You need to know that if you view God as high and holy, we need to know He's approachable, otherwise He scares me to no end. He's sovereign, He's powerful, He's going to judge me. You tell me, yeah, but He loves. He loves so much, He'll die for you.
In fact, He did. He demonstrates His love in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. You take it or you leave it. God will not beg you to take it, but He will certainly urge you to.
So access is gained by suffering. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Hebrews.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in Hebrews chapter 10 for a brand new study called, Let Us. Hebrews chapter 10, if you have your Bibles open, we will begin at verse 19, Hebrews 10. Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He consecrated for us through the veil that is His flesh, and having a high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for He who promised is faithful. Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another in so much the more as you see the day approaching.
Please be seated. Till now, the writer of Hebrews has been largely doctrinal in his presentation of points. He's been using comparisons that has shown the superiority of Christ to Moses, to the priesthood over angels, and that only through the death of Christ on the cross, of course, is sin defeated and believers able to enter into glory. That is what he has been writing to these Jews in this first century. And now he's going to build on all that he has been saying from verse one to the present. He's going to point out the type of life believers are to engage in, how we are to live based on everything he has been saying, the superiority of Christ.
And we look now at verse 19 and we begin there, where he says, Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the holiest by the blood of Jesus. Now for those of you not familiar with what is going on, I do need to pause for a moment and just give you a brief overview of what's happening in this Hebrew letter. There were Jews who had come to Christ and because of the pressures of the culture and other things going on, they were being attracted away from Christ and back to Judaism.
You could say to their roots. And the writer getting word of this takes to task these believers who were falling away from the faith or looking to mix the faith with something else, with Judaism. And that is what he is doing is appealing to them. And so that is why up to this point he has given them a doctrinal overview of Christ's superiority to the mosaic system that Christ is indeed Lord over all and is developed or taken the mosaic system beyond what Moses had for the Jews.
So that's that's the background. So when he says, Therefore, again, that links everything he has said back to verse 1 to verse 18, the preceding verse, and now he's going to encourage the believers to act upon it. So when he says, Therefore, it is the therefore of because you could say because brethren.
And he does not, of course, stop here, but will further develop it to the end of the letter. Now where he says brethren in verse 19, he could only call fellow believers that. Now I point that out because there are those that say, Well, those were Jews who were not believers that he was writing to. Well, look at verse 32 of Hebrews 10. He's addressing these same brethren, and he says, But recall the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings.
Partly while you were made a spectacle, both by reproaches and tribulations, and partly while you became companions of those who were so treated. For you had compassion on me in my chains and joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods, knowing that you have a better and an enduring possession for yourselves in heaven. So he's writing to believers.
No one else can behave this way. No one else fits the bill that he goes on to say here in verses 10 to 34. Now remember these first century Christians, the leaders of the church, the apostles. Their faith was not built upon the preaching of other men like we do today.
Their faith was based on living with Jesus, watching him perform the miracles, listening to his sermons. They saw him die. They forsook him. And then they saw him rise again. And in love and kindness, he restores them. And he sends them out. Ergo, apostles.
And it was those first century saints that were eyewitnesses. Well, God is not going to say, well, for each generation, I will again send my son and he can die all over again so someone can witness it and believe. No, God has said, now we're going to do this by faith. I'm going to give you enough evidence to make a decision and act upon it. Others have done it.
You have no excuse. And that is where we are. This New Testament church started here and has been rolling ever since. And it will continue until Christ calls the church home. He says, having boldness to enter the holiest. Well, he's opened a throne room to believers.
You see, at this time, again, he's using, he's constantly using the Jewish temple as his background. And there you'd go to the Jewish temple and after you entered in, the first thing you'd see would be the brazen altar where the blood sacrifices were made, the animal sacrifices. There would be the laver not far from that as you would approach the temple itself. And then there would be, you couldn't go in unless you were a Levite into the holy place where there would be the lampstand to the left and the showbread to the right and then in front of you would be the altar of incense and then another curtain, a barrier. The only person that could go behind that barrier was the high priest and he could only do that once a year and not without blood. Sin is bloody business.
It's one of the points the Bible is making. And so where he says having boldness to enter the holiest, he's talking about that first chamber. Jesus Christ opening this up for us as our high priest.
He takes us in to the holy chamber and then behind the veil to the holiest chamber. No Jewish priest could do that and that's how they would process this as he was speaking to them. This letter was being read.
That's how it happened in those days. When a letter arrived from an apostle to a church, it was read to the congregation. And so, as we have been pointing out through this Hebrew letter, the Jews, they did not need an education on the temple or Jewish customs.
They fully were familiar with it. We're the ones that need to be, have these things pointed out to us so they could be significant. And so our going into this presence of God, this throne room of God in heaven to the very presence of God through our prayers and our hearts, we have this boldness by which we can do it. It is the boldness of modesty though.
It is not a rude boldness. It is not one born of self-confidence or personal self-worth. It is something that is begotten by Christ and it is exercised by trust in him.
