Clough Hebrews Lesson 53
Key is Perseverance – Hebrews 10:32-39
In our study in Hebrews we’ve been studying Hebrews 10:18-39 and this is the section that we have summarized by saying that knowing the person and work of Christ ought to encourage Hebrew Christians. We have examined the gift of exhortation or the function of exhortation in verses 22-25, we’ve seen how Biblical exhortation works, it begins in verse 22 with drawing our attention to our position in Christ. The second point in verse 23 was identification of the problem, pinpointing where the problem was in life so a person could take their stand against it. And then the third one, verses 24-25, something positive that you can do about it, it wasn’t just in the abstract but it was a positive concrete thing that people could do to solve the problem and the problem was potential defection from the Christian faith. So verse 24-25 gives that and this should ought to be a model for those of you who find yourselves in positions of exhortation; maybe you think you have the gift of exhortation and would like to train it, then this passage and passages like it would be for you.
Then we began last time with Hebrews 10:26 and following with the fourth warning passage, “For if we sin willfully,” remember in verse 26 and we concluded with verse 31 last week. And the warning, the point of the warning was that the Word of God has to be taken seriously and the Old Testament example was that one who did not take the authority of the Mosaic Law seriously was punished by capital punishment. The author of Hebrews, using typological interpretation, takes it one step further, that those who reject the Messiahship of Jesus Christ merit eternal damnation. And so he’s using Old Testament analog to develop the New Testament truth. But the whole point of Hebrews 10:26-31 is that the Word of God ought to be taken seriously. And now beginning in verse 32, as he does so often in these warning passages, he goes on to encourage the people. He doesn’t want to discourage them, he wants to encourage them. And if you just stopped at verse 31 it would be discouragement.
So beginning at Hebrews 10:32 we have encouragement. “But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great fight of afflictions, [33] Partly, while ye were made a gazingstock both by reproaches and afflictions; and partly, while ye became companions of them that were so used.” Now the “But” of verse 32, in the Greek it’s de, and this is the conjunction, here’s it operating as a conjunction of contrast with what has preceded. So instead of defecting, instead of giving up, instead of flaking out, these people are to go on, opposite, and they are to do certain things and now he’s going to say what they should do. This is basically nothing more than an amplification of verses 24-25. Now 24-25 we’ve got an encouragement, remember that was the positive things. All right, verses 32 and following is just an amplification of that positive thing that they are to do. Besides gathering together and exhorting one another here’s one specific concrete piece of advice the author of Hebrews gives his readers. Here’s something, he said, every one of you can do and if you’ll do this it’ll stabilize you when you’re under pressure.
“But call to remembrance the former days,” “call to remembrance” is a present imperative, meaning keep on calling to remembrance, over and over, it’s ana, you notice, those of you with the Greek text the ana, a-n-a prefix on the main verb means repeatedly, do this again and again, plus the present tense emphasizes it. So over and over you ought to do this. Now what they are to do is to recall past experiences of using faith in their life and if they’ll recall these past experiences of using faith, then they’ll be encouraged to use faith in the present tense and not just think about the past. “Call to remembrance the former days, in which after you were illuminated,” the word
“illuminate” is the same word we studied in Hebrews 6, it’s photizo, and it means that they were illuminated with New Testament truth out of their Jewish culture. They looked forward to a Messiah and now Jesus of Nazareth had come and He was the Messiah, and since He was the Messiah, therefore, and they heard about it, apparently these people were in Rome, and they heard about it and at the point they heard about it the Holy Spirit illuminated their minds, they were photizo, they were illuminated. Remember this does not mean they were regenerated…to far, you can’t interpret this all the way as regeneration. Apparently it just refers to illumination by the Holy Spirit.
“…after you were illuminated,” in this case these people were regenerated but the verb doesn’t always mean regeneration, “after you were illuminated, you endured a great fight of afflictions.” Now the word that is translated in the King James as “fight” is an interesting word, althesis, what does that look like to you in English, what English word? Athletic. And it’s the word from which we get the word “athletic.” It is one of the athletic metaphors that comes into the New Testament. In the New Testament two of the most common metaphors are athletics and military. This is why it’s too bad we have so many people going to seminary who haven’t had military experience. One ought to have some military experience and/or athletic experience to properly appreciate the New Testament. Paul, if you want to put it that way, was a sport’s fan. And the reason we know it is because he used athletic metaphors so often and when he did use an athletic metaphor he used it correctly. And he used it because of the depth and intensity of the spiritual conflict. Paul used athletic metaphors from contact sports, boxing is given in 1 Corinthians 9.
