Clough Hebrews Lesson 47
Conscience – 10:1-2
Last time I left off in the middle of something and I want to clear that up before we go on to Hebrews 10. I believe what I didn’t clarify last time that I wanted to work a little bit more on was verse 23, where it says “It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified, but the heavenly things themselves with better things than these.” The question that we face in Hebrews 9:23 is the “heavenly things.” It’s plural, it’s something that is cleansed with Christ’s sacrifice and so we have a definition problem of what heavenly things are. We know that whatever it is the tabernacle, according to verse 23, the tabernacle and its furnishings correspond to these “heavenly things.” If we go into the immediate context of verse 23, the last time we encountered the idea of cleansing was in verse 14 and it was obviously conscience. In Hebrews 10:1 and 2 we have the concept of cleansing once again and again associated with conscience. So there seems to be ample precedent for it’s linking cleansing and conscience and since cleansing is to do in verse 23, then linking “heavenly things” with conscience. Since “things” are plural we’ll make consciences plural, the consciences of men. And the consciences of men are called… plural, are called “heavenly things” because as we said last time, “heavenly” refers to a realm that is presently unseen but someday will be seen, it’s a future thing. It’s not like Plato’s world of Ideals. The “heavenly things” are things that will someday be seen or can be seen under special conditions of revelation.
But still we haven’t answered the question, why are “consciences” called “heavenly things.” And here is where we have one of the great challenges to modern psychology. And it’s a challenge to modern psychology that Biblical Christianity brings and one which modern psychology has no answer for except speculation, all the stories, for example, about The Exorcist and so forth, the demonic elements; these kind of enchant people, intrigue people, kind of amuse people, make people curious but we do have to admit that the Bible is teaching that the conscience of man, wherever the conscience is located, the conscience of man is open to the immediate spiritual environment around him. It’s that part of man that is touching the spiritual atmosphere around him. Now the problem we have is visualizing what a spirit is, and we can’t visualize what a spirit is; we can’t visualize it as having shape, yet sometimes spirits [can’t understand word] have shape, they’re not abstract things. A spirit can be wind, as appears in Hebrews 1 as natural fire, as natural wind.
And yet at other times a spirit can appear right in front of you as a person, so how this spirit can change, how you can have one spirit that divides itself, singular, among an entire herd of swine, how you have in 1 Kings one spirit that divides itself into 400 pieces, that apparently influence the prophets, the false prophets, and yet all the 400 pieces are part of the same, singular, spirit, we don’t know. The only thing I have ever thought of in terms of this to try to fit the Biblical data is you think what you learned in high school biology with the amoeba and how it kind of… you know, you get one of the… I even forgot the extensions there, what do you call them? Pseudo pod, and it comes out there and can split off and so on; that’s the only thing you can visualize these spirits as being, but somehow they are able to divide and come back together again, and somehow be the same one. Now how that happens we don’t know, but we do know there are strange things and man is at the interface of the material and the immaterial.
And the conscience of man is your receiving set, it is what is in touch with the spiritual powers around you, and when you see the word “heavenlies,” particularly in Ephesians, such as Ephesians 6:12 it’s not talking about something spatially removed great distances from you. It can be but the spatial distance of the heavenlies from you is not the issue. The issue is, and a better translation probably is “the spiritual sphere.” In our 20th century language that would get the idea across that the authors are trying to get across with the word “heavenly,” the spiritual sphere.
Now to show you a picture of this if you turn to 1 Corinthians 6:17, it’s talking in verses 5-6 about sexual intercourse, and in verse 17 it’s talking about “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.” And the only way I can picture this is you’ve got something like this: you’ve got the humanity of Jesus Christ spatially removed from us because He spatially is at the Father’s right hand and we don’t know where the Father’s right hand is, we know it has to be a point in space because Jesus’ human body isn’t omnipresent; His deity is but His body isn’t. Well, Jesus is spatially removed from the believer, yet in some way we are one spirit with Jesus, in spite of the distance between us and Him. We have the Holy Spirit who is omnipresent, and the human spirit of Christ is kind of in touch with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is in touch with our human spirit and so you have kind of a one contact type thing. And this is the conception the Bible has, it doesn’t mater how far spatially Jesus is away, it’s as though He were next to you, touching you. There’s a contact.
