Clough Hebrews Lesson 72
Believer/Priest Obedience and Conclusion – Hebrews 13:17-25
Since this is the last session Hebrews we
just go back in time here to show the two large scale parts; from Hebrews 1:1
through
There will be no changes in the Christian faith, it is a final revelation. And this may not seem like a big point until you begin to get hit with the claims of the Baha’i sect and Bahiullah, or the claims of the Muslims and Mohammed, or the claims of the Mormons and Joseph Smith, or the claims of Christian Science and Mrs. Eddy. Until you get hit with these kinds of questions you can’t appreciate the force of the assertion of this epistle, but this epistle holds that when the canon was closed and the apostolic era was closed it did not need a Joseph Smith, a Bahiullah or Mohammed to add, to clarify, or to add progressive revelation to it. The revelation that has been given is once and for all and final, expressed in no better words than the words at the beginning of the epistle, “The Father has spoken in many, many ways and many, many place, but now He has spoken unto us by His Son.” There is finality to the person of Christ that does need to be amended, changed or reinterpreted; His Word doesn’t have to be restored by any restoration movement. So in this the epistle to the Hebrews stands as a block against every cult, against every movement that attempts to redefine, to add to or to synthesize Christian with some (quote) “future” (end quote) revelation.
Then the last part of the epistle, from
Hebrews
This second part also has what we’ll call a big point to it, and the big point in this second part of the epistle is that the Hebrew Christians face a problem and the problem they face is much like the problem we face continually in the Christian life. The problem they faced was they had to choose between what was familiar, what was a family tradition, what was something they were comfortable with, that was, all right and they had to choose to go outside the camp and bear the reproach of Christ. They had to, in other words, step outside where the harsh cruel world was; outside of that comfortable home where everything was familiar. And they had to step out into the unknown territory, identify themselves freely in a society that did not understand what Christianity was, that confused the Christian cult with atheism. They had to step outside from the shelf of the umbrella that had been given to them by Roman law that this was a legal religion and step outside and be identified with an illegal religion. This was the call that Christ summoned His people to, to come outside and bear the same reproach that He bore when He was crucified outside the city wall.
So it’s a call to the Christian to leave the comfortable tradition in favor of the plain simple Word of God. So over and over again it’s a challenge to each one of us that always, carefully in your own soul distinguish between what is comfortable, what is the tradition and what is the bare command of the Word, because there will come times in your life when God will call you to step outside, step into unfamiliar territory, step into places where people do not recognize you, where you have a difficulty in communicating, where there aren’t those comfortable environments and you just step out by faith in the person of Christ; that Christ finally does know what He’s doing, even though you don’t know what He’s doing, He does, and it’s the same challenge on a lesser scale that these first century Jews faced. Are we going to stay with tradition with which we’re familiar and comfortable or are we going to step out on the basis of the Word and the Word alone. When we come to that kind of a decision in our life, the choice between tradition and doctrine, then the epistle to Hebrews is an exhortation once again.
Now we begin tonight with Hebrews 13:17 and we’ll finish the epistle. In verse 17 a very important word is used, and it isn’t “obey.” “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves,” the word “obey” is peitho and it doesn’t mean to obey, it means to have confidence in. It means to be persuaded of the trustworthiness. So he says, “have confidence in them that have the rule over you and submit yourselves.” Now that’s a principle of leadership that applies in the military, it applies in business, it applies in church, parents, it applies everywhere. And that is you cannot have people submitting to leaders in whom they have no confidence. And that’s why I freely invite people who have no confidence in my ministry to leave because I know they’re not going to submit to me and they’re not going to be enthused, and so this is why every once in a while I get a little feisty, just to test, to see if these people can stand me, and if I find they can’t, that’s good, that gets rid of them. And then we pare things down to people who have confidence and are willing to play the game.
So “Obey them that … and submit yourselves” are the two principles of all leadership. And they apply to every area of leadership in life. People will not submit where they cannot be persuaded to actively trust. This means several things practically. It means that the person does not look up to those who have the rule, those who have the rule are the elders, pastor-teachers and as they look at these pastor-teachers they are going to see faults with them. Obviously this group of believers saw a lot of fault with the local church because they weren’t meeting with the local church. Why do we have the exhortation in Hebrews 10:25, “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together as is the habit of some.” That’s an expression of lack of confidence in the church leadership. They had more confidence in the rabbi of the Jewish ghetto than they did with the new pastor-teacher of this “Christian religion” (end quote). And so being more familiar and at home with the rabbi than with the pastor-teacher they chose the rabbi.
