Clough Hebrews Lesson 48
Christ Sat Down – 10:5-18 (Psalm 40)
Verse 5 he’s going to the third major Old Testament passage of Scripture. There are three major Old Testament passages that are used time and time again in this epistle; this one is only used once but it’s used very centrally. Of course, you remember the Psalm that’s used over and over; which one was it? Psalm 110, that’s coming up again for the nth and then Psalm 40 is used here and Jeremiah 31. Those are the three major passages of the Old Testament that this guy uses again and again and again and again. You might just to remember these by way of interest, you can think of Psalm 110 as predicting or forecasting a new priesthood; that’s the theme of Psalm 110, a new priesthood. Psalm 40 looks forward to a new sacrifice, and Jeremiah 31 looks forward to a new covenant. So these three central passages in the Old Testament he ties them all together and applies them to the person of Jesus Christ.
And the reason this is so important is that in Hebrews we have a model of how first century Christians used Scripture. Now in verse 5 this is one, about the 15th time we’ve had an introduction like this to an Old Testament passage but again just review, notice how he introduces the text. This is proof that the first century Christians accepted verbal plenary inspiration of Scripture which is a big long theological name for inerrancy. In other words, they did not buy what is commonly taught in the name of Christianity today, by most clergy men, that the Word of God, that the Bible witnesses to the Word of God but is not in fact to be identified with the Word of God. If you want to see a sample of the hedging that goes on, if you have time take a few minutes and read the introduction to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and in the introduction you’ll them use the Word of God but it’s very clear the way they are talking about it it’s not equated with the Bible; it’s something in back of the Bible. It’s something higher, the Bible is just the surface and you have to get in behind the Bible to the Word of God.
This author doesn’t say that because in verse 5, “Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he says,” now it’s not what it means behind the text, it’s just simple, very simple quotation of Psalm 40, so let’s hold the place in Hebrews 10 and turn to Psalm 40. “A Psalm of David,” again, and it’s a picture of Jesus Christ. Psalm 40 is a declarative praise psalm. Remember the different Psalm kinds or categories. A declarative praise Psalm is a psalm that emphasizes praise instead of petition. Remember the two polls, you have petition and you have praise; this is why if you look on the bulletin insert the prayer petitions in that bulletin insert are categorized under two headings, praise and petition. The reason we do that is because that’s a Biblical format. Now some Psalms will go heavy on the petition, they’re called individual laments or something else. Other psalms will go heavy on the praise and they’re called praise psalms. A declarative praise psalm is talking about certain specifics that God has done.
And in Psalm 40:1-4 David reports what God has done. Let’s, since verses 1-4 form the introduction to the section that’s quoted let’s just read it quickly. “I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. [2] He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. [3] And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God; many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.” Now that little clause in verse 3, “a new song” there is one of the classic locations for that idiom. Now that’s the thing you’ll find in the book of Revelation, “and they sang a new song unto the Lord.” Now what does it mean when believers have a new song? It means that for the occasion of a miraculous deliverance by God, when the believers turned around to thank God for what He’d done in their lives, they would express it musically and the new song was a song written for that occasion. In other words, the creative force, musically, in many of these songs was simply thanksgiving for something God had done. So, “he has put a new song in my mouth, praise unto our God, many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.” In other words, they expected their thanksgiving, which was musically expressed, they expected that that would result in people believing. You see the last part of verse 3, “many shall trust in the LORD,” as a result of hearing this.
Now here’s the expression in verse 5-8 of this man’s vow; it’s a declarative praise psalm, it was written after the deliverance in response to a vow that had previously been made. Now in verses 5-8 he’s going to tell you what he is going to do in response to what God has done for him. [5] Many, O Lord my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done,” in other words, many things have happened to this believer, “and thy thoughts which are to us; they can’t be reckoned up in order unto Thee; if I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered.” Now this is one of the most tremendous areas of praise to what God’s thoughts are toward the believer, that he says literally here that I could continue to praise you God, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to praise you for every bit and piece of Your plan toward me. Do you see what a large view of the grace of God this man has. It’s so big, God does so many wonderful things for him that he hasn’t got time to praise Him even if he had 24 hours in every day to do it.
So there’s only one thing he can do, because God’s grace is so overwhelming toward him, and since he is unable to verbally give thanks in all the areas, there is one and only one legitimate response and this begins in verse 6, and this is the section the author of Hebrews quotes. “Sacrifice and offering Thou didst not desire; mine ears hast Thou opened; burnt offering and sin offering hast Thou not required. [7] Then said I, Lo, I come; in the volume of the book it is written of me, [8] I delight to do Thy will, O my God; yea, Thy law is within my heart. [9] I have preached righteousness in the great congregation; lo, I have not refrained my lips, O LORD, Thou knowest. [10] I have not hid Thy righteousness within my heart; I have declared Thy faithfulness and Thy salvation; I have not concealed thy loving-kindness and Thy truth from the great congregation,” and so on, he goes on to make some petitions. But in verses 6-8, which is the section quoted in Hebrews the psalmist is paying back his vow and he’s paying it back ala Romans 12:1-2. It’s the same thought repeated.