Now the conscience is the place where we are open to these contacts. This is why playing with the occult, flirting with the demonic, is one of the fastest ways of ruining yourself spiritually because it cuts off, ironically, it cuts off and destroys your proper contact with the spiritual realm. The conscience, you see we have been designed as member of the human race, we have been designed to contact the spiritual world through the conscience because the conscience is the proper receptacle, so that, for example, when the Holy Spirit works where you have legitimate contact with the spiritual world, the Holy Spirit contacts into the conscience. That’s the point of touching. But when you have demon powers and you have people flirting around with the supernatural that is illegitimate and magical, then the spiritual forces begin to touch the body itself and they work on the soul through the body, we get sensations and all sorts of things, weird things happen, and so forth, because we are touching the spiritual world with the wrong set of tools. The conscience is the proper place to touch the spiritual world.
So much for the conscience and the heavenly things, that’s the best I can define what the author of Hebrews, why he passes back and forth between the word “conscience” and “heavenlies,” conscience and heavenly things. The conscience is your heavenly thing, and when it says we are blessed in the heavenlies, we are blessed spiritually, it means we are blessed in such a way that our permanent eternal blessing is already in touch with us. And the point where it’s touching us is in the area of the conscience. This is why the conscience becomes very, very crucial in Scripture and why all forms of mental illness, that are not organic, forms of mental illness that are inorganic, basically stem from a violation of the conscience in some way, shape or fashion.
Another question I didn’t finish was the last word of Hebrews 9:28, someone asked: I still don’t understand what it means when it says they shall “look for him…unto salvation?” What is the salvation in Hebrews 9:28? The word “salvation,” future, Second Advent, the author of Hebrews when he uses the word “salvation” he primarily means phase three or the stage of glorification, that which is future; that’s what he has on his mind. So when he uses the word “salvation” he is using the concept that phase three includes the resurrection body, phase three would include the believer’s judgment, phase would include rewards, those things, that’s what he has on his mind when he uses the word “salvation” and Jesus Christ “shall appear unto salvation,” meaning He will lead believers into this final third state, ultimate sanctification, glorification or phase three, whichever set of words you choose to call it by.
Now Hebrews 10, continuing the same section of Hebrews if there aren’t any questions. [someone asks question] The tool that we’re talking about as far as what? The choice? No, the ego determines which one you’re going to listen to, you determine that. You can choose to reject your conscience, see that’s the whole point of Scripture, you can go against your conscience; God’s given you the freedom to bust your conscience if you want to try it, and what happens when you go on negative volition and you direct your mind to split with your conscience and you create a split here between the two, that’s a dangerous condition if it persists because you start getting, well the Bible calls it a callousness that forms, it’s just like pulling the shade down on the window and finally your mind can’t get over here to get a clear conscience about something any more because you’ve violated it so much that you wanted to live an autonomous life, you wanted to separate your mind from your conscience so you’ve got kind of a built in self-destruct system; God has built that into you, it’s part of your responsibility as a creature made in God’s image.
You can destroy yourself, it’s your option. The only way, once you’ve destroyed yourself is you’d better trust that God in His grace will be very, very gracious to you so you can get restoration but the conscience can definitely divide, now the conscience itself can’t be destroyed, you just destroy your mind, you destroy the link between your mind and your conscience because that’s just like a never ending tape recorder taping everything for final judgment. So your conscience will not be destroyed; in fact in the airplanes they have these little solid steel spheres with the instruments on it so if there’s an accident the first thing the investigators do is dig around until they find where that set of instruments of is and it gives them the altitude and so on. So the plane may crash but those instruments are going to be preserved or the record; the record is actually put inside the instrument and that record will remain intact. The same here, we can destroy ourselves, we can kill ourselves physically, we can destroy ourselves mentally, we can go on a big binge and get our emotions all out of kilter, we can have psychosomatic illnesses and destroy the body, we can wreck ourselves but you’re never going to destroy your conscience. That is built in and God, just like an airplane crash, the FAA investigators goes and that’s the first thing he retrieves. So the conscience is indestructible from that point of view but the conscience can be violated, you just don’t pay any attention to it, any more than a pilot would pay attention to his instruments.
