Now, the Book of Hebrews will receive consideration
from us for the next while.
My method usually is to preach through books
of the Bible.
I haven't been doing it here, but I'm
starting it now, the Book of Hebrews, and
let me read the first chapter, the opening
verses.
God, who at sundry times and in divers
manners spake in time past unto the fathers
by the prophets, hath in these last days
spoken unto us by his Son, whom he
hath appointed heir of all things, by whom
also he made the worlds, who, being in
the brightness of his glory, and the express
image of his person, and upholding all things
by the word of his power, when he
had by himself purged our sins, sat down
on the right hand of the majesty on
high, being made so much better than the
angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a
more excellent name than they.
Now, I'll not go further than that this
morning.
I'll only talk indeed from the first two
verses, part of the first two.
Now, the Book of Hebrews presents a few
difficulties.
There are no difficulties that are insurmountable at
all, but there are a few that are
mostly historical and external, and I'll deal with
them only briefly and give minimum attention to
the scaffolding, because it's not too important merely
to note it, and then for the rest
of the time deal with the truth which
the book contains.
Now, the purpose of the Book of Hebrews,
that is, the reason the Holy Ghost inspired
it to be written, was to confirm, that
is, the purpose was to confirm wavering Hebrew
Christians in the faith.
Now, let's get this settled now, that there
will never be any surrender to the idea
that the Book of Hebrews is written to
unconverted people.
This is a heresy which has sprung up
within the last few years as a necessary
dodge to take care of another heresy.
You see, when one heresy comes, another one
has to come to hide it, and then
another one bigger than those two has to
come to hide them.
Pretty soon you have a whole chain of
them.
And to make allowance for certain wrong beliefs,
the Brethren had to tell us that the
Book of Hebrews is not for Christians at
all, but for people who just were hanging
around the outside and are not saved.
I can't go into it now, but I
might say that this is an innovation and
was never believed by the Fathers and has
no standing in Church history or the development
of Church doctrine at all.
The Book of Hebrews was written to confirm
Hebrew Christians in their faith, and the way
that they were confirmed was that Christ, the
Eternal Son, is presented as being all in
all.
And the writer shows the self-sufficiency of
Christianity.
Here is something that we ought to get
a hold of.
These things, each new truth we get a
hold of hard, strengthens us.
And it is a strengthening thing to know
that while Christianity grew out of Judaism, it
is not dependent upon Judaism at all.
Jesus our Lord said, You don't put new
wine into old bottles, and he meant you
don't put Christianity into Judaism.
So there is a great gulf fixed between
Judaism and Christianity, the Judaism of the Old
Testament, the Mosaic order, and Christianity.
Just as a man is born of his
mother, but he grows up to full manhood,
and his mother may die, and yet he
continues on.
He is independent of her, though he was
born of her.
So the Christian faith was born of Judaism,
though it is independent of Judaism.
And Judaism may cease to be, and Christianity
stands on its own solid legs because it
rests down upon the same Lord that Judaism
rested upon.
It was foreshadowed by Judaism, but it was
not and is not dependent upon it.
And I might add that the book of
Hebrews is a finely written literary work, and
its author is unknown.
Now there have been a number of guesses
about who wrote the book of Hebrews.
Most people think Paul wrote it, but they
just think so because they want to.
I think so myself, but I admit I
think it just because I want to.
I don't know there's any reason to think
it at all.
And as I go along from morning to
morning, undoubtedly I'll say, Paul says, meaning the
writer of the book of Hebrews says.
And I am not going to circumlocute every
time the way the preachers do and say
the writer to the book of Hebrews, which
is a long phrase, takes up time and
puts people to sleep.
So that if I say Paul, you'll know
that he doesn't know who wrote it, but
he's saying Paul.
Then some people believe that Apollos wrote it,
because it's quite an eloquent book.
Some people believe that Barnabas wrote it, and
some people believe that Luke wrote it.
And the funniest guess that I've ever heard
is that of Saint Clement, who believed that
Paul wrote it in Hebrew and Luke translated
into Greek.