This is why, when we have the offering, I often go to Romans 12:1-1, the issue in giving is giving your life, incidentally things in your life. But the big picture isn’t the money, as such, that’s given. The big picture is giving your life in response to what God has done, and giving it happily with thanksgiving. Now that is the response to God’s grace.
Now in this section, if you’ll look at it and flip back and forth between the two sections, what is it that doesn’t seem to follow exactly; there’s been a change in the text. Does anybody see? When the author of Hebrews goes to quote the psalm he adjusts a certain section and again here’s where the power of observation pays off because usually when he changes something it’s to produce a doctrinal point. It sounds like, in verse 6, of the King James at least, I don’t know how it reads in the other translations, right in the middle of verse 6 it says “my ears have Thou opened.” Now that sounds like what he’s saying is you’ve caused me to hear something. That’s not what the Hebrew means, “mine eyes you have digged,” is the way the Hebrew reads and it’s a picture of God fashioning man in Genesis 2 out of clay and for the whole in the ear he’s dug the hole, in other words, the idiom here is “Thou hast created me.” And so the Septuagint took the idiom of verse 6 and enlarged it from the ears to the body, and the reason it did that is the Septuagint was an explanatory translation, sort of like Ken Taylor’s Living Letters. And it took an idiom that people didn’t understand, which was “my ears have Thou opened,” or “my ears have You created,” and it enlarged it because the ears were used here for pars pro toto, the part for the whole, it’s just an expression that instead of saying “a body Thou hast created” he just said “my ears You’ve made.”
And the reason, can anyone thing why in Psalm 40, the original text, why of all the parts of the human body this psalmist would most be concerned with the ears? [someone answers] Right, he’s going to say… you see, how was the Word taught then? Not by reading, it was taught orally. People had to memorize, you couldn’t carry a Bible around with you. You don’t realize what a privilege carrying a Bible text around with you is; most people in history have not learned their Bible the way you and I have learned it. Most people have had to learn their Bible by sitting down and memorizing it when they had a copy available; in the Middle Ages there’d be just one copy or so in Latin in the church of the village, and if you had a few hours to get off from your work in the field you went down to the village church building where you could in and if the priest let you in to look at the book, you could go in there and memorize and then go out. That was the only way you could work with it. So when the Bible was scarce people had to learn by memory and so it was all hearing, it was all on the memory concept.
So verse 6, then, in the original, he’s talking about “sacrifice and offering You do not desire,” now originally what he’s talking about here, and here’s where we have to get this delicate section in the Psalms, originally, and the psalmist view is that God ultimately wants man to respond to Him as in Genesis 1:26-28. Man was originally created to subdue the earth; that’s the sacrifice God really wants. Now after the fall, see there’s loyalty, loyalty to God in every area of life. That was the big, big original purpose of man. Now after the fall we have all the impediments, sin, and now we have to have sacrifice and offering in the sense of giving and animal life, this is the Old Testament concept, animals had to die to get rid of the sin problem. But sacrifices in that sense, animal sacrifices, substitutionary animal sacrifices that he’s talking about don’t cut it because they’re only partial; they only deal with getting rid of the effects of the fall but they don’t deal with going back to the original purpose of it all in the first place.
So what he’s saying is it goes back really to pre-fall times. “Sacrifice and offering you don’t really desire,” it doesn’t mean that he’s trying to get out from it because we know David did go and offer sacrifice, but in perspective he’s saying that’s not really the end of the whole story. “My ears You’ve opened,” now what’s that got to do with the sacrifices, you see. Because the ear is pars pro toto for the body, in other words, You’ve made me a body, I’m supposed to use it. That’s what you really want, “burnt offering and sin offering Thou has not required,” ultimately what God requires was loyalty, absolute loyalty in every area to His authoritative Word. That’s what God wanted.
Now this comes out in the very next two verses; [7] “Then said I, Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me,” now the question is, what is “the book?” Some have thought this was a heavenly book of God’s unrevealed plans. Not at all; the book here is the Torah. The book here is simply the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, “it has written about me,” in other words, it is written about me in the sense I as a member of the human race, my destiny in that book, my purpose for living is in the Torah, everything’s in the Torah, the whole framework is there, “it is written of me,” what I should do. So obviously David has done some meditation. The author of Hebrews has done meditation on David, David has done meditation on the Torah and so David says I delight to do Thy work, in verse 8, this is the central thought of it all, “I delight to do Thy will, O my God.” That summarizes the whole thing, that’s the thing that God’s after, “I delight to do Thy will, O God.” Now it sounds very simple, here’s an Old Testament saint, David, he’s under the era of the Old Testament, he sees how God blesses and he realizes there’s something more profound than just getting rid of your sin, there’s something called sanctification which is greater than just getting rid of sin, but going on into positive obedience and loyalty to God. That’s what ought to be developed.