So verse 17 is an exhortation to stop it, to have confidence, not in the rabbi of the Jewish ghetto but to have confidence in the one who has rule over you, that is the elders. And this means, not that these elders are perfect but if these people are in a position to apply the faith technique toward the Lord to direct the leader in the right way. All leaders make mistakes but the issue is whether the people who are under… the followers, in a follower status, can exercise faith that the Lord will take care of it, that’s all. And if they can’t, well, then something has to happen, and if they can’t then some things have to happen.
One of the things that can happen is what is happening in the epistle to the Hebrews, namely that some issues had to be aired, some doctrinal issues, and the teachers of Hebrews aired these issues. In other words, the reason why we had Hebrews Christians here… suppose here were some pastors in the Roman Jewish community and here were the masses of believers to whom the epistle to Hebrews is written. Now these people down here have doubts, they have questions, and those questions keep them from trusting. And since every area of the Christian life is a walk by faith, they can’t walk by faith following these leaders because they’re not really sure that the whole thing hangs together. So instead of just putting verse 17 in the first chapter, the author of Hebrews waits to the very last before he brings this issue up, because he has carefully prepared everyone for verse 17 by giving 13 chapters of intense doctrine and exhortation. He has dealt thoroughly with the issue and therefore he has met these questions. That was the whole point of the epistle—he has met those questions. And now that he has legitimately met those questions, now he can say, “have confidence in those leaders.” The case is clear and if they do not have confidence then they’re in rebellion against God’s Word, it’s that simple. The issue has been clear, the doctrine has been taught.
Now there always are people who cannot do this and this is all right as long as they don’t worm their way into the inner structure of a local congregation. But when these kinds of people that cannot have confidence in the leadership and they cannot submit, if they worm their way up onto the board or into the heads of committees of a church, then there’s problems, and it’s up to not only the pastor, it’s up to up to men on the board, it’s up to the deacons, to be aware of this. People will show a lack of confidence in many ways. This is why it pays to watch people perform in committee work first so you get an idea of whether their heart’s in it or not. You can’t tell, just one shot experience or just meeting someone. You have to be exposed to them for some time and then you learn. And this is why in years to come we hope that the committee structure of our congregation will be the area where people can prove themselves. And then from there we can have people come to the board and so on.
So, “Have confidence” and then “submit,” two key points of leadership, “them that rule,” those are the ones that rule the local church. Notice again the structure, this author is very concerned with loyalty to the local church, something that is destroyed in our times because we have two kinds of heresy; we have the heresy of the Christian organization that is not local church centered and it breeds a mentality of disloyalty and disrespect for the local church by it’s activities, functions and priorities, and then we have people who latch onto one local church in particular and when they move to another geographical area they have the attitude that there’s no local church that can possibly satisfy their needs and kind of stay separated; it’s a violation of the word. There will always be some place where you can find some Christian fellowship, it may be bad, but if you’ve been in the military service you know what I mean. There’ll be some areas where you just kind of have to choke and put up with it. And if the guys in the service can do it then civilians can do it. So that’s my answer to people who say well, I can’t find a good church.
“…for they watch for your souls,” now this
is the job of the pastor-teacher, they watch continually for your souls, and
it’s humorous because this particular verb means they lose sleep; I often
wonder how this worked, now it works because I have a telephone but this author
didn’t have a telephone. And probably
somebody went down and figured out which house Apollos was staying in so they
could beat it down at
So you have this extreme and the New Testament just gives you these kind of statements; these are your New Testament balance statements. The pastor is given responsibility to train those who submit; you’ll notice the first issue was that you must have confidence, and submit yourselves, “because they watch for your souls,” the implication being if the sheep do not have confidence and they do not submit themselves, then you create a disjunction between what God told the pastor to do and what the sheep permit him to do. He’s being called by God to do one thing and men tell him not to do that thing. So it creates a tension and the resolution to the problem is given here, “because,” and he goes on to explain what this pastoral responsibility is, “as they that must in the future give account,” so the pastor not only faces the Lord in judgment for his own life but he faces the Lord for judgment about his sheep. Now if come along and you feel like I give you a spiritual kick in the spiritual butt every once in a while, that’s because I’m looking out for my own interest as well as yours.
