Introduction to Hebrews (Part A)

And as Christians, we often make the mistake of first reading the preface, the Old Testament, then the New, but it should be the other way around. Because Jesus Christ filters the Old Testament for us, thereby helping us not being entangled and losing our identity. In so many ways, so many levels, we begin to think we're Jews.

We want to honor the Sabbath, for example. We are beginning our study through Hebrews. Would you turn to Hebrews chapter 1? We're only going to get two verses, if things work out well, this morning. I'll do the reading, we'll all do the heeding.

God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world. A document like Hebrews must have an introduction, and it's a very difficult introduction because there's so many things going on around this document. And my original draft of notes, outline notes, was over 8,000 words. And so I had to cut that down, of course, and you'll be glad that I did. I got it down to about 2,396 words.

Now I won't, of course, recite the words, they're just touchstones for me, but it's an indication of the details that belong to these things. And why is that? Well, the devil delights in a spiritually dumb church. He loves it. Unfortunately, he gets a lot of help from those who attend churches. He loves Christians who don't love Scripture. One of his favorite things in the world.

Oh, there's another one. He goes at them. He enjoys meeting them on the battlefield. They without their sword. Or if they have their sword, it's so dull, it's more of a stick than a sword. And of course, the Bible tells us that the Word of God is our sword.

It is a weapon to attack with. And so it is important that we get the Word, we take it in, so we can do something with it, not us. Whenever we try to do something with God's words, it doesn't work out as well as when God does something with His word through us.

And so we have to take the time to give you some background on this, and I hope I don't put you to sleep a little bit sooner than I usually do. The title, To the Hebrews. Well, the author did not put that on. That happened long after the document had been in circulation. The Hebrew was a term that the Jews used to distinguish and identify themselves amongst the Gentiles through the ages.

It's the Jews. The author seems to refer to this document as his word of exhortation. We get to that in the thirteenth chapter. I've written this word of exhortation, this encouragement, that has led some scholars to suggest that maybe Barnabas, that servant of exhortation, that he perhaps is the human author of this masterpiece, that is very much not likely. It is a letter because there are personal touches within it, but it is more than a letter. Likely initially a sermon, but it is a treatise. It is an exposition. It has profound exposition in it as well as personal notes.

And I want to get to some of the personal notes because whenever we come across these personal touches, they are for us personally. They speak to us. They benefit us. They arm us. They warn.

They encourage. They are meaningful. The first one is in the fifth chapter. And as we are going through the document, we find, again, this is a sermon, it is an exposition, it is a teaching, but it is also something that was given to people that the author knew about. And so that makes it a letter and a book. Paul's letter to the Corinthians, that's a letter, not a book. But Hebrews, it's a book and it's a letter.

Well, in Hebrews 5, he stops in his momentum for a moment and he says, For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God. You have come to need milk and not solid food. Your sword is dull.

It's a stick. It won't work on the battlefield in your favor. It will work against you.

And you will let your comrades down in the process. That's what that comes out to be. There are those that are listening to this message or will listen to this message. They need to receive that. They need to hear that they should be teachers of the word, sharing it with unbelievers, but they're not. They're always learning and they're never coming into the knowledge because they're not working and applying it or other reasons why. They need milk, not solid food. They're not maturing.

They are stunted. Then in the 10th chapter, he says, For you had compassion on me in my chains. Stop there for a minute. You mean Christianity involves chains? He's not talking about jewelry. He's talking about being shackled, being placed under arrest, made into a criminal in the eyes of the world. He says, And joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods, knowing that you have a better and enduring possession for yourselves in heaven.

So he knows these people. He's saying, You've suffered persecution. You've had compassion on me when I suffered persecution. They came and they plundered your goods. They they took what belonged to you. They stole from you because you believe in Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior.

The 13th chapter, he says, Pray for us. Very personal. We are confident that we have a good conscience in all things, desiring to live honorably. How many Christians don't care about honor? They care about self.

But these, they desire to live honorably. And he says, But I especially urge you to do this, that I may be restored to you sooner. I want to see you again. See again the personal touches in the letter. Do we have personal touches with each other? Is there something that's heartfelt when we think of other believers? Or maybe we are just irritants.

Maybe we are just so self-absorbed we cannot, we cannot absorb the Spirit of God. Finally, to illustrate the personal touch to this document, because we won't get much of it as we move through it. He's going to be giving high octane truth throughout this document. But he says, Know that our brother Timothy has been set free with whom I shall see you if he comes shortly. Now, I have another reason for bringing up these personal touches is because we need to try to identify who wrote this.

Because that's how we think and we should. Well, I will get to that momentarily. But you know the preface for this letter? The preface for this document letter are the first five books of Moses. That makes the preface larger than the article.

If you understand, somewhat have a, just a basic knowledge of Genesis through Deuteronomy. Then you get the gist of where the author is, what he's going to be talking about, ministering. Incidentally, the Old Testament is a preface to the New Testament.

Again, making the preface larger than the article. However, we don't read it that way. See, the Bible is not a natural book. It's a library.