I recently had a several letter each way dialogue with some female editor of Christianity Today who was sitting back saying that Paul never got violent in his metaphors. And I pointed her to 1 Corinthians 9, and she says there’s no contact sport there. And so I wrote and asked as to whether in her vocabulary boxing in 1 Corinthians 9 was a contact sport, and whether wrestling in Ephesians 6 was a contact sport. All the boxing and wrestling I’ve seen were contact sports. But nevertheless, this is the modern way of looking at Scripture.
So here we don’t have the modern way, we have the old way, “the great athletic conflict,” literally, “of afflictions,” and it means that these people were under tremendous pressure. This doesn’t mean that when somebody trusts the Lord Jesus Christ they’re going to live on a bed of roses the rest of their lives, accept Christ and your troubles will be over and so forth. We’ve had many, many people trust the Lord and their problems begin and the reason that their problems begin is because the Lord starts training them, as some of you know.
All right, “…after you were illuminated, you endured a great athletic contest of pressures,” this was the past of these people. These believers had lived through a lot of pressure and we’ll see what kind of pressure in a moment, but they lived through a tremendous amount of pressure. And the author of Hebrews is simply arguing, if you just remember people, how you did it before, you can do it again; that’s the argument. I don’t have to, he says, although I will in chapter 11, I don’t have to go through and show you the illustrations of Noah, of Moses, of Abraham, you ought to know this from your own experience. Just a few decades ago you went through this mess and you did it by faith.
Now in Hebrews 10:33, here he describes, and this gives us insight into the background of this particular epistle. “Partly,” and those of you who are Greek students, I want you to notice something here, this is a classic place where that thing that they always tell you in Greek text books, when you translate and you first learn to translate, and they always say translate it “on one hand—on the other hand,” and it sounds very mechanical when they tell you how to do this. Here’s a case where it works; the word “partly” and “partly” is men and then there’s a bunch of words and then you’ll see a de; men de, these are two parts of this great athletic contest of affliction. In other words, pressures came from two directions on these people.
The first direction was that “you were
continually made a gazingstock by reproaches and afflictions,” so that’s the
direct type thing. This is where these
people were singled, out by the Romans, for persecution. They were directly
singled out, there wasn’t any indirect thing with this, they themselves experienced
this, “by reproaches and afflictions, and partly, you became companions of them
that were so used.” In other words,
this is indirect affliction. We’ll go
into those two in a moment. But those
are the two main categories of affliction, the direct and the indirect. The direct, they themselves, because of their
testimony for Jesus Christ, would be persecuted. What kind of persecution? Well, it varied
from the ten percent gimmick that was used in the early
The indirect was when they would uphold friends who were being persecuted, they stuck together and you’ll notice, this is a theme, and the author of Hebrews thinks this is important enough to bring it up here because remember in verse 25 what was the danger? In verse 25 the danger was that these people would forsake the assembling of themselves together, in other words, were tending to lone ranger the thing, go by themselves, face the trials of life without any fellowship with other believers and it just never works. First of all, it’s a violation of the doctrine of spiritual gifts. You can’t use your spiritual gift to edify me, I can’t use mine to edify you if we’re separated by twenty or thirty miles, so Christians fellowship is necessary. So here he goes to the same point. Before he said when you were under pressure you guys stuck together, now you’re under pressure and you want to fall apart, you want to break up, you want to just forget the whole thing.
In Hebrews 10:34 he goes into some more detail about this and here’s where we can understand not only the kind of pressure but we can also guess, for we aren’t given specific Scriptural information, we can guess now a little bit more accurately and precisely the date of this epistle and moreover the addressees of this epistle. “For ye had compassion,” it says in the King James, “on me in my bonds,” but that’s not the best text. The best text is “on those in bonds,” that “on me and my bonds” business comes the King James people thought Paul wrote it and they were taking that phrase from some Pauline epistles. But literally it reads, “you had compassion on those in bonds, and you took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that you have in heaven a better and enduring substance.” Now they “had compassion,” the Greek word from which we get sympathy, and it says they “had compassion on those in bonds;” who were those in bonds? Those “in bonds” were believers who were already in prison. Now this tells us something very interesting because in the ancient world if you were thrown in prison you might starve to death if you didn’t have friends outside the prison who would give you food. So if you were locked in prison and you wanted to survive, you’d better have some friends outside that would come in the prison every day or so with some food for you. If you didn’t, chances are you’d die. And so what these people would do is every day or so they’d come in with a bunch of food, into the prison, to give to the prisoners, the Christians, who were in bonds. That’s hwat it means very practically.