[more said] No, the content of the conscience, once it’s loaded, is not going to lose it, it’s just that you don’t pay any attention to what the conscience has in it. Now you can increase the content of your conscience, that’s taught in 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14 and there what happens is that your conscience, apparently your conscience starts out with God-consciousness, the conscience begins to function in a small child; when God-consciousness starts you can’t be dogmatic, I have guessed that the external sign that the conscience in a child is functioning is when the child masters language and conceptual thought, because then at that point the child is now thinking in terms of truth and false, right and wrong. Until that point is reached the child consciously isn’t acting against the framework of absolutes. But once that point is reached the child is now functioning with responsibility and at that point the conscience begins to be loaded with more and more God-consciousness through the mind.
The mind is the loading mechanism for the conscience because Paul very definitely says in 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14, he said there will be times when it’s a new believer, you will not have your conscience refined enough to make day to day decisions, and he uses the illustration of going into a Gentile restaurant in Corinth or Rome and eating meat that was sacrificed to idols. Now the conscience of a new believer just says minus idolatry, minus idols, I don’t want to have anything to do with idols. Now that’s okay as far as it goes but it’s not sophisticated enough, it’s not discriminating enough. So what Paul says is that these new believers, all they know is they don’t want anything to do with idolatry, that’s what is right for them, because it violates God’s essence.
Now, the problem is that their being new believers they haven’t loaded their conscience with enough to reason it through and say well in this case, since the idols are nothing, we can ignore the religious ceremony that went into the production of this slab of T-bone steak or something and we’ll just eat it and we’ll eat it as unto the Lord because we know who’s the true creator of that piece of meat; but a new believer may not have enough doctrine to make all those connections. S the thing is if your conscience bugs you, Paul says, don’t do it. And don’t do it until you get enough doctrine where your conscience can relax about the thing and you can see what you can and can’t do.
Now it’s ironic but you normally hear it said the opposite way. Normally what we’re all brought up to believe about the conscience is that the more standards you have… we’ll say somebody has a strong conscience, they can’t do anything. Now the Bible reverses that terminology and here’s where you kind of just got to slow down and connect words. When the Bible talks about a weak conscience it is talking about what we’re usually talking about when we say a strong conscience. Let me illustrate. Take a person who can’t, in conscience do certain things. In Paul’s day it was this problem of meat. Now if you and I were there with our usual English way of describing, or American way of describing it, we would say good night, look at these people, they won’t even come in here to eat a piece of meat, they’ve got a conscience that won’t quit. And we would tend to say that conscience is very strong because it wouldn’t permit them to do many, many different things but ironically when the Bible, when the New Testament talks about that kind of a person it uses exactly the opposite vocabulary, it says no, that person has a weak conscience, not a strong one, a weak one. The reason for it is that the Bible is not looking at the forbidding, the act of forbidding, the Bible is looking at the finesse or the sophistication of discrimination. A weak conscience is one that can’t discriminate so it just throws the whole thing out, whereas a strong conscience is one that has more accurate standards in it and it can discriminate and so Paul could walk into the meat market, he didn’t care whether the meats had been offered to idols or not, it didn’t bother him, and sit there and eat it.
[someone says something] The unbeliever has the freedom to go against his conscience; he sure does because that’s part of his volition, his moral responsibility. He couldn’t maintain his responsibility if he didn’t. [more said] Because the unbeliever who is unregenerate, the unregenerate person is a person who knows what is right and what is wrong, he knows what he ought to do, he is convinced, however, he wants to do it in his own power which itself cuts off enabling grace. So the unregenerate person finds himself constantly thwarted because he never can do what is pleasing to God. For example, an unregenerate person can do certain overt activities, which we call human good, but he does them out of an autonomous spirit; his idea, he want to live his own independent way, period, and he doesn’t want to rely on enabling grace, and since he doesn’t want to rely on enabling grace, even though he may do this overt activity that may be very good, such as reading his Bible, praying, witnessing, and going through the roof doesn’t mean beans with God because he has done it with a basic autonomous motivation.