I don't know where he got that idea.
Then I read somewhere that somebody attributed it
to a woman.
I forgot her name, but that's what they
say.
It doesn't bear any author's name, so it
is neither strengthened nor weakened by the fact
that we don't know who wrote it.
If John writes a book and names himself,
and then it can be proved he didn't
write it, you have weakened the book.
That never has happened, but I'm using it
merely as an illustration.
Or if you can prove that Mark didn't
write Mark or Luke wrote Luke, you've weakened
it somewhat.
But when a book doesn't claim any author's
name, then you can attribute it to the
Archangel Gabriel and there will be no change
in the content of it, because it is
what it says that matters and not who
wrote it.
This book of Hebrews stands in its own
grand strength a temple where there is seen
standing the Eternal Son, the High Priest of
God forever.
Now it begins with the word God.
God, who at sundry times, and it begins
where everything begins.
It begins with God.
Genesis is the great book of creation, and
it begins by saying, in the beginning, God,
or God in the beginning.
And the book of Hebrews is the great
book of redemption, and it begins with the
word God.
And all things begin and end in God.
I took three months here, the beginning of
the year, to preach on the attributes of
God.
And I tried to show you, and I
hope that it sunk in a little bit,
that in God begins and ends time and
space, matter and motion, life and law, form
and order, all purpose and all plan, all
succession and all procession.
All things move out from God and return
to him again.
I pray that God may open our eyes
to see that whatever doesn't begin in God
and end in God isn't worthy of the
attention of men made in the image of
God.
And it's worse than that.
It may even be a snare.
Any interest that you may have that doesn't
have God in it is your enemy at
last.
You were made for God and made in
the image of God, and your chief end
is to serve God, to admire God, to
worship him and enjoy him forever.
And therefore, anything that you do or plan
to do or have any interest in that
doesn't begin in God is a snare to
you, and it's a result of the fall
of man and your fall in Adam.
Now, any interest, I say, is your enemy.
Any plan, any project, any activity, any philosophy
you may hold, any beliefs you may have,
any motivations that are in your life that
do not begin in God and end in
God, they are your enemy at last.
And I ask you to be aware that
you don't cast in your lot with mortality.
We, the children of the light and the
children of eternity, are called of God to
live immortal lives, that is, lives in the
light of immortality.
And you must be very careful that you
don't hear the siren voice of the world
sounding and call you and woo you from
the contemplations of things immortal to give your
time and cast in your lot with mortality.
Now, it says that God in the beginning,
or God who spake, God spake.
And I want you to notice that these
words, God spoke, God spake, over a period
of four thousand years, God had been speaking
to the race when these words were written.
Now, the race had separated itself from God
and fled from the garden and held itself
incommunicado.
The human race, while it had its gods
and it had its altars and it mumbled
its prayers, the human race, by being alienated
from God and not having God in its
mind, the human race was separated from God,
and so to the race God was only
a tradition, and the voice that had sounded
in the garden was silent.
Not that it was silent, but that they
did not hear it, and so it amounts
to the same thing.
So the ages might have continued until man
or nature or both failed and were no
more, but God came and spake, breaking the
silence.
He spake to Adam in the garden, he
spake out after the garden, he spake to
Noah, he spoke to Abraham, he spoke to
David.
All down the years, one man says, all
the prophets since the world began heard the
voice of God.
God is speaking, God spake.
Now, he spake, says the scripture here, at
sundry times.
See, God spoke to various persons at various
times, but always his words accorded with all
his other words.
I was talking with somebody, I don't recall
who, I think it was the secretary, the
district secretary, and she said, I've looked at
the word until I don't know what it
means.
And I said, that happens to me often.
If you give too much attention to a
word and force yourself to examine it and
analyze it, pretty soon you have a dead
bug in your hand and you can't believe
the word means what it believes, what it
does mean.
It is the same with the scripture.
If we press it too hard and bore
into it too far and examine it too
much, and especially if we don't walk in
the light of it, pretty soon it becomes
darkness to us.