Now think of this for a moment; don’t you think that jeopardizes the person that’s walking in the prison? Imagine what they must have thought every day as they walked in the prison with the food, by the glaring eyes of the Roman guards, wondering if they were going to be the next ones that were going to be arrested, particularly if this guard saw you happen to be going in quite daily, what are you so interested in this enemy of the Roman Empire for, maybe we ought to investigate you. So they didn’t treat their fellow believers in prison like what we often treat our fellow believers who are sick or something, never see them or anything. They went to them and spoke with them and they risked personal retribution in order to do this. Tremendous testimony. We know from history that for the first 200 years, during the imperial persecutions of the Christians, this was a regular procedure.
If you’ll turn to Matthew 25:36 it’ll make that little passage take on new meaning. Granted that in Matthew 25:36 Jesus is talking about future time; the principle is the same in present time. Jesus’ remark was made in the context of first century prison light, and in Matthew 25 when He says in verse 36, and notice it comes after verse 35 where He’s talking about food, see in verse 35 He says, “For I was hungry, and ye gave Me food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you took Me in, [36] Naked and you clothed Me; I was sick, and ye visited Me; I was in prison, and you came unto Me,” and that was the standard procedure of the early believers. They considered it part of their Christian duty to visit fellow believers in prison, to help them out in any way they could, even at the risk of personal retribution.
Now the next part of Hebrews 10:34, “you had compassion on those in bonds,” now the next thing they suffered is that you “took joyfully the spoiling of your goods,” literally “you endured with joy the robbing of your goods,” “your goods” is the word for property. So we know that their property had been taken, so they suffered material persecution. Now if you hold the place and turn to Hebrews 12:3-4 we know something about this persecution. What we’re doing now is we’re studying the persecution suffered by the original readers of the epistle to Hebrews. Notice in verses 3-4 it tells us something about them that was true, at least up to that time. “For consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. [4] You have not yet resisted unto blood,” … not yet resisted unto blood,” which means that they had not yet suffered murder, yet this verse in chapter 10 says they had suffered, say, confiscation of property. So this outlines the kinds of persecutions these people were undergoing, they weren’t being killed but they were suffering confiscation of property.
Now when we introduced this epistle we said
there are two leading places that are candidates among Biblical scholarship for
the destination of this epistle. Anybody
remember what they were?
But now we’ve got something else that
knocks out
Nero had a lot of parties and one of his…he had problems, I don’t know whether he had Lubbock Power and Light but he never could get enough power to light up his garden, and so he decided he’s use Christians and so he’d nail a few Christians onto some boards and coat them with tar and light them, and you could drink, and of course these people were all halfway under the table while this was going on, and these Christians would be screaming and sizzling away and they were providing good light for Nero’s parties. That was one way, and obviously they were dying. So by 64 AD we know that imperial persecution of the Christians had attained a murder level. But before this there were persecutions and they weren’t quite so vicious. Speaking of Nero’s persecutions, Tacitus, the Roman historian said, “Their death was made a matter of sport; the Christians were covered with wild beast’s skins and torn apart by dogs, or they were fastened to crosses and set on fire in order to serve as torches by night when daylight failed. The Christian girls had to enact the parts of [sounds like: Dur sea and Dan aye us],” which were very orgiastic rites and so on that the guys put on and so this is how the early Christians were treated under Nero and after that point.
But before that there was another Roman
Emperor, Claudius; does anybody know what Claudius was famous for? We covered
him when we dealt with the epistle to the Romans. He had one impact and it’s an
interesting point because it’s an extra-Biblical testimony of the spread of
Christianity. [someone answers] What I was thinking of was the edict of
Claudius in 49 AD. Claudius had a problem with riot control in the city of
In December we’re going to have a Hebrew Christian here who’s a member of the Jews for Jesus group, not the charismatic type, they’re a split off the American Board of Missions to the Jews, and most of the time they go places in the United States they cannot reveal the motel room because the JDL bombs them, the JDL is the Jewish Defense League, and these people, these Jews for Jesus, they just go… and they’re quite aggressive, much more so than the American Board and obviously the JDL doesn’t like it too much so here in 20th century America the hostility between the Christian Jew and the non-Christian Jew is as intense as it ever was and you can see what Claudius… we’re not excusing Claudius but you can see how he got finally fed up to here with what was going on in the Jewish ghetto and he just cleaned them all out.