Now, what the author has discovered and here’s where these psalms have double meaning, is that in verse 6-7 the hint is that doing God’s will is itself a sacrifice because here you have a body plus the human spirit equals the life, or the soul. Now, a sacrifice is giving one’s life for someone. And so David says, here’s the sacrifice you want, when I give my life. But when David thought of giving his life for God, he thought of giving his life in the sense we say… you know, in some circles they have dedication services and I give my life to the Lord to do this and that and the other thing. And we think that way; well originally probably that’s what David meant. But the Holy Spirit so worked through David’s experiences and through his vocabulary that lo and behold, the text has a potential for something greater than just what David was thinking about when he wrote it, because it turns out that the man who gives his life, literally, is going to be Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not only going to give His life in the every day sense of the word, the details of life all during the time He was living, but He also ultimately gives His life on the cross, as a literal sacrifice.
Jesus Christ, then, brings the world back full circle. It started out, God’s command to man was to be loyal; man screwed up in the fall so you have loyalty complicated with sin. Jesus Christ comes along, gives his life for sin, thereby fulfilling loyalty between Himself and the Father, and when He is loyal to the Father and He lives a perfect life, lo and behold He gets rid of the sin problem by dying on the cross. So Jesus Christ got rid of the effects of the fall by doing precisely what man failed to do at the fall and that was being loyal to God. So the ultimate sacrifice, the author says, as he looks at Psalm 40, as he reads verses 6-8, he says hey, there’s something in these verses that doesn’t apply just to David, this is too powerful material to just apply to David; it applies to somebody else and the somebody else is Jesus Christ.
Now let’s come and see how he sets it in the context, Hebrews 10. He’s just gotten through in the first four verses showing that Jesus Christ is going to have to do something that the Old Testament didn’t and he’s just got through saying that the sacrifices and offerings of the Old Testament system kept going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and weren’t producing anything real. And something had to take care of sin and so then he goes to Psalm 40. Probably, we can just kind of sit back here and guess and this is only a guess, but don’t you think as he was thinking through the process of writing those first four verses and he kept thinking, sacrifices are not good, sacrifices are no good, sacrifices are no good, sacrifices are no good, they have to be continually offered. Suddenly, the Holy Spirit worked in his mind, Psalm 40, what did Psalm 40 say? “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire” but instead You desired a total sacrifice of one’s life. Ah, it fits perfectly, he reasons, with Jesus Christ, and so then he begins to quote it.
And he introduces it, then, verse 5, “when
He,” that is Jesus Christ, “comes into the world, He says,” now as He comes it
should be, actually “as He comes into the world, He says.” Now we don’t know and I haven’t studied
enough to give any kind of a dogmatic answer, but it is suspected that these
are the thoughts in the mind of God the Son as He was being born at the virgin
birth; the body has already been prepared in the womb of Mary for nine months;
and at that moment when Jesus Christ was virgin born, He may have said this, in
His deity, not in His human consciousness but in His deity He said, this was
His attitude, and this was the attitude that Christ had all during His
life. If you want some cross references
on this, I give you the following: Matthew 6:10; Matthew 16:39 and 42, that is
that famous passage when He’s in Gethsemane and He has to do battle and He has
to sweat out between what He naturally desires and what God demands, “not My
will, O God, but Thine be done.” And
that’s the basic attitude Christ had, and it’s the attitude we are after in our
own lives. John
You might summarize Psalm 40 and verses 5-7
here as this is the magnum opus of positive
volition. This is the best expression of
positive volition that you can possibly have.
This shows you what positive volition actually is; it means doing what
God wills when you don’t desire doing it, and Jesus Christ did not humanly
desire to go to
Now in verse 8 the author begins to exegete. Now watch how he handles this thing because this is a model of how the Bible was taught. Some people say well I wonder what the services were like in the first century? This epistle is showing you the middle of one, this was a synagogue address and how he teaches here was how the teachers taught in the first century. They quote their Old Testament and then they begin to deal with it exegetically, phrase by phrase, clause by clause.