And the idea that the Bible must be
divided, we must divide it.
Let's divide, rightly dividing the word of truth.
Oh, how it fulfills that scripture which says,
Our beloved brother Paul, after the wisdom given
him by God, has written some things which
are hard to be understood, which the unlearned
and the unstable rest to their own destruction.
Because Paul said, rightly dividing the word of
truth.
The Bible teachers have gotten out their scalpels
and their butcher knives and their meat cleavers,
and they have been at it now for
a generation, cleaving the holy word of God
into bits and slicing it apart and laying
it out, quivering and bleeding on the blocks.
My brother, the Moody Bible Institute, has a
saying that all the Bible is for me.
It may not all be about me, but
it's all for me.
I believe that.
And I say that when God speaks to
various persons at various times, his words are
always accorded with others of his words.
There are even persons who try to bring
differences of opinion between Paul and James, and
they say, James believed in works and Paul
believed in faith.
Well, what they don't know is that Paul
believed in faith and works, and James believed
in works and faith.
And they both believed in both faith and
works, only they stated it a little differently.
One man saw that they were trying to
believe without obeying, and the other man saw
they were trying to obey without believing, and
both rebuked the embryonic Christians for their failure.
So God always says the same things to
people wherever he says it, God being one
and God always speaking out of his own
unitary nature, always has to say the same
thing to everybody, the same grace and the
same love and the same justice and the
same holiness and the righteousness and the same
goodness, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, always out
of their one nature, they say the same
thing wherever they are saying it.
Now, I notice a widening and increasing revelation
during the centuries.
The Lord spoke cryptically to the serpent.
He told of a warfare between the serpent
and the seed of the woman.
He told of a bruised head and a
bruised heel and a victorious champion who was
to come.
To Eve he told of sorrow and childbearing
and of her social status, her place in
the family.
To Adam he told of a cursed ground
and of the necessity for toil and finally
the coming of death.
To Cain he told of forgiveness through sacrifice,
and to Abel and to Noah he told
of grace and of the order of nature
and of government.
To Abraham he told of the coming of
the seed, the Redeemer who was to come
to make atonement for the race.
To Moses he gave the law and the
Levitical order and told of the coming prophet
who was like unto Moses, but oh, so
unlike him and so superior to him.
So at sunry times God spake and in
divers manners God spake.
God always said about the same thing, but
he didn't always say it in the same
manner.
Just as you might have somebody shout across
the back fence to you, or you might
have someone call you on the telephone, or
you might have them send you a telegram
or write you a letter or whisper to
you or yell at you, it's the same
person trying to get through to you and
getting through to you in a different way
depending upon the circumstances.
So God spake, and he spoke in different
manners.
That word divers, as you know, is the
old word for different.
He spoke in different manners to different persons
at different times.
He spoke to Adam and Eve in the
garden by a voice, the soft, gentle voice
of God walking in the garden in the
cool of the day.
I don't know how you feel or what
you've ever thought of it, but I'll never
be a totally happy man until I hear
that voice sounding again and know that I'll
never, never be away from its presence.
That gentle voice of God sounding out in
the garden in the cool of the day
will someday sound throughout all the universe and
bring into one all of his ransomed children.
Then Abraham, God spoke to him once in
a deep sleep, and don't ask me, I
just happen to be writing something now.
I haven't finished it.
I'm writing on the bus.
I write most of my editorial on buses
or airplanes, and this one is on God
speaking to man and how they are heard,
how he spoke to them.
I don't know how he spoke to them.
The matter of the technique of inspiration has
always escaped me.
I wish that I could do as some
of my learned brethren do, decide how you
want to believe about a thing, and then
quietly rule out all the other evidence.
It would be such a comfortable thing to
know everything and never to be bothered and
never sit in the middle and say, don't
ask me, Lord, thou knowest.
I don't.
But when it comes to how God spoke
to a man in a deep sleep, I
don't know how he did it at all.