It has reference works as well as various other expositions and documents within it, letters within it. But when we come to the scripture, we read the New Testament first. We are ministers of the New Covenant.

The Bible tells us this. And as Christians, we often make the mistake of first reading the preface, the Old Testament, then the New. But it should be the other way around because Jesus Christ filters the Old Testament for us, thereby helping us not being entangled and losing our identity. As Christians, because the Old Testament is so attractive in so many ways and so many levels, we begin to think we're Jews. We want to honor the Sabbath, for example. Well, that's not us. That's the Jews.

But I won't go there. We'll get to some of this as we go through the Hebrews through the coming weeks. But the author and the date, well, that means something to me too. It's not just boilerplate information.

It's not just, well, you've got to put that in there. When was this done? I want to know what was happening because that will speak to the time that I live in. Well, it was written before the destruction of the Jewish temple.

We'll say, well, it was so significant about that. That means the Pharisees and the Sadducees were still at high speed. They still had something to say to the Jews. They still harassed the Christian Jews.

They had a lot of clout, weight behind them simply because the temple was there. That created so much confusion. We live in a time where people will come up in our culture with things that create confusion. And we have to deal with it as the church. There's nothing new to Christians. Today, we live in a time where men, we have males that want to be females.

We have females that want to be males. This is, of course, we know it to be. Now, they're offended by that.

But be offended. This is how it is. We believe this is satanic activity. Satan is the one pulling these strings. It's not natural. This is something that is spiritual. This is not to say that we are to hate those who are caught up in it.

We certainly don't approve. And so in our culture, we have things to deal with. They did also. The same God who was with them is the same God who was with us. But we know that this was written at a time when the church had been at it for a while. They had been at work trying to sort these things out and they still struggled. The church didn't get it like that.

They were born at Pentecost. They had so much baggage. So many things to cut through over the decades and centuries.

We're still cutting. The American Christianity is a train wreck on many levels. The sacred cows. We ought to create a slaughterhouse just to butcher them.

They're all over the place. Things that have nothing to do with anything but actually get in the way are mandated by Christians because they've become sacred cows. But that's just how it is. You're not going to get away from it, but you do have to address it when it comes across your desk. Well, anyway, even the great scholars, men that I highly admire, they make mistakes in their digging into the Word.

We all do. You can't stop that. It's impossible. So we encourage you to bring your Bible, to fact check, to go over it. It does not reduce the value of preaching and study. It heightens it because we know what happens when it goes away. When teaching of the Scripture goes away, we know what happens. There are plenty of countries where the teaching of the Word does not exist, and we know what's going on there. There are plenty of towns in this country, many of them close to the Pacific Ocean. But not close enough, it seems.

A few miles out would be better. So one of them said, well, the document was written before the temple was destroyed. We know that, Hebrews 10 and 11, every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. Well, he wrote that in the present tense. So at the time he wrote it, the temple in Jerusalem was still there. No one knew what was coming toward it, that it was going to be destroyed shortly. But one of the great scholars said, well, it was written between the ascension and the destruction of the temple.

Well, that's not true. That's not accurate, I should say, because he mentions Timothy. Well, Timothy did not join the church until maybe the early 50s, sometimes late 40s. It was a while before he came into the church.

We know it was before Nero's great persecutions, but the Jews were persecuting already. And so somewhere 30 to 37 years after Christ ascended to heaven is when this document was circulated. Likely written not long after it was first preached. My hunch is that it was first a sermon. Well, anyway, let's talk about the who wrote it.

Was it Paul the Apostle? Many scholars say it was not. Well, that's because they don't listen to me. Simple, okay, let's move on now. Many great scholars, and then scholars, the higher they go up, the more easily they're entangled in their own arguments against each other.

And my take is they begin to lose sight of trench warfare, of a reality that we must not lose sight of. Well, they say, well, the language, the Greek language, which Hebrews was originally written in, is too polished. It is the finest Greek, and none of Paul's letters has this type of Greek.

Well, okay, we'll give you that one, but we'll come back to it and explain why that's not a disqualifying feature. They say that the writing style is deliberate. There are no outbursts of emotion that characterizes Paul's letters. Not in a negative way, Paul did not become emotionally unstable, but in his writings, there would be times he'd burst forth.

He'd be writing about something, and then this emotional flair. We love that he would do these things, because he cared, and he was not a robot. He was a servant of a high and holy and living God. They also say, well, Paul used Greek and Hebrew and other sources in his Old Testament quotations, whereas this document sticks exclusively to what is known as the Septuagint, which is simply the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into the Greek language. The Hellenistic Jews, the Jews that were more influenced by the Grecian culture and not living in Jerusalem, they were the Hellenistic Jews. And so they say, well, because he uses the writer to Hebrew sticks with the Septuagint, it's not Paul.

Well, that's kind of lame, but here's a good one, though. Here's one that for a long time kept me from believing Paul was the writer. I guess you get the impression of more sending signals that I believe Paul wrote this. Well, if it wasn't Paul, the only other option is me.