Let me try to maybe sharpen this up. As Christians we can be motivated by an autonomous spirit. And here’s usually how it happens. You usually start thinking this way and this is when it’s happening to you; when you’re thinking why is it that I have to have grace, why can’t I be just good enough to be acceptable with God instead of being reminded of how I blew it and then have to come into God’s presence having been forgiven of my sin by grace. In other words, inwardly, in our hearts there is basically in every one of us a hatred of grace; we will not happily submit to gracious forgiveness because we’d a lot rather not have to need the forgiveness to start with. But the idea of having to have forgiveness, you feel like you’re lowered, and of course you are. That’s precisely the word for it, you’re humbling and you’re getting lowered when you admit that you have to have enabling grace to take an inch forward in the Christian life. And you have to see that you’ve blown it by God’s standards.
Now the reason why we want not to have grace, ultimately is because we were designed to produce apart from grace. See, Adam in the Garden didn’t need grace to produce. That was his destiny, to bring forth, to subdue the earth and to produce, to be active in history and that’s our destiny as part of the human race. We all have that implanted from the point of creation in our hearts, we want to produce. But what frustrates us is that everything we produce is dead because we’re fallen creatures, we screw up all the time against God’s standards and knowing this and becoming conscious of we have to choose, are we going to sit there and keep on trying to produce against His standards and constantly getting frustrated or are we going to say okay, I give up that modus operandi, I come over here and now I’m on grace and I realize that I must trust Him to forgive me from all my sin and to enable me to produce anything worthwhile. And it’s humbling, and it’s the worst thing; people will prefer to go through anguish year after year after year after year to the point where they will literally destroy their minds and bodies, they will prefer that… prefer that mind you, to that humbling experience of having to trust in grace.
[someone says something] Yeah because they’ve misdefined freedom. The autonomous man has never properly defined freedom. This is why these talks that you get involved in the class room between sovereignty and freewill are usually never productive because during the discussion of the sovereignty/freewill question nobody usually in the discussion ever brings up the point that how is freedom being defined. And the very definition of freedom itself involves presuppositions.
[more said] No, the conscience cannot be invaded by demonic thought but here’s what happens. The problem is that in practice how do we know it’s the conscience and how do we know it’s not a seducing spirit; that’s the problem and the only thing that you can use, and here’s where the Word of God is an external criterion that comes in handy, or that’s the only way to do it, is that a seducing spirit in your conscience will be either side of some portion of the Word of God because the conscience, and again I can’t describe what’s going on here but this is only an impression you get from Scripture, is that whatever is in the conscience is true, there may not be much in there but what is in there is true. So that being the case, whatever is in there is going to line up with the Word of God. And this is where, when you can’t decide an issue like this, this is why, for example in 1 John 4, John tells the church that you will have seducing spirits come against you and he doesn’t make experience the criterion in that point, he says here, I’ll give you a test and he gives you a doctrinal three verse test in 1 John 4 to apply when that seducing spirit comes. And he was dealing with a real life first century problem, in that case he says you’d better be careful because a seducing spirit can mimic your own conscience.
Now my advice to you in this kind of thing is don’t start getting fixations on evil spirits. We can go two ways with this, we can be the materialist who doesn’t believe in the spiritual phenomenon at all or we can go into the exorcist mania and that’s all we talk about. In either case we’ve lost the balance of Scriptures. And in Scripture if you maintain, as you go through Hebrews even, evil spirits have been talked about so far and we’ve mentioned them but the author is not majoring on evil spirits, he’s majoring on the person of Jesus Christ, and that’s always a test when this demonic business gets unhealthy the signal is that you start talking about it more than you do about Christ’s redeeming grace and you’re in trouble at that point.