So when the edict of Claudius was passed, that probably caused a lot of persecution. In fact, we know it did because there’s accounts of having go down the street and there’d be these homes on the edge of the street and the Roman soldiers would come down enforcing the edict, and any Jew that was left in the house, all right, get out of here, and they’d come in the house and they’d get everybody out whether their furniture was moved or not, because they figured they’d had time to move out, Roman soldiers would go clean one house out, they’d go to the next one and the mobs would come behind the families of the soldiers going down the street and the mobs would start seizing the property, they’d just go in there and anything that was left furniture, food, clothing, dishes, anything that was left in these homes the mob would take. And the Jews were pretty well because as they did in so many cities, they had a lot of business investments and so on. So the mobs were very much interested in these homes. So we know that many, many thousands of Jews lost tremendous, tremendous quantities of property.
So this may be the kind of persecution, they
weren’t losing their lives, but they were losing their property and this would
have been years before the epistle to the Hebrews, but since the epistle to
Hebrews had to be written close to the fall of the temple, we then would say
that it must have been written around 64 AD or very, very close, the Caesar’s
armies around Jerusalem, Vespasian originally came in around 68 AD and then he
turned over the siege of Jerusalem to his son, Titus, in 70 AD. So if we put the date of the epistle, it
couldn’t be 49, this is looking back to 49, remember this has happened a long
time ago to these people. It must be
late because this is the second generation of believers as we can tell from
Hebrews 2. So you see, we can’t be sure
exactly what’s happening; we can’t be sure because the text of Hebrews doesn’t
tell us for sure, but what we do know is that we have an envelope of possible
dates. We tend to favor
Are there any questions on the methodology there, just a side note on the history of the epistle. If you’re puzzled as t where you get this kind of information, you go to a good introduction volume on either Old or New Testament, we have some in the library, there’s some over at Tech, so all you have to do is look up a good Old Testament or New Testament introduction, make sure it’s a conservative one and not one neo-orthodox thing or something. [someone says something] Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars it’s called, a famous volume.
In Hebrews
It goes back to what we tried to show you on
the divine viewpoint framework and you face a kind of pressure, learn to think
in terms of these three steps. When you
face a specific attack and you’ve already went through a couple of these three
steps on suffering, when you face a specific attack under pressure, just think
enough to be able to put in a sentence; just think it out, what is it that’s
bugging me right now. Well this is
what’s bugging me right now. To deal
with pressure you’ve got to be able to think; that’s why the Bible is against
taking anything that impairs your ability to mentally concentrate. You’ve got to think it through. All right, then you go and you plug into
divine viewpoint framework, the doctrine that you know, then you block the
attack with the doctrine, and here what was the attack these people faced. Suppose you’re these people now, you’re in
Let’s break this down, see how they applied doctrine to their experience. What was their attack? Loss of property. All right, you can imagine, their property meant something, they worked hard for it. So loss of property, all right, what doctrine do you think they plugged into? [someone answers] All they probably plugged in something future by the way he’s saying, see what he says, “that you have in heaven a better,” so they must have plugged in something about their position in Christ. So there was their doctrine, so they went from their attack, loss of property, and they said okay, listen, what have we been taught? We’ve been taught that in Christ we have this, we have this, we have this, we have this, we have been taught that we inherit the promises of God, we’ve been taught that to be absent from the body is to be face to face with the Lord and so on. We’ve been taught all these things, now we’re under pressure, let’s use it. All right, block the attack with doctrine. Now the attack, what would have been the tendency, when your property is being taken away from you what’s the tendency? To look where? Your tendency on this attack is to get preoccupied with the property losses. So the block then shifts your attention. In other words, faced with the loss of property my attention gets drawn to my property losses. All right, with the application of the doctrine of position in Christ, I say all right, my property is lost, God is sovereign, all things work together for good so I’m going to look up. So there’s an attention shift. It doesn’t mean I just part with it gladly, these people parted with it painfully; there was a joy there but it wasn’t this idiotic joy, joy, joy business that everyone sings about in trite songs. They had a basic deep joy but it wasn’t that stupid stuff.