And furthermore, there isn't anybody living that does.
There are just some people living or partly
living who think they do.
Abraham heard a voice of God, and it
was recorded what he heard.
But how it got through to him, I
haven't a faintest notion.
And then there was Moses.
God spoke out of the bush, and he
spoke on the mount, and he spoke by
writing with his finger on the stone.
And there were prophets who heard God speak
in dreams and saw visions, and God talked
to them by signs and symbols.
But always the God whom the world thinks
is silent was not silent at all.
It is a great error to believe in
the silence of God.
God is only silent where men can't hear.
The voice of God is sounding throughout his
world continually.
And the man who hears it may become
a prophet or an apostle or a missionary
or a reformer or a soul winner or
a Bible teacher.
If he hears that voice sounding, but you
say, isn't the word spoken, isn't it here,
isn't it down in print?
Yes, it's down in print.
Nobody can believe in the inspiration of the
scriptures any more certainly than I do.
But the scriptures can lie there silent for
a thousand years and never be heard.
And they can be read by minds that
can't hear, and they'll never know what they
mean.
The man, the treasurer of the Ethiopian eunuch,
was traveling along reading from the book of
Isaiah, one of the most self-explanatory chapters
in the whole scriptures.
And yet he had no idea what he
meant.
And it took the Holy Ghost to come
and reveal to him.
It took Philip to come and tell him
what it meant.
And so I believe that it's possible to
read my Bible and read it regularly and
yet not know what it means until I
hear a voice in it.
And when I hear a voice in it,
that voice never says anything contrary to it,
but it speaks through it.
The voice is the trumpet through which God
Almighty speaks.
You can have and retranslate and translate a
thousand ways the trumpet, but if you're not
able to hear the voice that sounds through
the trumpet, you might just as well not
have the trumpet.
We have so many translations of the scriptures
these days, and it's all right, let them
come.
I am the chief and I'm the world's
greatest sucker for new translations.
Just as soon as one's out, I have
it.
I have old Sheldon.
But I never get any help from particularly,
because I realize that God can tell me
to do something in 40 different ways.
The Lord says, Go and apologize to Brother
Jones.
Well, there's only one thing for me to
do to get out of difficulty, and that's
to go apologize to Brother Jones.
Humble myself and go apologize.
Now, he can say it in the modern
snappy slang of Philip's.
He can say it in the noble numbers
of the King James.
He can say it in this garbled New
English version.
He can say it any way he wants
to say it, but it doesn't make any
difference.
If I don't go apologize, I've failed God
and myself.
So it doesn't make any difference to me
what translation you use, and I don't believe
the devil ever translated the Bible, and I
don't know if I don't believe and accept
any devil's Bibles at all, even in spite
of my eager beaver brethren who try to
make me think the devil translated the scriptures.
I don't think so.
And here's what I'm trying to get at
now, wandering around the bush, is that God
spoke in divers manners, and he spoke to
various people various ways, and then God caused
some things and not things that he said
to be written down in a book.
And that book is the final test of
all doctrine, the final test of all morality,
all Christian ethics, all beliefs for this world
and the world to come.
But that book can lie dead as a
rock until we hear a voice speak through
it, until the Holy Ghost cause it to
come alive to our hearts.
The scripture must be understood by the same
spirit that inspired it.
It says in many fragments, I don't know
where I got that idea, it says it
here in my notes, many fragments.
Well, I think some other translations call it
fragments, and I think they're right in that
the whole thing is imperfect and incomplete, and
they all lead up to something and wait
for something.
I'm thinking of the Old Testament now.
They're all incomplete.
The Old Testament is like a door without
a house to put it on, or like
a house without a door.
It calls for something else.
And in these last days, says the Holy
Ghost, he spoke by his Son.
And this was it.
Remember years ago, some years ago, of a
Jewish doctor by the name of Dr. Rose
who had become converted to Christianity.
Dr. Rose told me that he was a
reader in the Hebrew synagogue before he was
converted to Christ.
He said, I said, what did you do,
doctor?