[someone says something] But the fact that his conscience was strong means he could have, if the weaker believers weren’t around, now he’s bringing in another principle at that point, yeah, there’s another principle, you don’t want to cause a weaker brother to stumble but… [person interrupts] Well, if you look at 1 Corinthians 8, one of the points of 1 Corinthians 8 is verse 7 and here’s where it very clearly shows you that the conscience is loaded from the mind side and how a conscience that is weak is basically stripped and bare of data. I prefer, and I think this accurately portrays the Scriptural idea behind weak and strong conscience, if you just think of the word to discriminate and not discriminate, a strong conscience or a mature conscience has a greater power of discrimination; a weak conscience won’t discriminate and the proof of it is right here in verse 7.
[someone says something] A conscience, there’s no evidence I’ve been able to find in any study of any location of any part of the Word of God that would align the conscience with anything false. [more said] He started out with enough truth to hold him responsible, that’s the whole argument of Romans 1. Now there’s a theological, there’s a vast theological point and you touched on it right there, if you say that the conscience can be deluded, what that is tantamount to saying is man loses his responsibility and you just can’t do that because otherwise that negates the whole concept of judgment in Scripture. I can prove that doctrine deductively from the doctrine of judgment or we can prove it inductively the way suneidesis is used in the text, either way you want to go, deductively or inductively you’ll have to the same conclusion.
[someone says something] The conscience has to be purged because the conscience gets defiled and the picture of defilement is the same picture that I’ve drawn here. There’s a word for defilement and that is the idea that this… it’s like a light. The reason why I know the Scriptures teach you the [can’t understand word] is from Proverbs 20:27 where it clearly states the conscience is the lamp of the Lord and when it’s talking about this defilement it’s a picture that comes on the lamp and it’s not the light itself, it’s the lamp stand and it’s the picture that you get this defilement on it. That defilement doesn’t destroy the conscience but what it does is renders the mind cut from viewing the conscience so essentially you break this connection and it’s broken, incidentally, every time we personally sin. There’s a profound thing that occurs, every time we rebel against our conscience is we put more dirt on the screen. Now what happens is that Jesus Christ cleanses that conscience so by grace but only by grace is that cleansed, but it’s not talking about adjusting the standards inside of it, I don’t see any evidence of that at all.
[more said] Now you’re pinning me down to the point where I just don’t want to dogmatically say; I’ll just say this, it’s pretty obvious in Christian lives that though God positionally cleanses us at the point of salvation we all have this process we go through in sanctification where you get more and more sensitive, after you’ve just been very insensitive morally speaking, you get more sensitive and it looks like what’s happening there is that it’s being cleansed or purged a little bit at a time and I think even that shows God’s grace, because suppose all of a sudden He ripped it all off and here’s your mind with all our minus… beautiful big fat luxurious –R behavior patterns, and He strips off all the dirt and of a sudden He hits you with everyone of them. Now our God doesn’t treat us, His children, that way; He doesn’t dump the whole load, He takes it little bit by bit to train us out of it. Remember ethics is administered in history pedagogically. It was true for the human race corporately, it is also true for the individual.
[someone says something] It’s not just the Word that goes in the conscience, general revelation goes into the conscience, Romans 1:18 and following. [more said] Well now I wouldn’t say of the heart, we’re getting involved in technical psychology here but the term “heart” includes more than just conscience, “heart” includes mind in Scripture. That’s a more inclusive term. Here’s the problem and here’s maybe a commentary to get us back out of this. Many men have tried to develop a psychology, what they call a Biblical psychology, based on these words in the Bible. You can’t develop a modern scientifically qualified psychology from the terms heart, mind, soul, conscience and so on. What you can develop is you can do it indirectly, you can say here’s what the Biblical authors are talking about in every day common language, because the Bible is written in every day common language, not technical terms, then you can go over here and study various psychological theories and try to figure out, how do they project down into common every day experience. Then treating every day experience butt the two down together here.