Now, the counter attack, what would you counterattack. Remember, we’re not out of water until we come all the way back down to this third step, after we’ve blocked the attack, it’s not enough just to block temptation but you’ve got to counter attack the temptation. If you’re being… if Satan is putting the pressure on by causing great property losses, he’s basically drawing your attention down to the material thing. And you say okay, I resist this, my attitude is now on the person of Christ, all right, as I shift my attention away from the property back to Christ I block the attack. But if I stop my Christian response with point 2 I leave myself open for another version of the same temptation in the next five minutes because Satan can come right in there with another one. So how would I kind of permanently immobilize this kind of attack? [someone answers] All right, I’ve got to go back to some Biblical concept of created goods, it goes back to created goods. My point is that created goods are temporal; this is the first creation, since the curse this is a dying creation, you can’t take it with you.
[someone says something] All right, that’s another one because under property loss another attack would be not only loss of property but vengeance, a vengeful attitude. And that would be another attack which would have to be treated differently. But if you treat it… instead of what we did here, you started with vengeance and you work your way down through here you’d wind up with the fact of quoting Romans 12, “Vengeance is Mine,” and letting the Lord take care of it. [more said] That’d be a good one. [more said] Block the attack with doctrine, yeah, counterattack with the human viewpoint opposite. In other words, what’s the human viewpoint opposite? That goods are worth something that should be your matter of prime concern, and so what I’m trying to show you here, when you get in these kinds of situations, whether it’s temptation in the area of property, in the area of sex, whatever it is if you’ll head on through to the third point and not just stop here, this is where a lot of us stop and then we find out and boy, it’s five minutes later, we’re being attacked again by the same thing in a different mask, so the thing of it is, you attack the human viewpoint opposite.
[something said] Oh
yeah, you attack it with doctrine.
[more said] If it’s the Claudine persecutions, obviously it was. [more said]
No because quite frankly they didn’t have the numbers. The Christians didn’t have the numbers in the
early days in the
So you can’t argue that Christianity in the first two centuries was pacifist. Now only that but you have some commanders in the Roman legions who were Christians, so it obviously shows… and the reason why this passivism thing got started, by the way, that everyone says the early Christians were pacifists, but they didn’t fight the Roman army. Now that’s a wrong deduction, it’s a non sequitur. What happened was that in order to fight in the Roman army you had to swear allegiance to Caesar which meant you had to accept His deity. So the reason the Christians weren’t in the Roman army wasn’t because they didn’t want to kill, the reason the Christians weren’t in the Roman army was because they couldn’t get over the Caesar problem, and that’s why, that’s historically why the Christians weren’t in the Roman army, not because they thought killing was bad.
[someone says something] Well, this outline that I’ve got up here, this outline, the attack, the one, two, three steps is only an increment. As I’ve tried to say, when you look at something like this, all this is trying to do is get you to deal with a small piece of the overall struggle. Now when, in practice, in our every day experience, when you get hit with a temptation you may have to go through this four or five times with four or five different issues that are all kind of mingled together. No attack that Satan throws your way is that simple. But the point is you’ll never learn how to handle the more complicated ones until you simplify it. So what I’ve tried to do is simplify it as best I can to the bare essentials and getting it down that simple, then hopefully you’ll get a mentality, and then with that mentality, yeah, you’re right, you push this as far back as you have to.
[more said] That’s right, in practice, when we have a serious problem in our life, it happens in counseling all the time, you get something up here, some problem up here; well you solve that and boom, you discover it’s one down here, solve that and boom, there’s one down here; solve that and boom, there’s one down here. And you’ll get down there, four or five times and it’ll be down there. I’ve never seen … even people that are very screwed up, never do you have to go down three or four more levels before you get to basically what it is; it’s always a theological problem, always involving, basically the satanic thing that God is unfair usually, somewhere buried down in the trash heap is what it is. But the idea of that three step is just a real simplified version to get used to thinking that way. And then in the real thing… well you know that, if you’re in discussion with somebody in your living room or something, in a good give and take dialogue, it’s not going to be three steps, it may be three hundred steps but so what. I mean, the guy that’s on the football team, he learns how to block and he learns how to block for maybe… you know, here’s 30 seconds worth of activity but in the actually football game of four quarters the guy that’s blocking is going to be a lot more than 30 seconds worth of activity but he couldn’t do all that blocking in the first, second, third and fourth quarters if he didn’t get the elementary thing on how to block down. Once he gets that down then there’s permutations and combinations that come up in the course of a game but at least he’s got the basic thing down.