Hebrews 10:9, “Then said He, Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God.” Do you see where that’s quoted from; look up in verse 7, see in verse 7, he’s just quoting part of the Old Testament passage. [7, “Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God.”] Now he comments on it, and there’s his method of teaching. Quote the Old Testament, now he comments and explains it, “He takes away the first, that He may establish the second.” Now what is he talking about in verse 9, what’s “the first” and “the second.” Does anybody want to venture a guess. [someone answers] That’s the first, what’s the second? The New Covenant. Verse 9 is a present tense, “He is taking away the first,” in other words, as Jesus Christ says that, the very act of saying it is removing the Mosaic Law. “He is taking away the first that He might establish,” aorist, point in time, “that He may establish the second.” It shows you something; it shows you that consummation or ultimate sanctification could never have been attained under the old covenant. The Mosaic Law would never produce a finished product. If Jesus Christ wanted to end the whole system and bring us all to completion He had to bust loose of the Mosaic Law. That had to be broken out of and this is the proof of it in this verse. You have to take away the first before you can establish the second. He already knows the second one and he’s going to quote in verse 16-17 Jeremiah 31 so we know what’s on his mind.
All right, he explains further, so Jesus does take away the Mosaic Law to establish the New Covenant. Hebrews 10:10, “By which will we are sanctified,” now the word w-i-l-l or “will” refers back to the quotation, he’s still commenting, he’s taken a little section out, in verse 9 he says “I come to do Thy will, O God.” Then he explains it. Now he goes back and takes another piece out of that quote and now he’s going to exegete it. What verse is the word “will” in? Where does it come from? Verse 7, you see the last part of that. See what he’s done, he’s just repeated verse 7, he’s split it up, he’s exegeting it. See, he says, “I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God,” all right now he’s quoted part of it in verse 9, now he’s going to finish it in verse 10, “By the which will we are” that is the will that Jesus Christ submitted to with His positive volition, “By the which will we are sanctified, “ or literally, “we have been sanctified,” perfect tense, perfect tense is a point action with results that continue, “we have been sanctified.
Now quiz; there are three ways of looking at sanctification, positional sanctification, experiential sanctification, ultimate sanctification, which of the three is he thinking of here? Positional. If you have already had it and it’s not going on now it can’t be experiential and if it’s in past tense and not future it can’t be ultimate, therefore this is positional sanctification. “By the which will,” in other words, as a result of Jesus Christ’s obedience to the Father’s plan, “we have been sanctified,” over and out, it’s complete. Bunyan, one of the great devotional writers who was unusual because he was doctrinal, wrote in his book, Grace Abounding, and he impersonated God here, talking to the man, the believer who is afflicted with guilt and sin and he put it very well, I just want to read this section out of it. “Sinner, thou thinkest that because of thy sins and infirmities I can’t save your soul, but behold, My Son is by Me, and upon Him I look, and not on thee. And I will deal with thee according as I am pleased with Him.” Now that in a nutshell summarizes positional sanctification.
I’ll read it again in case you missed it. “Sinner,” this is God, Bunyan has God talking to the sinner, the Christian who’s concerned with his sin problem, the Christian that has guilt, the Christian that thinks he’s committed some sin that is big enough to separate him from God and keep him separated and Bunyan says, “Sinner, you thinkest that because of thy sins and infirmities I can’t save your soul, but behold, My Son is by Me, and upon Him I look, and not on thee. And I will deal with thee according as I am pleased with Him.” Now was the Father perfectly pleased with the Son, or only partly pleased with the Son? He’s perfectly pleased with the Son, isn’t He. And why is He? Because of Psalm 40; what did Psalm 40 say? “I delight to do Thy will, O God,” and that pleases the Father, the Father is perfectly pleased with the Son, if you are identified with the Son then He’s perfectly pleased in position with you. That means that in your Christian life you are not adding to the security of your salvation by your good works. Your good works should flow out of a response to what God has already done. You are not gaining brownie points because you attend church, because you show up at the right places and make the proper noises. That does not add to your security.
Your security is given at the time you trusted in Jesus Christ and what is the doctrine that we are talking about here. [someone answers] Eternal security but what is the doctrine that pins it down that you are… that God has done something; what, at the time that you trusted Jesus Christ. Justification. A whole battle for centuries was fought over that doctrine. Justification, men lost their lives over that doctrine. In fact in this movie, Cromwell, which will be October 19th and I will try to provide you with some history in the bulletin to give you historical background for the film which you will need; if you don’t, do some reading and educate yourself, so to the library, get a church history book and read something about the Cromwell era, so you will know who Charles I is, James is, Charles II, and Archbishop Laud, and know his position. You’ll see these characters it the film and they’re done very well. So just educate yourself, you’ll get a free history lesson out of it all if you just put a little effort in it. And you’ll also see what real Christian men were like in ages gone by before we had all the prissy people around.
[someone says something] This one came from Grace Abounding, he wrote a whole series of them; one of the top devotional writers incidentally, in the history of the Christian church. And he was a great doctrinal writer because of this quote; did you notice in the quote how much doctrine there was; it wasn’t how he felt. Let me read that quote over and you compare it with usual devotional literature. Bunyan is not describing how man feels; listen to it again: “Sinner, you thinkest that because of thy sins and infirmities I can’t save your soul, but behold, My Son is by Me, and upon Him I look, and not on thee. And I will deal with thee according as I am pleased with Him.” Now where in that statement do you find anything about Bunyan feels. See, that’s the mark of great devotional literature. It’s talking about how God feels about you. Wouldn’t you rather know that than how you feel about God? You don’t need a devotional book to tell you that. What you want to know is what God feels about you, and that’s the mark of a great devotional writer. He built it, by the way, off passages just like this one.