But there’s no way of directly comparing an abstract scientific hypothesis, whether it’s Freudianism or something else of man with the Bible, without going through several intermediate steps and it gets very, very involved; it is not easy to do and you deceive yourself if you think you can just pop off with a word or two and think you’ve got it. This is a common occurrence, that people will say these words; it is very difficult because to this day we don’t have a living culture where we can go and talk to the people and ask them hey, what do you mean by “heart?” If we could find people that we could be assured were operating the same way that the Semitics were we could learn a lot, we could improve the vocabulary but we’re on terms here that are hard to control.
The only way you can do this and if you’re interested in this, all I can say to you is pursue it but just remember one principle: you’re going to have to take a concordance and you, yourself are going to have to spend hours and hours and hours checking the usage every time that word occurs and there’s no shortcut. I can give you a definition after I’ve studied, say, like in the “heart,” when I studied “heart” I studied 953 or so, almost a thousand, I forget what, occurrences of kardia, in the New Testament plus [says Hebrew word, can’t understand it] in the Old Testament. And after I study almost a thousand data points I could walk away and say this is pretty much what the Bible is saying. And I can tell you that but it won’t register with you until you’ve gone through the process yourself, and you’ll find as you go through the processes that these words are meant to be specific.
For example, the word “spirit” is never said to be living, never find it, in all the hundreds of references in Scripture, never will you find the word the spirit is alive, but you will find every time the word nephesh or soul is alive. The way these words are used it obviously means the authors have two ideas in their head between soul and spirit. Now to be real technical and pick around what they mean is a whole big game. And it’s a very detailed thing. All I can tell you is the conscience isn’t even mentioned in the Old Testament. The conscience is included by the word “heart” in the Old Testament. Sometimes it’s included in the word “spirit.” In the New Testament it does appear, suneidesis, and every time it appears it appears to be that organ that is absolutely critical in the spiritual life. Paul says I always follow my conscience. And you’re dependent on your conscience, as I said before, to give you the okay to believe.
You can sit there and hear an evangelistic invitation to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior and if there’s not enough data in your conscience or there’s some spiritual problem and you can’t believe, you can be pressured by the evangelistic assembly, by raising hands, signing cards, having someone bully you into praying to receive Christ or something like that and under that kind of pressure you can make a false decision for Christ that you’re going to resent. And you may take months to recover from that false thing. And that’s why, when you witness, there’s a time to lay it on the table, but there’s also a time to say okay, the decision is yours, now I’ve explained it to you, you know the store, you’ve thought it through, if you’re not convinced of it think it through some more but I’m not going to sit here and twist your arm to believe because I know that if I do that I may produce a false decision.
So the conscience is always to be respected, even at the point of witnessing. You respect that person’s conscience and don’t ever force them to believe; if the Holy Spirit is working they will believe; if you’ve done your job to clarify the issue, if you’ve spent… sometimes it takes hours and hours and hours and hours to sit down and talk and discuss and so on, and you’ve done your homework the Holy Spirit will take care of His end of the deal. You don’t have to do the Holy Spirit’s work for Him. Now sometimes… sometimes with leading of the Spirit it might be advantageous to precipitate kind of a small minor crisis that trips the decision but you have to… my experience with that is that the people I’ve seen do it correctly are people who are very, very skilled and have a lot of experience. It’s not for amateurs.
[someone says something] Yes and to obey the material that you’ve got
in the conscience, because if you’re not submitting to your conscience you’re
going to get all this stuff over you conscience and you get this porosis condition, the heart is porosis according to Ephesians 4:17-19,
according to Romans 1 toward the end of the chapter. So you’ve got these places that testify you’re
doing yourself damage. We’ve got a book in our library you ought to read on
this, it’s Damned Through the Church
by John Warwick Montgomery. And he
points out you can be damned coming to church.
You can be worse off walking out of a church meeting or among a group of
believers than you were before you even met them and here’s why: because you
came in contact with divine truth and now you’re held responsible for it. At least before you met them you weren’t held
responsible for that particular divine truth, now you are. Remember what Jesus said about Chorazin and
Let’s turn back to Hebrews, that’s all right, if we want to work on conscience, we’re not hurrying to pass a final at the end of the semester so relax. That’s when you can learn, when you can relax. Let’s look at Hebrews 10:1, “For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. [2] For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.” All right, let’s look at verse 1, pull out the main subject and pull out the main verb. What’s the main subject of verse 1? “Law.” What’s the main verb? “Make perfect.” Okay, the Law can never make perfect, technically the main verb is “be able,” if you’re translating it in the original, “be able to make perfect.” The Law is not able to make perfect.