[someone says something] Very good point, John 14, in fact the very word “mansion” is used in John 14, “I go to prepare a place for you,” so if Claudius wants to bump us out of this ghetto great, we’ll just get bumped into the Lord Jesus Christ’s ghetto, except it won’t be a ghetto. So there’s all sorts of ways you can handle that kind of a situation and they evidently did it and did it very well. Time is running so let me get going with verse 36, 37, 38…
We have an interesting interpretation problem. Hebrews 10:36, “For you have need of patience that, after you have done the will of God, that ye might receive the promise.” The idea being that these people are not persevering. The number problem in Christian circles today; Jay Adams, the Christian psychologist said, when he was at seminary, and he said this and I quoted him in the third framework pamphlet: in counseling week after week I continually encounter one outstanding failure among Christians, the lack of what the Bible calls endurance. Godliness does not come by osmosis, it is by willing, prayerful and persistent obedience to the requirements of Scripture that godly patterns are developed and come to be a natural part of us. There’s no quick instant spirituality, in site of what all the charismatics are saying, if you turn the water on in your bathtub at 70 decrees and let your tongue flap at both ends and this gives you a great spiritual experience. All this, it’s nothing more than laziness; I want instant spirituality. The Bible doesn’t give you instant spirituality, the Lord promise to give you spirituality over a training period. And that’s what he’s saying. Now to back this up he’s going to quote a verse, and here we’re back to some very interesting things.
Hebrews 10:37-38 are quotations from
Habakkuk. So turn to Habakkuk 2:3-4; now there are three sources that we have
to pull together here to gain an interpretation. The first is the Masoretic text; that’s the
Hebrew text behind your translation of Hebrews 2, 3 and 4. Now in the Hebrew it says … anybody know the
argument of Habakkuk, what it’s all about?
The argument of Habakkuk is that God has allowed suffering to come on
the nation
The idea here is that the vision is of Jesus Christ, the man, Habakkuk, sits here and he’s waiting for justice to be done and God tells him hold on, wait, the solution is not within your soul, the solution is outside the soul and so the just lives on a day by day basis by faith, that is, faith that this whole thing is going to come to a moral conclusion. “The just shall live by his faith.” By the way, Habakkuk 2:4 together with Genesis 15:6 are the two places where justification by faith is taught in the Old Testament. We’ve been studying the doctrine of justification by faith, all right, we’ve done it through Genesis 15:6 but it can also be done through Habakkuk 2:4; this is the other Old Testament passage the apostles quote over and over and over again, “the just shall live by faith.”
All right that’s the Masoretic text, you
have that before you, but let me put up on the overhead text what the
Septuagint says. Where it is “it” at the
end of verse 3, “it will surely come, it will not tarry,” the Septuagint has “he”
in place of “it.” The Septuagint says
“he shall surely come, he shall not tarry. The Septuagint is the Greek
translation of the Old Testament done about 200 BC by the Jews in
All right, if you read that in the Septuagint, what does that tell you about the way the Jews were taking this particular text in 200 BC. They were taking it Messianically. Now there’s some more interesting things to come. In the Hebrew, when you wanted to indicate… you see where it says in verse 3, “it will surely come,” in the Hebrew it looks like this: “coming it will come.” Now that’s just the way you intensify the mood in the Hebrew system. You put an infinitive absolute before the main verb and that intensifies the mood. So when you want the “He’ll surely come!” you double the stem and that’s how you get the intensity of the mood.
All right, now the Septuagint at this point, instead of going ahead and translating it like the Hebrew idiom would call for, “He will surely come,” lo and behold, what do they do but they literally interpret it. So in the Greek they write, “coming,” except they write it as a participle, “He will come.” “Coming he will come,” now if you’ll turn back to Hebrews, this man is quoting from the Septuagint, but when he quotes he adjusts one point. This is the translation he’s looking at, but when he goes to teach the passage he changes it. Can anybody see in verse 37 where he’s made the change. Now he can do this, we can’t, he can because he’s an apostle, he’s an inspired author of Scripture so he has the authority to do it, we don’t. “Coming He will come,” now what has he done to that translation. Just look at verse 37, what has he done? [someone answers] With an article, he makes this an article. So he’s saying “the one who comes will come.”