“…as they who must give an account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief,” now this is the future bema seat when the pastor-teacher faces judgment for his flock and he is going to do it either in joy or grief, and it’s going to depend on the production of that flock. Now the joy that is given is when you have a maximum number of believers benefiting from the pastor-teacher. Grief, obviously, is the opposite. And the last statement is to head off at the pass any kinds of false conclusions. People may say oh, it’s all the pastor’s responsibility. Well, to head that conclusion off and to stop from going off to that extreme he adds this explanatory phrase at the end, “for that,” that is, if the pastor at the bema seat must give an account for his production and his flock and it’s not up to Biblical norms, then it “is unprofitable for you.” So it means that if you have a local church and you have believers in this local church, you have the pastor out here, the pastor is asked by the Lord what he did to cope with this particular situation. And the pastor says well I did this, I did this, I did this, and I did this, and the Lord says and you didn’t do this, you didn’t do this, you didn’t do this, and you didn’t do this and that’s his judgment as a pastor. Then the sheep who, the pastor is judged on what he did to cope with the situation, but then the sheep are going to be judged with what they did in the situation. In other words, why was the situation there in the first place. And it’s in this case we have a double problem, the pastor did certain things but then there are certain things he didn’t do, he gets a bad mark, and the congregation gets a bad mark because they were out of it. So the last clause of verse 17 is a balancing mechanism to keep you from skewing off to one side of the road or the other.
I want to go back a moment to the center of verse 17, since we’ve gone through it just briefly now over all, I want to go back to a detail in the middle of the verse, where it says “they will watch for your souls,” now the word “soul” is psuche, psuche is the word for the product of the human spirit and the human body. Psuche includes the mentality, it includes those things that we associate with personality. So we go back to our soul chart and then ask ourselves, then what is the pastor primarily responsible for. All right, he’s watching for their souls, what is he watching for in the soul? He’s watching for God-consciousness in the conscience, that is, how sensitive the conscience is, as to whether the conscience is responding to the Word, because you see, believers can take in doctrine and they can have the divine viewpoint framework and they can know Scripture but it hasn’t become part of God-consciousness because it’s never believed in the first place, it’s never received, so it’s there, it’s simply like every other fact that you ever learned. But then with the filling of the Holy Spirit it becomes part and parcel of the human spirit so that the conscience then uses that doctrine to actively judge the person and the person finds himself believing it. So you can define God-consciousness in terms of this chart here as that portion that’s truly been received as a real functioning base.
And so the pastor, then, is constantly
asking himself how much do these people perceive of divine truth and how much
do they believe of it by their actions.
Now the pastor can’t… he doesn’t have a little machine that tells you
this, you can only guess, you can only go by probability, but there are certain
indicators, and this is why a pastor-teacher who’s oriented to the Word will
always put the emphasis on the teaching, not on the doing, because he’s always
afraid of generation spurious good works that give the façade that that
doctrine is being believed and it isn’t.
That’s why I’ve always had the philosophy of approach of teach the Word
and then let the Word take hold and sprout up in various activity. Since as
here, we’ve had a ministry sprout up at the
So that leaves the field clean as far as I’m concerned, but if we get a lot of hocus pocus and the glad hand committees at the door, we’re so happy to see you hear, and love the brethren and fall all over them, which is what most people think when they talk about love the brethren and they expect you to kiss them at the door or something every time they walk through. Now if you get that kind of activity started, that keeps the pastor in the dark as to what’s genuine, but if you back off and let the stuff spontaneously generate it gives you a clear field of vision, it’s not so cluttered up, and this is why I’ve always operated this way. And this is why most of the people that have been trained with me have always operated this way because we cannot see cluttering the field up with this stuff because then you can’t see where you really are, you have no idea what’s going on, you can’t separate the purely sociological from the spiritual.
Now you run risks when this happens, you’ll always people come an say why don’t we have a young people’s group, and so forth, and we’ve had [can’t understand word] we haven’t done a thing for the teenagers of this church, not a thing, and haven’t done for the six years I’ve been pastor-teacher in its primarily reflective of a lack of the congregation, that’s all, nobody is caught up with it. But if I go arm twisting I’m sure I could come up with a program tomorrow, we could all get out in the parking lot and take a karate lesson and have a track meet or something and we could get lots of activity started but then it would leave me in the dark as to now, well is this bona fide or not, I can’t tell because I’ve got an activity going and there’s no way of evaluating it. So this is why you just sit and wait, and if we don’t have a young people’s group, well we don’t have a young people’s group, I can’t help it. I’m teaching the Word and if nobody wants to plug in that’s their problem. So this is how and why we do certain things; it’s based on verses like this.