That's goofy, but back to this. In Hebrews chapter 2, the author suggests that he did not hear the word of salvation from the mouth of the Lord. Well, that's a good one, but that's still not a disqualifying feature, because Paul did hear it from the mouth of the Lord, but he did not hear it at the time the Lord walked with his disciples. And so the objections to those who say, well, that Paul could not be the writer, and it's so cute, they say, clearly Paul is not the author. Well, clear to who?

Clearly, it's not clear. Well, if not Paul, then who would you suggest? Who at this time in history had the juice to produce such a document? Who else had such insights and ability, and yet remained anonymous? That would be cheating the church, it would seem.

Who would mention Timothy in this document without mentioning Paul, unless it was Paul writing it? Who else possessed this caliber, this command of the word of Scripture over the church? In other words, when he spoke, everyone listened.

Why is that? Because he was persecuted from Damascus to Rome. There was not a place that he did not go to, he did not stir up trouble. And everybody knew it was right, because he did so in preaching the gospel, unmitigated, without apology.

And everybody admired that. Peter, when he wrote to the Jews that was dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, he mentioned the fact that Paul had written to them. 2 Peter, he says, consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation. Also, as also, our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you. And also, in all his letters speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures. So Peter says, there are those that twist the Scriptures no matter what. They twist Paul's words.

They don't know what they're doing, they're a problem. But he said, Paul wrote to you, dispersed Jews. But he wrote deep things that are difficult for us to get. That's Hebrews. You read Romans and Corinthians, things that are deep, no question.

But you get them. But if you're a Jew, you've been raised with the temple. You've raised with the Passover. You've been raised with Aaron and Moses and Joshua as heroes, and angels ministering spirits on behalf of the Lord. And someone comes along and tells you, all of those bow down to Jesus Christ. The temple is no longer necessary. You need to stop being Jews and start being Christians. That, that is quite powerful. I brought up earlier the American church with her sacred cows.

You try to kill one of them and watch what happens to you. It's not biblical. It's often very bad. But it's become something that we identify with. I was raised this way. It's not, it's poorly thought out. And so we're dealing with human beings.

There's not cattle here. So this is what the apostle and the early church was up against, what was happening in their churches, what the pastors had to deal with personally and with others. And so Peter isolated this document, I believe. This is Hebrews he may have been talking about. No other document of Paul other than Hebrews answers to his statements. And if it was not Hebrews, then we have other letters of Paul that have fallen away.

And that's quite possible. God had said that Paul would be a minister to the Gentiles, but not only to the Gentiles, to the Jews too. I'll read that out of Acts. But the Lord said to him, Go, the God is speaking to Ananias, sending him to Paul when he was still Saul of Tarsus at his conversion.

And he's saying, this is what I want you to tell him. Go, for he is a chosen vessel of mine to bear my name before Gentiles kings and the children of Israel. And so there is great evidence that Paul is the writer to this. So my conclusion again is that he authored the words, perhaps again preached them first, but because of the hostility of the Jews towards Paul, personally, he omits his signature. He wanted this document to circulate amongst the Jews, wanting them to get it without his name. His name would have made, who wrote this? Oh, that's it, I'm not interested. That's how much hatred there was for him in Jewish circles.

This is true to this day about various things. Zondervan, I'm not interested in reading anything that comes out of Zondervan. I don't know, since they sold out, since the Zondervan family sold the company, I'm not interested in anything they have to produce because it's always tainted.

They made great attempts to destroy Halley's Bible Handbook and other things, and they're ecumenical and they push things that should not be pushed. So if you say, hey, would you mind reading this book? And I flip it over and I see Zondervan on the back.

Nope, not interested. So I'm just saying it's a human. It's very human of us to be this way. And I think it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to understand that producing something is one thing, marketing it, circulating it, getting it into the hands of people is another thing. And so it likely was a stroke of genius. We know the Holy Spirit that has the author of this document not attach their name to it. And so the letter would have been circulated more freely and the Jews desperately needed to hear this. I also believe that while Paul did author on the human level this document, that it was edited under his oversight and that would explain why there's such a polished Greek. Someone said, Paul, this sermon you gave on the Jewish culture and Christianity, we have to circuit, we have to print this. Paul says, well, I can't stop you from doing that.

We have this today. Personally, there are those that have taken some of the sermons that I've been privileged to preach and they have transcribed them. Now, when you speak, when you preach, it doesn't always make it well into written form. It needs to be edited. That requires a lot of work and time. Why I don't have them produced is because I'm too busy doing my next sermon and I can't go back very easily to work on them.

But my point is it's not at all out of line with how we do things. We produce them in speech, but then we have to edit them if we're going to publish them in print. So clearly to have someone edit the sermon and put it into high Greek, it's not a stretch at all. You've been listening to Cross Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, today's teaching is available free of charge at our website. Simply log on to crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can subscribe at crossreferenceradio.com or simply search for Cross Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app. Tune in next time as Pastor Rick continues teaching through the book of Hebrews right here on Cross Reference Radio.