Now the word “perfect” can be used of maturity in phase two, that is this present life or the word teleios can refer to ultimate sanctification. But in verse 2 the author solves our problem because he gives the characteristic of the teleios believer, the believer that is mature, the believer that is perfect will have something true of him that the imperfect believer does not have. Now one of the things that the teleios believer will have is that when he becomes a believer at the point of regeneration he passes through a washing; this is mentioned in our communion service when I read John 13:10, Jesus Christ is sitting washing the disciple’s feet and we always read that passage, and remember there’s two words for wash, Jesus will wash their feet, He gets up, Peter says you’re not going to wash mine, the Lord Jesus says if I don’t wash you you’ll have no part with me, Peter says then bathe me, and Jesus replies to Peter, you don’t have to be bathed Peter because you’ve already been bathed. All you have to do is have your feet washed. And the difference between bathing is a once and for all thing that occurs at the point of salvation and then this periodic washing, this confession of sin.
Now that once and for all bathing is mentioned in verse 2 and it has a peculiar effect, “once and for all purged should have had no more conscience of sins,” now that’s talking about believers in the Old Testament system, so let’s go back to the Old Testament system and ask ourselves what did these people not have that is available to New Testament believers? Maybe we can best illustrate this by an analogy. Let’s pretend, or let’s compare it with the fourth divine institution for a moment and capital punishment. Until Jesus Christ returns, we’re believers, we’re regenerated, we’re in union with Him, but we don’t have something that the believers in the millennium who are going to have who are also regenerate, in union with Him and so on. What is it they got we don’t have in this area. [someone answers] Well, perfect government but empirically in manifestation history what we got on our hands all the time that we have to do constantly that we’re not going to have to do in the millennium. [someone answers] All right, there’s a delay but what I’m thinking of, the capital punishment gets distorted into war; you’ve got war, you’ve got no world government with world authority and bring peace and get rid of the whole budget that goes to armaments all the time, [tape turns, small section garbled] …in Isaiah 2, that whole thing is going to be bumped when you have a world government able to enforce law but the world government is not going to exist until Jesus Christ returns because Jesus Christ is the only one qualified for the world government.
All right, that being the case, let’s compare it now. Here we are in the Church Age, here’s another believer in the millennial kingdom. All right, there’s our comparison. Does the salvation of these two believers differ? No. Are they both regenerate? Yes. Are they both saved by trusting in Jesus Christ? Yes. Well then what’s the difference? This believer has more of Christ’s blessings than this believer because he enjoys the perfect government that Christ will then be giving him. Now this believer may have to serve in an armed force, he may have to train to be a killer in the service. So this believer has to do something that this believer won’t have to do, not because their salvation is different but because that era of history itself is different. This era enjoys less of the grace of God than this one, so as an era, as a whole environment it’s different. All right, now that’s the difference between two believers equally saved but dwelling at two points of history. One enjoys more of Christ’s overall plan than the other one.
Now let’s take it to a psychological area and let’s backtrack, instead of divine institution four and capital punishment let’s take divine institution one and the conscience. Now let’s take an Old Testament believer and a New Testament believer. Have they both trusted in Christ? Yes. Are they both regenerate? Yes. They may not know as much about Christ, this one as this one but generally you can say positionally they’re both saved individuals, but what’s the difference? Psychologically there’s been a difference. This believe in the Old Testament knew that God would take care of his sin, just like we know God will take care of war, but in actual practice he couldn’t see his forgiveness as permanent, it was always promissory. God, Jehovah, will take away your sin, but the awareness of the reality of his sin was with him. Psychologically in the New Testament we live in another world. And what I’m trying to get you to see is see this world, because you were born, we all have been born into the Church Age, we can’t appreciate what it must have been like to be a believer in the Old Testament era. But a believe in the Old Testament era would have been born again and he would trust in Jehovah to take care of his sin but the sin was still there, looking him in the face; he still had this awareness that gee, I know God’s going to take care of it, boy, I sure hope he does. Like we say I know God’s going to care of the war thing and I know God’s going to take care of this government thing, it’ll be great when he does.