One other thing, not only is the pastor concerned for the God-consciousness and the conscience but he’s also concerned with the emotional response of believers. The only guidelines I can say is the person in the pastor-teacher’s position is to watch how people handle crises of life that would normally stimulate great emotions and just ask yourself are they stable when this has hit; stable is not when there’s not 45 people there, they pat them on the head and tell them what a fine Christian they are and so on. But when they get hit with a situation, sort of without any resources other than their own spiritual resources, then how do they function. And that tells, that’s feedback for a pastor or for a deacon who’s watching the situation, that’s feedback so you can get a clue as to what’s going on here in the emotions. Now that just shows you what this author is getting at is that pastors are watching for your psuche, they are watching primarily for the mentality and the emotional responses involved with the Word. And incidentally, they are concerned with other things too but this is where the center of it is, there with the mentality of the soul and the emotions and the conscience because that’s the word psuche is used.
Hebrews 13:18, he goes off of the general pastoral exhortation and he comes in verse 18 to himself. Again, we’d love to know for sure who it is, we guess it’s Apollos; some men have guessed that it was Paul but there’s no way to make sure, he didn’t sign his name and nobody in church history remembers who he was; not one church father, actually definitively tells us who the author of Hebrews is. “Pray for us; for we trust we have a good conscience, in all things willing to live honestly. [19] But I beseech you the rather to do this, that I may be restored to you the sooner.” Now what is he talking about in verses 18-19, “pray for us,” be constantly praying for us, so he’s obviously separated from this group of believers and his basis for praying is because we’re in God’s will. That’s the confidence he has that these people can enter into his ministry prayerfully. He says that I know I’m in God’s will; how do I know it? Because I have a good conscience. “we trust we have a good conscience,” the word “trust” is the same word to “obey,” it means we are persuaded, “we are persuaded we have a good conscience, in all things,” in all areas of life, “willing to live kalen,” willing to live by a norm of the conscience.
Now the “in all things” has reference to this chart I often put up for the divine institutions, but if tonight you’ll look at something else on the chart, other than what we’re usually looking at we’ll notice something. This chart is actually a circle, it’s actually a circumference around here and you’ll see the small lines that are on this chart and they’re put on there for a reason which I’ll explain. That chart, besides being a chart of divine institutions is basically a profile of the bottom circle. Now in the family training program we’ve talked about the top circle and the bottom circle; the top circle is God’s obligations, the bottom circle is man’s obligations. Now in that bottom circle, which is the area of the declared will of God, in that area we have these concerns. So you can divide the will of God into these sectors, not that these sectors are watertight from each other but that it’s a convenient way of remembering the will of God and cataloging the will of God.
So in divine guidance you say okay, I’ve got a problem; okay, what area is it? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or is it in the area of local church. All right, immediately you’ve got a catalogue device operating, so you can start pinning down where do you have a problem with the will of God, what area. Okay, if you have a problem in the area of the local church, all right, then let’s go to ecclesiology, let’s go to passages in God’s Word that deal with the local church and then we can find divine guidance. And this way it keeps you from sitting, I need divine guidance, I’ll turn all the lights out and wait until it comes on in a neon sign in my ceiling, or I’ll go in my closet and stand on my head until I get a vision. Now that’s divine guidance by emotion. But this is an attempt to get you functioning to pick up principles from the Word, and this basically is… now in practice our bottom circle, every one of us, is not a circle, it’s lopsided. So let me just draw basically a sample bottom circle. Suppose we have a bottom circle that looks like that. Now what that means is that this person has a marvelous appreciation and understanding for the principles of law and justice in society, in that area of his life he is familiar with God’s will, and he’s in conformity with it, he’s aware of it, he’s convinced of its truthfulness and God is holding him to be responsible in a large area. He’s aware of his social obligations. He’s aware of most of his family and marital obligations, but in the area of one he tends to be irresponsible when it comes to money and labor. In that area there’s an ignorance about God’s Word. In that area he just hasn’t either been exposed or he’s rejected.