[10] “By the which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all,” and Greek students, look at that word ephapax, there’s your word, once and for all and it’s about the third time we have come onto this and so now it’s time to hear one of the great Reformers pick up the theme of once and for all and what doctrine is involved in that once for all. Where do we have a little irritation in church history? Anybody recall, what’s the issue that developed out of these passages historically in the Church. These passages that emphasize Christ made His offering once for all, period! The issue of the Roman Catholic mass.
Now in here you will see one phrase that’s coming up and I’ll explain it now so we won’t stop on it later. In verse 12, “But this man, after He had offered,” it’s an aorist participle and historically this is an interesting thing that happens with this very verse and it set off the mass. Verse 12 was written in Greek and Greek has an aorist tense, which is a point, and so in the original New Testament it said: “This man has offered, period, at a point in time once and for all.” And it was very clear in the Greek. But what was the language that the New Testament was later translated into next? Latin, and in Latin there is no participle to express this, with this particular verb stem and so in the Latin it had to be translated as a present. Now what happens to verse 12? How does it read if you read it in Latin with a present tense? “But this man, continually offering one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down.” And so you have Jesus Christ continuing to make an offering. So verse 12 figures very prominently in all these discussions that went on. There was one man in church history that knew better and it was Jerome; Augustine didn’t know what was going on when he came to the text in places but Jerome was the man who had his head screwed on and he tried to correct Augustine on many points, because Jerome knew the languages. Augustine, like so many people, knew a lot of philosophy but he wasn’t a language man. Jerome was a language man and therefore he was the straight one.
Now listen to what Calvin says, Calvin takes off on this and in his commentary
to the Hebrews he wrote it to
Calvin comments: “Such is the sacrifice of the mass with the papist, for they pretend that by it the grace of God is applied to us in order that sins may be blotted out, but since the apostle,” Calvin believed that Paul wrote Hebrews, “but since the apostle concludes that the sacrifices of the Law were weak because they were every year repeated, in order to obtain pardon, for the very same reason it may be concluded that the sacrifice of Christ was weak if it must be daily offered in order that its virtue may be applied to us. With whatever mask, then, they may cover their mass they can never escape the charge of an atrocious blasphemy against Christ.”
“Now, since we have come to the close of the discussion, respecting the priesthood of Christ, readers must be briefly reminded that the sacrifices of the Law are not more effectual proved here to have been abolished than the sacrifice of a mass practiced by the papist is proved to be a vain fiction. They maintain that their mass is a sacrifice for expiating the sins of the living and of the dead, but the apostle denies that there is now any place for a sacrifice, even since the time in which the prophecy of Jeremiah has been fulfilled. They try to make an invasion by saying it is not a new sacrifice or different from that of Christ but the same. On the contrary, the apostle contends that the same sacrifice ought not to be repeated and declares that Christ’s sacrifice is only one, that it was offered for all and further, he often claims for Christ alone the honor of being a priest so that no one was fit to offer Him but Himself alone.”
“The papists have another evasion and call their sacrifice bloodless, but the apostle affirms it as a truth without exception, that death is necessary in order to make a sacrifice. The papists attempt to evade again by saying that the mass is the application of the one sacrifice which Christ has made but the apostle teaches us on the contrary that the sacrifices of the Law were abolished by Christ’s death for this reason, because in them the remembrance of sins was made. It hence appears evident that this kind of application which they have devised has ceased. In short, let the papists twist themselves into any forms they please, they can never escape from the plain arguments of the apostles by which it appears clear that their mass abounds in impiety, for first according to the apostle’s testimony Christ alone was fit to offer Himself; in the mass he offered it by other than; second, the apostle asserts that Christ’s sacrifice was not only one but was also once offered so that it is impious to repeat it but in the mass, however, they may parade about one sacrifice, yet it is evidently made every day and they themselves confess it. Thirdly, the apostle acknowledges no sacrifice without blood and death. They then chatter in vain that the sacrifice they offer is bloodless. Fourthly, the apostle, speaking of obtaining pardon for sins, bids us to flee to that one sacrifice which Christ offered on the cross and makes this distinction between us and the Father, that the right of continually sacrificing was done away by the coming of Christ, but the papists, in order to make the death of Christ efficacious, require daily application by means of a sacrifice, so that they, calling themselves Christians, differ nothing from Jews except in the external symbols.”