Now it just so happens that this gives us a
clue as to who the author of this may be by what he’s done just here. “The one who comes,” translated again it
would be, “the coming one.” Now there
was a man in the New Testament that spoke of Jesus as “the coming one.” Do any of you know what his name was? John the Baptist. Now it’s even more interesting, if you’ll
turn to Acts 18 and see who one of John the Baptist’s followers was. If you want the reference for where John
speaks of Christ as “the coming one,” ho
erchomai, it’s in Matthew 11:3 and John a:27, those are the places where
John the Baptist refers to Christ as ho
erchomai, the coming one. But now
look in Acts 18:24, “And a certain Jew, named Apollos, born at
Now this isn’t any dogmatic proof but if you turn back to Hebrews now and see what he’s done with quoting Habakkuk, it certainly looks for all the world like he’s… it’s not a direct quote, remember this is given in the synagogue, he’s got a chance to go see a synagogue service and as he gets up in the synagogue, as he stands there and he speaks this he’s kind of interpreting Habakkuk, “yet a little while and the coming one is going to come, and he won’t tarry.” See, he’s taking it right out from Habakkuk and he’s using this in exactly the intellectual problem that Habakkuk’s been facing. What was Habakkuk’s problem? Habakkuk’s problem was why doesn’t God solve our problem now, why is it taking Him so long to resolve this moral problem. And the Hebrews faced the same thing. Why was it taking Christ so long to solve this moral problem? So he goes over in Habakkuk and pulls it in.
Then he says, Hebrews
Now the key verse of the whole chapter, the last one, the one we’ve been looking forward to is verse 39, “But we are not of them who draw back into perdition, but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.” Now that is teaching one of the great truths that came out of the Reformation. Anybody know what it is? If you have some of your Calvinist friends around they’ll tell you about TULIP. Anybody know what “TULIP” means, what it’s an acrostic for? Total Depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, that’s why Classical Calvinism has never really taken root in fundamentalist circles, that’s the one point that the fundamentalists can’t agree. Irresistible grace and P, that’s the one that’s taught here in verse 39, Perseverance of the saints. And those are the famous five points of Calvin’s Reformation [can’t understand word]. “P” is the perseverance of the saints. Let me tell you what he’s talking about.
Hebrews 10:39 simply means this, it doesn’t mean somebody is going to be perfect in their life because in Hebrews 11 we’re going to get a catalogue of Old Testament greats and we’re going to see that they dropped the ball many times. So it can’t be teaching that everybody is going to be perfect, because Hebrews 11 knocks that out. So what does perseverance of the saints mean? Perseverance of the saints means that because we are elect in Jesus Christ, God the Father keeps after us to constantly renew our faith so that one of two things will happen to a believer. Either the person will be hounded by the Holy Spirit so that he can go out on a toulie trip and be way out of it and come back, or he’ll get way out of it and the Holy Spirit will hound him and he still resists and he’ll have the sin unto death. The Lord Jesus Christ will kill you physically before He will permit you to destroy yourself spiritually. Some people who are dying very gross deaths, such as in 1 Corinthians 11, where you had Christians suffering miserable deaths, if they had had medical insurance in the Corinthian church it would have become bankrupt; it’s a horrible situation but God is merciful, He will cause you to die before He will allow you to spiritually tube out. And if you see someone that’s going out and raising all kinds of hell, and just getting away with it, Hebrews 12 calls him, and I quote the King James, “a bastard.” Now that makes it pretty clear.
So the perseverance of the saints is simply saying that God is in control of your sanctification and “we are not of them who are going to draw back,” in other words there have been believers… remember, this would loosely be called the Messianic movement and in this movement in the first century you’d have believers and then you’d have follow-ons, people who were not genuinely born again but people who were just kind of socially pressured into the group, people that went along because they thought well, my friend and my aunt is in it and whatever my aunt does I do because I think she’s a great woman, she founded the church and all the rest so I’ll be a member of the group. So what would happen? When you start putting the pressure on this kind of a group who are the people that are going to bug out? These people. So the pressure had a purifying influence. And that’s what he’s saying, “we are not of those who draw back,” “drawing back” means denying Jesus Christ; it means giving up the Messianic allegiance.
This is a common theme in the New
Testament, it’s not just reading in. If
you want another place where this occurs turn to 1 John
Next week we’ll begin the famous passage in Hebrews 11 on faith and we’ll get into what Biblical faith is and what it isn’t and if you have questions on faith we’ll get into those too.