So in the bottom circle on a daily basis he finds himself an infant in this area. But over here he’s very mature and over here it’s in between, and the local church is nothing to brag about. So if you’ll think in terms of that, this is why it’s so wrong for one believer to compare themselves with another believer, because you can be extremely mature in one area of life and have it all over your fellow believer and yet in another area just be completely wet behind the ears. And you have to realize this; that circle, even though for simplicity when we teach it, we always draw a nice circle up there and say well, you know, this is God’s will. But in practice if we wanted to map out someone’s life it wouldn’t be a circle, it’d be more like this. It would be unbalanced.
Now the objective, of course is to move out in every one of these areas, that’s the objective but this author, when he talks about, “for we trust that we have a good conscience, in all things we teleioo,” to live by the conscience, that means I have positive volition in all things. So he’s saying it’s not that he’s absolutely mature in all these areas, but in areas where he is not mature he’s willing to learn, that’s the point. He’s not claiming perfection. He is claiming a willingness to learn. Now as a leader you’d obviously have great respect for this man, whoever he was, he was a genius, spiritually and naturally, to write this kind of an epistle, an absolute genius. But even though he is a genius he is saying all I am saying of myself to commend you to your praying for me is that I have positive volition, if I’m wrong in divine institution area one, then I am teachable, and I can be corrected by the Word of God in this first divine institution. If I am wrong in area two, I am teachable and I am willing to be corrected by the Word of God in this area. So it’s an expression of teachability before God. I am willing, it doesn’t say he is, he says I am willing to live.
Hebrews
It is the same thing that Paul finds
himself involved in in Romans 1:10. Paul
wanted to come to Rome, now if it’s the same place, in other words the epistle
is written to Hebrews in Rome, then we’ve got the same city besides the same
principle, but in Romans 1:10 Paul says, “Making request,” he’s talking about
his own prayer life here, “if by any means now at length I might have a
prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you.” He is not praying God, I want to come to
So the author of Hebrews faces the same thing as Paul, same concept, and it shows you how these men prayed. They did pray conditionally. Now it wasn’t kind of a passive ha-ha, wet hand prayer, it was kind of the type where you pray and you tell God a few things and give him five or six reasons why He ought to change His mind and come to Rome and God it would be better for You, for the Church, for everybody if I got an order now to go to Rome. Now that’s active praying but it’s still submissive praying. It’s still conditioning the prayer upon God’s will finally.
Back to Hebrews 13:20, here is a model prayer, verses 20-21 and again we learn some details about the prayer life of the early church. This is called, for those of you who come from liturgical backgrounds, a collect; a collect is a model prayer that would be contained in the prayer book, an example, The Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopalian Church, has collects in it, Lutheran materials have collects and what these collects are isn’t that the people are just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah through the collect all the time, that wasn’t the point; the collect was written to teach people how to pray by giving them a model. Actually you know the Lord’s Prayer is a collect, “Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name,” and so on, we recite that at times and son on and it wasn’t ever intended to be recited; it wasn’t intended just everybody go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, it was originally intended as a teaching device to show how to pray because what had the disciples asked the Lord before He gave them the so-called Lord’s prayer. “Lord, teach us to pray.” So He said okay, here’s how you pray. Well, if He literally meant for us to sit and repeat “Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name,” the conclusion would be that’s all you could pray because the disciples had asked Him how do you pray, and He said here’s how you pray. So it can’t mean that we just sit there and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Now it doesn’t do any harm, compared to most of our prayers it sounds pretty good I imagine. But the issue is that it wasn’t intended to be just a memorized repeated ceremony.
And here is a collect, verses 20-21, that is telling the believers to whom the epistle was written how to pray. Now I have this collect in the wedding ceremony at the end; this is part of what we conclude the wedding ceremony with. But basically it’s a model for people who want to pray. Let’s look at the parts, those of you who studied the Psalm series you’ll immediately recognize this is nothing more than a repeat of what we learned in the Psalm series. Let’s look at the parts. Hebrews 13:20, “Now the God of peace,” there’s your address, God is addressed on the basis of His essence. You see, when Jesus prayed “Our Father, who art in heaven,” it’s always an address to God, comma, and something about His essence. So you could say, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Now that’s an address to the Father and it’s saying something about Him in His essence. He’s addressing God the Father and he’s calling Him “God of peace,” and you’ll see that time and time again in the Bible, when God is spoken, it’s not just God, sometimes it is but at other times He’s called Father. Why? Because it’s emphasizing His Fatherhood, like Paul points out in Romans, calls Him Pappa, the idea of intimacy, I claim Him as my Father, it’s a confession of my top circle positional truth as a child of God. That’s what I’m saying with “Our Father.” Now of course the average person says “Our Father, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and they never realize what they’re saying. But if you say it with meaning and you understand what you’re saying you’ve said a mouthful. When you call God your Father you are claiming sonship. That’s a corollary to even opening your mouth with the word.