This was the application that was done on this passage in the days of the Reformation. Understand the history behind many of these passages. I read you these things to try to awaken somewhere in some of your souls the sense of the flow of history, that when you read your New Testament you won’t read it like a document that just dropped into the world from heaven. This has been fought over for centuries; learn the passages that were involved in these great historic controversies, then you’ll read the Bible and appreciate these passages. You would not have political freedom today if men hadn’t used passages like this to break down the system of that time. So you owe a lot to men who studied these Scriptures.
Let’s look at some further passages, Hebrews 10:11. Summarizing very quickly, “Every priest stands daily ministering and offering often the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. [12] But this man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right hand of God.” By the way, does that sound familiar? “Sat down on the right hand of God,” where’s that coming from? Psalm 110, that’s the Psalm that quoted over and over. [13] “From henceforth expecting” or “awaiting something until His enemies be made his footstool.”
Now this introduces one of the very, very interesting doctrines about the Church. Jesus Christ died, He rose from the dead, ascended to be at the Father’s right hand, beginning at that point in history… by the way, what happened when Jesus sat down, on earth, what was an earthly manifestation that Christ was in place? [someone answers] The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, when Jesus Christ reigned again it was signaled by the speaking of tongues on the day of Pentecost, it was a sign that various things had happened and transpired. So now something is going on, Jesus is waiting, it says. It’s present tense, meaning He keeps on waiting and this means waiting for something that is very important. And this is one of those tremendous passages, next time you want to have balance on the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man this is one of the key passages because it has Christ sitting in heaven waiting for something.
Now what is it, do you suppose, that Jesus is waiting. It says, quoting again Psalm 110, “till His enemies be made His footstool.” Let’s turn back to Psalm 110 and see if we can guess who the enemies are. Look at Psalm 110:1, David speaks, in the Spirit, so that he is prophesying as he is singing this psalm. “The LORD said unto my Lord,” now that’s proof, by the way, of the plurality of the Godhead in the Old Testament. The Old Testament does not teach solitary monotheism; David had no superior in the human realm so the second “Lord” in verse one must refer to God, but the first LORD also refers to God, and so thus you have at least two persons of the Trinity mentioned, the Father and the Son. “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit at My right hand, until I make Your enemies Your footstool.” So this means that when Jesus Christ sat down on the throne God the Father spoke to God the Son. And He said these words, I want you to sit here at My right hand until history terminates in the victory that I am going to secure for you.
So Jesus Christ is waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and so far for 19 centuries Jesus Christ has been waiting at the Father’s right hand for something. Now what is the something? The something is that Jesus Christ is waiting until the basis for His millennial kingdom has become established. See, He’s not going to return to the earth until that basis is established. So the first thing we can gather from the theology of the Old Testament and from the theology of the New Testament is that there’s some impediment to setting up the millennial kingdom, and it’s that impediment that Jesus Christ has to wait for until that impediment is removed.
Now what is the impediment. We can deduce what the impediment is because when does the millennial kingdom begin? It begins after the tribulation and during these seven years of the tribulation judgment is executed upon the earth. Prior, however, to the tribulation, the Church is raptured, 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 15 and at the rapture the body of Christ is removed. It’s going to be removed and the prophecy is skimpy on just how it happens; we’d love to fit the details in but remember, we are to the Second Advent with the Old Testament saints were to the first and they didn’t have all their stuff together on that one. They had pieces of prophecies and they had debates on how these pieces fit together and we can’t tell how all these fit together except when it occurs it will match every word of the text. But when that rapture occurs, that means that the body of Christ is finished.
Now the body of Christ, made up of born again believers between the day of Pentecost and the rapture, consists of a fixed number of believers. We don’t know how many believers, we don’t know what n is but we know there is a specific quantity of believers and apparently they are in a certain state of maturity. When that state, both numbers and in maturity, is reached the body is finished and it’s removed. Now there have been speculations down through the church history and Bob Thieme was not the first man to come up with it, everybody blames Bob Thieme for making this suggestion; you can find it in Augustine, and anyone that knows history does know that he preceded Bob Thieme by a few years…. The idea is that believers are going to replace the demonic powers, the fallen beings that Satan used to rule the world with and when the number of believers equals the number of fallen angels, that point is reached, the angelic council is now replaced with the church of Jesus Christ, and that’s why in the book of Revelation you have the elders standing in front of the presence of God. They, the Church has now replaced the angelic council and man rules over nature, fulfilling the mandate of Genesis 1. The nature including the angels.
So men have a tremendous destiny in the body of Christ. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 6 when he says Christians should not go to lawsuit with one another because he says don’t you know that you are one day going to be in the position of judging angels. And so we can deduce from this and many passages of Scripture that the Church Age is a time between Pentecost and the rapture when people are being called out from every race, from every continent, glued together in one body in Christ, and being trained for administrative purposes in the future, so that God is going to use you to manage areas of the new heavens and the new earth. And this is why He’s bringing trials into your life, not just to save people but after you’re saved to train you so you will have stability, you will have discernment and judgment. And then you will be trained and you will fit into your slot. So the body of Christ will be prepared.