Unfortunately or fortunately, I don't know, sometimes we have to switch the words around. We can't use the word faith. Faith has come to mean so many things by so many people because of what so many people do with the word. So, trust.
That's a word that we all understand because when our trust is betrayed, we know it. And so, by trusting Christ, we have this boldness. We have green lights, authority.
That's what you get with a green light. And we need that. We need to know that if you view God as high and holy, we need to know he's approachable, otherwise he scares me to no end. He's sovereign. He's powerful. He's going to judge me. What if you tell me, yeah, but he loves. He loves so much, he'll die for you.
In fact, he did. He demonstrates his love in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. You take it or you leave it. God will not beg you to take it, but he will certainly urge you to. So, access is gained by suffering, and that is the suffering of Christ. We are not saved by the life of Jesus Christ.
We are saved by his death. When we say the blood of Jesus Christ, we're saying the death of Jesus Christ, where blood was spilled. As I pointed out, if his blood spilled on you, there's no magical power to it.
The Roman soldiers would not have been converted. Ah, the blood touched me now, I believe. It's by faith.
But when we say the blood, we mean the death. He, in our place, took the judgment that we deserve because God has set the standard. The word sin means target.
It is the idea of God has set the target, hit the target. We miss it because we're sinners. That's our nature. We're born that way.
We have no say so in that matter. It's a discovery. But we are still accountable, and God has made a way for sinners to be received as non-sinners, and it is through the death of Christ taking our punishment, we call it vicariously, one for all. One death. Because that was how high the life was. It was worth that much.
It could do that much. No man could die, no mere man could die for a sinner and have it count with God. It took the Son of God to do that.
God has arranged this. Well, you can't lay it all out in one sermon as much as you'd like, but you can hit the main points, then go back and fill in the rest. In verse 20 now of Hebrews 10, he continues, he says, by a new and living way which he consecrated for us through the veil that is his flesh.
Now, it's a new and living way to those Jews, but they're going backwards. In a moment, as I just read a moment ago from beginning in verse 32, he's going to remind them that they came into this excited about Christ. What happened to you when he wrote to the Galatians? Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? Who threw a spell on you?
Who got to you? Satan. Satan loves to target Christians. He doesn't have to do much with the world.
They're kind of automatic. But Christians, he loves tripping us up. He loves making fools of us and unfortunately we help him out too easily. Christ developed everything in the Old Testament. He's changed the religion of the Jews. He's made the old one obsolete.
He's brought in the new one. Everything the blood sacrifices could never do was gain us access, make these changes. We don't need to kill an animal to get to God. They had to offer blood sacrifices, our blood sacrifices in Christ.
And so a living and new way which sadly is rejected by most human beings. Revelation 12 points out the culprit to this. The great dragon was cast out that serpent of old called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world, quote unquote. Satan is a deceiver. The word devil means he's a slanderer. He says lies.
He tells lies all the time. First John, Chapter five, the beloved John, the one who went to Patmos as a prisoner of Rome. There was given the revelation which we're seeing unfolded in our lifetime. There's no explanation for the nation of Israel except the Bible. There is no explanation for her ability to survive the onslaught of the nations. There are so many nations worse than Israel that get a pass. Israel doesn't get a pass for anything. In fact, even the things she hasn't done, she's guilty of doing.
As Netanyahu said, Israel is guilty until proven guilty in the eyes of the world. So this John, who was a Jew, who really doesn't use the word faith in his writings, but he uses the word love. He writes, we know that we are of God.
We know this. And the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. But they don't believe it.
They think we're the crazy ones. And there the struggle, the contest is right there. He says, by a new and living way which we serve, which he consecrated for us, that is to arrange it, through the veil that is his flash. Now again, that veil from the holy place into the holiest chamber where the Ark of the Covenant rested, that veil served as a barrier to man. It said, keep out. You're a sinner. You can't come in. Once a year, I'll let you in.
And that's it. And so the writer is saying, our Christ has removed that barrier. No longer is there a keep out sign before God. Now we can enter into his presence with thanksgiving in our heart. And so, as a Jew again came to the temple, even though they could not go into the temple itself, they were confined to the altar area, they knew that there was a barrier there.
That gateway, that barrier was the gateway. And some very interesting things from scripture about that, that God teaches us. Because it teaches us about God and ourselves and our relationship to him.
Because the most important thing about a human being from God's perspective is what that human being thinks of Jesus Christ. The veil was made of three colors. It was made of blue and red and purple. Exodus 26 verse 31 and 33.
I'll take that too. You shall make a veil woven of blue, purple and scarlet thread and fine woven linen. Then you shall bring the Ark of the Testimony in there behind the veil. The veil shall be a divider for you between the holy place and the most holy place, which was symbolic the most holy place of the throne room of God, what we know also as heaven. The blue represents Christ from heaven.