So here “God of peace” means he’s emphasizing the salvation aspect. God has restored peace between the sinner at enmity between him and the Father. So the first part of a legitimate prayer is the address part, and the address part speaks of God and His essence. Now there’s a practical reason why Biblical prayers begin in their address with divine essence. Can anybody think why? Just common sense. [someone answers] Respect is one, but what’s the subjective benefit of all this? [more said] It reminds you of your creaturehood and keep you grace oriented. So if the prayer starts off so the prayer starts off centering on the essence of God, you kind of orient yourself for the rest of the prayer.
All right, the second part of the prayer, “that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant,” not that second part is the confident section, he’s telling where he stands, what his platform is, on what basis does he come before this God. Here’s his confidence, here’s the source of his faith, I have faith that God will answer this prayer because He “brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus,” that’s why, now I can have faith that He’s going to answer my petition, because of this platform. Now there’s a point about this verse, some of you may have a Bible where this is keynoted off in the margin and you’ll see that the phrase, “that brought again,” and then skip, “the great Shepherd of the sheep,” is a quote from Isaiah 63:11, turn to Isaiah 63:11, I want to show you how he changed Isaiah 63:11; very clever. He picks off this verse and he did something with it. And what he did with it is fantastic. See, the danger of the collect is that you can read through the thing and it becomes so familiar to you, you just blah, just go through the whole thing and forget what it’s all about. But I want to show you what’s involved in this one phrase, just to show you the content of this prayer, tremendous… [tape turns]
In Isaiah 63:11 what is the context? Look at verse 10, can any of you fit the context of Isaiah 63 with the situation, the threatened situation of the Hebrew believers? Can you see any connection between Isaiah 63:10 and the whole problem? [someone answers] And particular what kind of deliverance, deliverance from what? What’s verse 10? “But they rebelled, and vexed His Holy Spirit, therefore, he was turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them,” meaning that the believers were irritating the Lord by their own sin. And so what did the Lord do, He was almost turned but “then He remembered the days of old, Moses, and His people, saying, Where is he who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of his flock? Where is he who put his Holy Spirit within him? [12] That led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm, dividing the water before them” and so on and so on.
In other words, the people said where is
God who promised to totally redeem us, and not just leave us hanging here in
limbo. And when they went back and they thought back to the God what did they
call it; they brought Moses “up out of the sea with the shepherd of his flock,”
now look at this picture and see if you can tie it to something we’ve already
seen in the epistle. The analogy goes
back to the Exodus, particular to the
Now this man picks this whole idea up, out of Isaiah 63 and he brings it over to Hebrews, takes out the name of Moses and puts in the name Jesus. Now watch what he does with it. “Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep,” see the idea that He has brought from the dead, He has brought of the place of death our Shepherd, with the obvious implication He’s going to bring us too, “the great Shepherd of the sheep,” so he replaces Moses with Jesus in this imagery and this becomes his confidence. So the second part of his prayer is the confidence section; here’s why I’m so confident to make this petition, because God has set in motion the wheels of His eternal covenant and the sign is the historic resurrection of Jesus Christ. “…through the blood of the everlasting covenant,” why is that in the confidence section? To show you that it’s part and parcel of one continuous unbroken historic plan, that this is the culmination of the historic program from eternity to eternity and God who has begun a program for eternity and geared it for all eternity future is not going to leave us hanging here at this moment of time. The program is too big for that. And that’s why it says “the God of peace” who’s already set in motion His eternal program, I pray on that basis.
And then in Hebrews 13:21 the third part, the petition, “Make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight,” the main petition is make you mature, make you equipped, and the word comes from the stem in here, this is the third part of this prayer, the petition section, it uses the word from the stem artizo, which means to equip. Now guess where that word is used. He is going to equip you in every… doesn’t that sound familiar, that we might be equipped unto every good work, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable, for doctrine, correction, instruction in righteousness, that the man of God might be” artizo, “mature, having been thoroughly furnished unto every good work.” The word “thoroughly furnished is super artizo in that verse, it’s not the usual word for maturity, teleioo here, it’s artizo.