All right, so this believer had the assurance that his sins would be taken care of, would be taken care of. This believer has the assurance that his sins have been taken care of. They are past, retroactive to the cross in 30 AD, or 32 whichever chronology you follow. This believer has a historic event, it’s not just a promise in the New Testament saint’s mind. This guy promise only; this guy, promise fulfilled at the cross, and it made a big difference because the Old Testament saint was told to do something. What was he told to do over and over and over and over and over and over again. Having had this psychological awareness of his own sin, knowing God would forgive him of it, but nevertheless, you know, it’s still there and I wonder how God’s going to deal with it. What did God have him continually do? Sacrifice. Why did God have him do that instead of just going out and dancing around the camp 25 times or washing his hands. Why did God have a particular thing that had to be done over and over and over and over again, the blood sacrifice?
Why? To train him to accept the substitutionary blood atonement when it happened. It was a course in appreciation, so over and over and over and over and over they had to do this. Now we, probably, because we don’t, those of us that don’t live on farms live sheltered lives, we’re not around when an animal is killed, particularly the way they killed them in the Old Testament. Slit their throat and let the blood spurt out all over the place and you stood there and the priest would take it for you and he’d say okay, this is the blood for you and he’d walk away with it and he’d probably get blood all over his hands and all over his garments; these nice pretty pictures you see in your Bibles about the priests with their lily white garments, can you imagine… they didn’t have any lily white garments, they were filthy, blood stained. Have you ever been around a meat packing plant, look at the clothes the guys have on. That’s the way the Old Testament priest looked, just like a meat packer because he was constantly doing this thing.
All right, this Old Testament saint would sit there and he’d have to go through the same old thing, again and again and again and again and again. Now that was all training, that was a training program for what would come future but the training program wasn’t removing his sin, it was only preparing him to understand it would be removed. But it was a training program only, not a removing program, not a forgiving program, a training program.
To wind this thing up let’s go back to our other illustration. You can see the same analogy, here we are in church history, here’s the millennial saint. We have to fight war after war after war after war. You have to get ready for one, then there’s another one comes, then another one comes, then another one comes, and the international community of nations acts, in effect, as political anarchy, there is an anarchy of states in the world. Now why do you suppose God has us going through the same old thing, war after war after war after war after war after war after war, allows it to go on, have to go fight it and this and that, bang around? To appreciate that when Jesus Christ comes we will now know what He has to do. You see, up until the 20th century, this is why our 20th century can very well lead us to the return of Jesus Christ, because up until the 20th century if I had told you hey, Jesus Christ is coming and setting up a world government, you could say oh, boy, that’s pretty good. But you wouldn’t have an appreciation for what it means to have world government until you have to sweat it a little bit. And good teachers do this to their students all the time. They’ll give them a problem, they’ll make them sweat it a little bit before they tell them how to solve the problem. And then the kids are all ears, because they had to sweat the thing themselves for a little bit and then when the teacher gave them the answer, oh, now I see.
All right, that’s the way God trains us in history. He makes us sweat out the whole thing. Think the ecology problems just happen? No, God is breeding, with everyone of these crises in the world, ecology, military crisis, energy problems, have you noticed every one of these logically makes you think how? Globally; it’s not an Arab problem, it’s not an American problem, it’s not a European problem, it’s a global problem. Why are the crises of the 20th century all shaping up to mold a global mentality? Simple; the global mentality has to precede the global solution. And Jesus Christ is going to solve the problem and then people will say oh, now I appreciate what it means. But if Christ had come in the 19th century did people have a global problem? They didn’t even know what the globe was. Today we do. All right, that’s the teaching method.
Next week we’ll get into Hebrews.