Now the enemies of Jesus Christ, obviously, are Satan and the fallen angels, Satan and the demon powers and these demon powers have reigned during the Church Age and apparently in a peculiar way in that during the Old Testament the demonic powers had some effect on Israel but you had a piece of real estate, Israel, that was relatively free of the demonic powers, in other words, you have God Himself in the Shekinah glory dwelling in the temple. It doesn’t mean that demonic activity was nil, it wasn’t. But in this area of real estate there was a, so to speak, relief because God Himself was dwelling there. In the Church Age the Holy Spirit has removed the restraint on the demon powers and essentially, although the Holy Spirit indwells the Church, the demonic powers are said to be in the administration of this world system. God, the god of this world, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians 2, these passages.
So apparently there’s a full contest that has been going on for 19 centuries and the issue is this: will man, who lives inside the kingdom of Satan, inside a political, social and in all ways spiritual kingdom of Satan choose, when they hear the Word of God, to rebel against the kingdom of Satan and come into the light of Jesus Christ. The issue then is one, will men choose for Christ or for Satan and the issue compared to other eras of history has become accented, accelerated, and become more intense in the Church Age because for every person that trusts in Jesus Christ it means Satan is one more step down the road to sentencing and he knows it. This is why Satan will have you do everything possible to break communication with your unbelieving friends. He will try to keep you from witnessing; he will try to keep you from being trained to witness. He will try to glue your mouth because every person that you can share Jesus Christ with and that person, through the Holy Spirit trusts in the content of the gospel, that is one more loss for Satan.
Also, every time you, as a believer, decide at a point in time to trust in the promises of God instead of going into panic palace, you also refute Satan because at that moment you have declared that God’s character is superior to what Satan can offer you, that the immediate desire of the moment, that whatever other influences that are coming to bear on your soul at that point in time, they do not stack up to the character of God made known through Jesus Christ and you choose to trust in the promise, again you have defeated Satan. And so you may have had many, many hundreds of times in your life and God doesn’t make an issue out of them now, and Satan certainly isn’t going to make an issue out of them now, but all this time, every time you are filled with the Spirit, every time you’ve submitted to the authority of the Word of God, every time you have consistently, with thanksgiving in your heart, obeyed what God has told you to do there’s been a victory, a victory a victory, a victory, a victory, a victory, and in eternity you are going to see the tremendous dimensions of the battle that was going on all around us and we never once even saw it, except for occasional glimpses. And God, for some strange reason doesn’t let us in.
See, if He gave us all special vision right now you’d be surprised what’s in this room besides you. But He chooses not to show us these things, both the good and bad angels, because it just gets beside the point. You can obviously see what happens when things like The Exorcist come around, everybody’s interested in supernaturalism but not Jesus Christ. It’s been very interesting to see that; people will accept the demonic, accept all this stuff, but where’s Jesus Christ in all this stuff. So God has designed history very accurately and with this purpose in mind.
But this is what is behind verse 13; from the time, from henceforth, from the day that Jesus Christ sat down at the Father’s right hand He has been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to assume His full kingship. The only thing that stands between Jesus Christ now at the Father’s right hand and His glorious kingdom is unsaved men plus unsanctified believers. So if you gripe, next time about I wish Christ would come tomorrow, if you take this verse seriously, you can do something about it. You can speed up the second return of Jesus Christ by being more obedient to the Word of God, by being more diligent in evangelism. That’s how you can speed up, so if you want Christ to come don’t sit on your butt waiting for Him to drop out of the clouds, which the theology that many Christians have. And this is why prophecy, by the way, has got such an atrocious reputation in our time because people see this, well look at all those Christians, they go to prophecy conference after prophecy conference and do nothing, and that’s a just criticism. Don’t sit around waiting for Christ to come. So much for verse 13.
Hebrews 10:14, “For by one offering He has perfected forever,” look at that, you couldn’t have a more potent verse to show you, to encourage you in the Christian life. Every bit of sanctification that you have today is just frosting on the cake. Jesus Christ has positionally sanctified you; let’s look at how it works. Let’s pretend for a moment that we’ve knocked out the doctrine of justification. Suppose you are here and you are a believer with all the sin nature and all the pile that’s accumulated here and you expect God to sanctify you. In other words, to work into your soul something. But the Holy Spirit can’t get permission to work in your soul until what happens? The Holy Spirit is perfect holy and this thing down here is perfectly sinful. So, how can the Holy Spirit do His sanctifying work in our souls? What has to happen first? Somehow our souls have to be declared at least legally righteousness, and when our souls are declared righteousness, then that gives the Holy Spirit the legal base He needs to begin sanctification.