So “make you equipped in every good work to do His will,” now that’s his petition. Judging from 2 Timothy 3:16-17 and this author’s methodology, how do you suppose he expects God to answer this prayer? He’s made a petition, this petition is not just spewing it out, it’s a carefully thought through petition, those of you who are not in these tactical prayer groups you’re missing out, I’m not trying to pressure you here but there’s one thing you learn in these tactical prayer groups and that is that you learn to design petitions. These prayer groups design their petitions and I notice the people that are in the tactical prayer groups consistently have much better designed petitions, they just pick up the skill and here is a well-designed petition. This is not just off the top of his head here, he’s thought this thing through, he thought it way through before he even went to God with the petition. And when he says it, what do you expect he has on his mind here.
[someone answers] Or at least we can say God is going to get them through His Word, because 2 Timothy 3:16-17 which was written prior to this, has already been written into the canon and has already told us that the methodology of the Holy Spirit is through the Scripture. And there are four steps in the Scripture that the Holy Spirit goes through and they are given in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, there’s not one person in this room who has ever learned a thing, if you think about it, that you didn’t learn from these four steps. “The Word of God is profitable for doctrine” so you had to know the doctrine first, then “for reproof” and that isn’t reproof so much, the word “reproof” is the word for conviction, so the first step is the Holy Spirit exposes you to a doctrine, or a concept, and then the second thing the Holy Spirit does is gives you confidence to believe it, it becomes credible to you.
Now notice the sequence, it’s “profitable for doctrine,” and the word “reproof” means conviction, then for “correction” now you see, the Holy Spirit can’t get to the correcting stage until two other steps have happened: one, the Word has been taught, and two, the Holy Spirit has worked it into the soul where it becomes credible. Now you see this is why you can’t be impatient with people. People get exposed to the Word and you wonder well what’s happening, how come we don’t see any changes. Because it hasn’t become credible to them yet, they’re hung up on that second step. And when it gets through the second step, then the correction starts; what’s the correction? Convicting of the wrong things in their life, and what’s the fourth one, “instruction in righteousness,” the positive replacement. So 2 Timothy 3:16-17 gives you a profile of how the Holy Spirit’s working, nothing mysterious, you don’t have to go to the Christian book store and find a book on the secrets of the Christian life, it’s not any secret at all. It’s the most publicized fact of history. The only reason is secret is because nobody opens the book where it is. They’d rather go buy somebody else’s interpretation.
Now when he makes the prayer here, “Make you equipped in every good work,” obviously he’s praying for that necessary work of the Holy Spirit, but the very fact he wrote the epistle proves to you he is not fatalist that sits back, oh God, let go and let God, that kind of thing. He obviously doesn’t believe that this prayer petition is going to answered apart from human involvement. God is going to answer the prayer, yes, but it’s going to be by means and one of the means is for him, the author of Hebrews, to use his teaching gift; else why did he write 13 chapters of doctrine. He’s written it and now he says Holy Spirit, take over, I’ve given the doctrine, now You work it into them.
“Make you perfect in every good work to do His will,” and then he adds an appendix which shows you he explains the petition, he amplifies the petition, and there’s a principle of prayer here involved in this petition in that it’s a well thought out petition and a specific petition. I think some people still wonder why we spend four or five minutes every Wednesday night going through the sick list. We have these people that are sick and our deacons now have a program where they go and they call these people or they call on them or see them each week, to check how they’re doing and what their needs are. Now why do we do that? To make the prayer petition specific. God bless the Hottentots… it’s not that, it’s God, work with some detail in their life. And the model and the justification is right here, “working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight,” now he doesn’t have a specific area because it’s all areas, but his emphasis is “well-pleasing in His sight,” not even Apollos’ sight, the “His,” the personal pronoun “His” in verse 21 refers to God, not Apollos. And it’s God and not the Jews. So the emphasis here is “working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight,” so he says whatever my petition is, I want it to generate divine good, not human good. I don’t want changes to occur in this congregation if it’s not going to be well-pleasing. I’m not praying just for changes, any kind of changes.
And then the last part of this is another confidence section. Remember often times in the Psalms we’d have the confidence section split? Well here it is again, after he makes his petition and before he makes his petition he has a sandwich; the petition is the content of the sandwich, the confidence section are the two pieces of bread, there’s one piece of bread at the beginning and one piece on the bottom and here it is, “through Jesus Christ,” so his second basis is on the basis of the merits of Jesus Christ he makes this, as contrasted to the subjective state that he is in while he is praying, if I don’t work myself up with this feeling, my prayer isn’t answered. No, it’s none of that, there’s nothing of the oriental here, where we go into intense contemplation and so on, and if we don’t do this then we’re not making contact with the absolute. There’s none of that stuff, there’s just a simple relaxation unto the merits of Jesus Christ.