The red represents Christ on earth, where his blood was shed for us. Again he volunteered to come here. Knowing what we know about this life, is there anybody here who would volunteer to come here?
If you lived in heaven, where there is no war and sorrow and treachery and all the things that make life unpleasant, to say the least. Who would do such a thing? What would cause him to do that? Love, love, love, that is it. A love that we try to follow.
We fail miserably, but it is so valuable, so special, we pursue it nonetheless. That red represents his blood shed for us, not for him. Purple. Purple is the blend of the God from heaven who became a man. His humanity took on humanity. It is the blend of the son of God, the son of man on earth.
Were you to take enough blue paint and enough red paint and pour them into a bowl and to mix them until you couldn't tell where the blue and the red were any longer, you would have purple. That blend together. In Jesus Christ, his deity is perfectly blended with his humanity.
So much that you can't tell oftentimes where the humanity begins and the deity begins or ends, or if you could want to say it that way, because it really has no ending, but the point that I am making. And so when Christ, when Christ walked to the fig tree looking for fruit, for example, that was his humanity. He was hungry, the Bible tells us. So he went to the fig tree. The fig tree used to have leaves. That fig tree, when it had leaves, promised fruit and it had none. Now, of course, there's much more to the story, but I want to stick to the point I'm making. We're seeing his humanity. I am hungry. The tree, of course, symbolic of Israel and her rejection of Messiah, and this is why he cursed it and to demonstrate that faith makes destruction unnecessary.
But that's, I've digressed back to my point. When he cursed the tree for not having fruit, that was his deity. We saw his humanity.
I am hungry. We saw his deity. He reigns. It is a prerogative over the tree to do that as he pleased being the creator. When he was on the cross and he said, I thirst, that was his humanity. When he gave up his spirit, that was his deity because no one can do that. No one can just turn themselves off.
You can be a turn off, but you can't turn off. Not unassisted. He did it hands free.
It was no effort. It was his will. And the statement is, no one takes my life.
I lay it down. Man is not big enough to kill the Son of God. And so there we see the temple veil spoke of Jesus Christ, spoke of the entranceway through him. And so when he says through the veil, that is his flesh in verse 20, it is speaking about his death on a cross. Jesus Christ said, I'll become one of them yet without sin to deliver them. All who would take it. Jesus will take you as you are, but he will not leave you as you are. Verse 21, and having a high priest over the house of God.
We have to take that clause just like that because there are two outstanding features to this. The high priest. Well, to the Jew, they knew what the high priest meant, but they also knew these Jewish Christians, that Jesus was the high priest. First Timothy chapter two, speaking of the role of the priest. Now don't think of a priest as you think of one today. You have to keep it confined to the biblical example of the priest. Priest in the biblical times was a mediator, the go between. I'd have to go to the priest to get to God. That's why I had the high priest who would go once a year on the Day of Atonement and then go behind the veil. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ. Mary's not a mediator. I know, again, you may be offended by that if you're a Roman Catholic, but we're not Roman Catholic. We preach what we believe. We believe what the verse just says. There's one mediator. Now we can intercede on behalf of another, but it goes to the mediator who is Christ without him. That's why we say in Jesus' name.
We're saying without him, it's not possible. And we are hated for this in many circles. We are despised because we will not appease.
We will not bend. We don't mean to be offensive, but when you don't appease, you offend. Even Christians. Christians will come here to this church. They don't like something.
They're offended by it because we wouldn't appease them. There's no way around it, but you can be blameless by not intending to harm someone. 1 Timothy talks about him, the house of God. That was the high priest, the mediator. 1 Timothy 2.5, there's one mediator. Now, the second part of this verse 21 that I'm commenting on, the house of God. Having a high priest over the house of God. 1 Timothy 3.15, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God.
There's a lot of Christians that don't want to read that, but then there are a lot that do. It continues, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and the ground of truth. He's not talking about the universal church only. We're always talking about the universal church. That's a church that's everywhere. As I'm speaking now, there are other pastors elsewhere preaching in their pulpits, not doing such a good job as I am, but that's because I'm humble.
I know, I know, I do that all the time because I like it. That's why. But anyway, there are other great men of God, seriously speaking, in pulpits now preaching. That's part of the universal church, but they are in local churches. It's a concept that Christians don't like because it holds them accountable and they don't want to be held accountable. Christians don't, many Christians don't even want to, they're SBS. They do not want to be covenant people.
They do not. This is a problem and hopefully, if you are guilty of it, you are mindful of it to the point where you are taking it to the Lord and you are saying, Lord, I want to resolve this with you. I want to fix this. He will help you. Anyway, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and the ground of truth, and we have failed there so often, but we must pursue it.
So this work, it is not automatic. We must respond to Christ. We want to benefit from his being our high priest.
If we want to benefit from him being over the house of God, we must respond. We must receive. We must remain. That's what he's telling them. You've got to stick with this.
Do not retreat. 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.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-22 18:17:20 / 2023-05-22 18:26:33 / 9