So this is why justification is the basis for all sanctification. This is why that one point act that happens at the moment you trust in Jesus Christ lays the groundwork for all sanctification that follows. There is no moral impediment to sanctification once you have trusted in Christ. There is no need for second blessing, third blessing, fourth blessing or hundredth blessing. You have already got… you are complete in Christ as of the time you trusted in Him by the doctrine of justification and this is the doctrine right here, “For by one…” “ONE offering He has perfected forever…” “forever” it says, “them who are being sanctified.” In other words, this has been a legal perfection to give the green light to the Holy Spirit so He can start His sanctifying work. Remember we are contaminated vessels from God’s viewpoint and the Holy Spirit doesn’t enjoy being enclosed in contaminated vessels. And the only reason He condescends to incarnate Himself in your soul and mine is because we are justified creatures, that’s the only basis.
So when you tend to think about sanctification and let me give you a little tip on keeping your thinking straight in worship and in prayer, if you’ll think about the connection that I’ve just gone through and read these verses carefully it will cause you to give thanks in the proper place. When you think about what God the Holy Spirit is doing in your soul right now and you say: Thank you God, I see that You’re training me, I see that You’ve worked with me over here, You’re working with me over here, and so on, and I realize though it stings right now, in the long run this is the best thing that ever happened to me, I realize that. But what you ought to do to produce a deeper thanksgiving is then to go on and say: Father, I realize that the only reason the Holy Spirit even indwells me in the first place is because I have been legally justified by Christ’s finished work and that will keep you pointing back to the finished work of Christ. That’s why 1 John 1:9 brings up the finished work of Christ, it’s always pointing back to the finished work of Christ. And that keeps you from getting warped, that’s going in some circles, centering on the Holy Spirit instead of centering on the cross of Christ. It all goes back to the cross of Christ as the basis; I’m not slighting the work of the Holy Spirit but the center is not the Holy Spirit’s work; the center is Jesus Christ’s work. And the proof of it is this: where in the New Testament do you have a book that expounds everything that the Holy Spirit is doing like this book expounds everything Christ does. You don’t. And it’s because the Holy Spirit wants us to glorify, not Himself, but Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 10:15, “And the Holy Spirit also is a witness to us;” in other words, what he’s doing here now is he’s made an induction or a deduction on the basis of Psalm 40 and the basis of Psalm 110, now in verse 15 he says now I want to show you that our conclusion is confirmed by another passage of Scripture. And he’s going to cite Jeremiah 31, but he says when he cites Jeremiah 31, he doesn’t say Jeremiah is a witness to us, he says the Holy Spirit is a witness to us, which again shows the high, high, high view of Scripture this author has. “The Holy Spirit is a witness,” present tense. What does that mean? Why doesn’t he say the Holy Spirit was a witness when He spoke back, centuries ago to Jeremiah? What’s the significance of the present tense, the Holy Spirit is a witness?
[someone answers] All right, “All Scripture is God-breathed,” in 2 Timothy 3, now we quote that and quote that, but just think of it, you know what “God-breathed” there is means? It’s a picture, you go out on a cold morning and go whoooo… like that and the breath is there, and remember the breath is what in Scripture? It’s the Spirit, isn’t it. All right, now what that phrase says if you want to exhaust the meaning, if you know a little Greek that’s a fantastic word to do a word study on, “God-breathed” in 2 Timothy is saying just like that whoooo, the vapor that comes out of your mouth in the morning has a shape to it, you can see it, it is as though God went whoooo down in history and the from of His breath is the Scripture. That is how closely the Scripture is linked to the Holy Spirit. So then when people go back to the Scripture it’s like going back to that clod of breath, the breath is still there, the breath has form, it doesn’t dissipate, and so he says the Holy Spirit is saying, and then he quotes Jeremiah, the covenant, he goes through the New Covenant. [16, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them.”]
And then he draws in the last two verses, and
we’ll conclude here because this is the last of the section of the book,
Hebrews 10:17, “And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” Now he looks at that and he says huh,
thinking now of this author in his humanity and from the human point of view he
probably thinks wait a minute, sins and iniquities God isn’t going to
remember? Well God always remembers sins
and iniquities, that’s why we have to give sacrifices all the time. And so when he sees this he says, conclusion,
verse 18, “Where remission of these is, there can’t be any more offering for
sin [is no more offering for sin].” In
other words, it is a once and for forgiveness.
So he deduces much of New Testament truth strictly from these Old
Testament prophecies. It’s a tremendous
testimony.
Now what I’d like to do since verse 18, this is the end of… the book was
written in two parts, all the way from 1:1-10:18 was the basis for
exhortation. Then beginning in verse 19
and to the end of the book, now we’re going to have what real Biblical
exhortation is on its applied end. But
he’s had to give you the basis for exhortation.
Now those of you who think you have the gift of exhortation, for your
benefit I am going to, next week, go all the way back to 1:1 and all the way to