Now the final part to this prayer, the last, what do we call this, those of you who were in the Psalm series, “to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” Remember the Psalms had two basic areas, petition and praise, and that’s your praise. So the prayer ends with praise. This is a very well designed psalm, it has an address, it has confidence, it has petition that is specific and it has praise. Why is praise in there? Why do you suppose that’s there? [someone answers] Right, it’s the creature orientation once again to the overall point. Why make these petitions? For our personal [can’t understand word]? No, this whole petition concludes with Christ’s glorification, that’s why we make the petition. It’s ultimately for the revelation of His character, not our comfort that the petition has been made. “To whom be glory forever,” may He have the glory, he’s saying, in this thing. And then he concludes “Amen.” Now he doesn’t say “in Jesus name” because he’s already said the equivalent twice in this section. He said “in Jesus name” when he said that confidence section at the beginning, and the confidence section “through Jesus Christ.” The confidence sections are basically “in His name.” But the “Amen” closes.
Now Hebrews 13:22-24 are just closing things that add the real personal factors to the letter. Just a few words to comment on them. “And I beseech you, brethren,” is the word “exhort,” to “suffer the word of exhortation; for I have written a letter unto you in a few words.” Now isn’t that interesting; anybody remember when we started the Hebrews series? September 1973, a year and a half we’ve been going through this series, and this author would consider it ridiculous, frankly, he’d say it took a year and a half to study my letter, you know, it only took me an hour to write it. But the point is that he, from his perspective, considers this basic, just brief, just hasty, just a note he knocked off. I say this in all seriousness, if that guy really thinks this way, the church has come a long way down; that’s the only interpretation we can place on this last phrase. If he is saying I have written… and the words “a few words” is an idiom which means I just touched these things briefly, just briefly touched them, if that’s true what a conference with this guy would have been like? Can you imagine what his normal teaching was like?
We get a hint in the book of Acts when Paul teaches approximately six hours a day, daily. That was the normal teaching of believers, so it shows you we see the New Testament church functioning successfully. They were taught; they were taught, I figured it out one time, in order to equal what Paul did in one place, for I think a month, I would have to teach at my rate for about eight years. So it shows you the ratio of what’s happening and this is why Paul was able to do things fast, he just went and just clobbered the area with a whole systematic theology. He’d have soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology, pneumatology and go into all areas of theology proper, this area, that area, another area, and just go hours, hours, hours, hours, hours, hours, hours and hours, and this was the knowledge that these people had at this time. And that’s what made them turn the world upside down. So when people say that we have too much teaching and why don’t we have a little more of the other, my answer is we haven’t even started the teaching yet. The family training program, all that is is a skimming of the basics. People around here have never seen concentrated teaching. So somebody that makes that comment is showing their ignorance, ignorance, by the way, that is profoundly revelatory of their lack of history because here you’ve got history. This is a historic comment of vital significance; this would have been considered by New Testament first century standards as a very, very short, trivial, easy discourse. Now you just think about it as you conclude this epistle.
Verses 23 and 24 are very obvious, he’s
asking them, this last of verse 24, “they of Italy salute you,” apparently
these are people who have been kicked out of Rome and have gone other places
and he’s with them and he’s writing back to Rome and he’s saying the people
that were your neighbors that have moved over here say hello. And the reason they did that, why? They didn’t have the postal service. Thank God.
They had personal messengers. And
when somebody was going some place you had to carry a bunch of letters with you
or greetings and so when they had an epistle like this, an official epistle,
everybody and his uncle would climb on and say hello. That’s why they did it. [23, Know ye that our
brother, Timothy, is set at liberty; with whom, if he come shortly, I will see
you. [24] Greet all them that have the
rule over you, and all the saints. They
of
Okay, and then finally concluding verse 25, the word that was so precious to those first century Christians, it was not an empty phrase, “Grace be with you all. Amen.” And that was not flippant. Grace to you meant that you be grace oriented, it was the desire to be grace oriented.
Now just a comment on this since we did
have the fire drill, Hebrews
Okay, that’s Hebrews.