’s what the verse is talking about, it’s not talking about loss of salvation.

Any questions? [someone asks question] We don’t know about the salvation of angels. The question is what about, did Christ die for angels? We don’t have any reference in the Bible where angels are offered salvation but we have this one particular passage that’s coming up in Hebrews that’s the next thing to it. And it doesn’t come right out and say that angels were offered salvation but it has something to do with literal sin in heaven and it says Jesus Christ purges it. Now what that sin in heaven is, it may just be the pollution of ourselves going to heaven. But it’s a cosmic cleanliness that it brought about by Christ’s earthly atonement; it’s a rather strong, very, very strong point.

[another question] Because the ultimate test was Gethsemane, and who was in control. When Jesus Christ prayed Psalm 22, He was praying to get off the cross, that’s what it says. So He’s talking about Father, get Me off this cross. And so yeah, He could save Him from death.

Okay…