He said, well, I got up on certain
Sabbaths, and I would read the Old Testament.
But he said, do you know, in all
those years of reading the Old Testament, I
had a haunting sense that there was something
missing.
He said, it was there, and it was
good, and it was true, and I believed
it, and it explained the history of my
people and all.
And I read it faithfully, but he said,
always there was the uneasy feeling that it
was fragmentary, that there was something missing in
it.
Then I interrupted him and I said, Dr.
Rose, when you found Jesus Christ, did you
find what you'd been missing?
With a big broad Jewish smile he said,
oh yes, that's what I'd been looking for.
He said, that's what was missing in that
Old Testament.
My heart had been haunted because I was
reading the frame, the outline, but the content
wasn't there.
But he said, when I found Jesus Christ
the Messiah, I found that which the Old
Testament had been writing all the time.
So he has in these last days spoken
by his Son.
God who in old times spoke in these
last times has spoken.
God who spoke before has now has spoken.
Before he spoke with many voices, and now
he speaks with one voice, the voice of
his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
He spoke by the prophets, he spoke through
the prophets, he spoke by means of the
prophets, but now he speaks in the person
of his Son.
I happen not to like the various wise
words that men are using now, tax-wise
and profit-wise and weather-wise.
I even had heard one man, God forgive
him, say prayer-wise, I don't think it
would be.
Prayer-wise, I don't like this wise and
that wise, but I'm going to use one
here now.
And I like to make rules and break
them, it keeps me young.
But I like to think that the word,
if we could use such a grotesque word,
the word is son-wise.
He spake sonly, he spake through his Son,
he spake in his Son to his people.
And he is called the Word, you see,
the Word.
God spoke and Mary's womb conceived and the
Word became a baby and a man.
And this was God speaking, this was the
eternal Son, the eternal generation of the Son,
which was before the world was.
God, eternal Son, equal with the Father, less
than the Father in his manhood, equal to
the Father in his Godhead, co-eternal and
co-equal of one substance with the Father.
Now he becomes flesh.
And when he became flesh, he did not
cease to be what he had been, the
Word, the medium through which God speaks to
his universe.
So he is speaking.
When you read the Gospels, when you read
the New Testament, and you know that the
Spirit of Jesus Christ is in it and
has inspired it, you are hearing not only
words, you are hearing the eternal Word.
You are seeing not only light, you are
seeing the light that lighteth every man that
cometh into the world.
You are hearing a voice from another world.
You are hearing not an echo, but a
voice from another world.
And before he spake, I say, in many
voices, now he speaks in the one.
And the message of the Hebrews is that
Jesus Christ is God speaking, that he no
longer speaks in a scattered, tentative, nor imperfect
way, but clear and audible and full and
final.
And what he is saying, he is saying
to all who believe today, wherever there is
faith.
Now, you have just one problem, my friends,
this morning.
It is the Eternal Son.
It is the high priest.
It is where high in the heavenly temple
stands the house of God, not made with
hands.
For the great high priest, our nature, where
is the guardian of mankind, appears.
And instead of hiding as Adam hid behind
the trees of the garden, a lot of
people are hiding behind the tree of theology,
and others are hiding behind the tree of
philosophy, and some are hiding behind the tree
of reason.
But we must come out from behind those
trees and let God speak.
And God has spoken to us in his
Son.
And what he is saying is not a
philosophical thing, not a thing of the reasoning
mind, but a thing of the heart.
The question of the Eternal Son and his
relation to us and our relation to him
is a moral question, something of conscience and
conduct and obedience and loyalty.
And Jesus Christ, who appears so big in
the book of Hebrews, as we go along
we will see how he is greater than
angels, greater than Moses, greater than Melchizedek, greater
than all high priests.
And all our future is bound up with
him.
And he is bound up in the future
of each one of us.
We cannot escape him, and we cannot appeal
from him, and we cannot find other help.
There is a doctor in town, and he
is a famous surgeon, and I go to
him and he says, You have to have
an operation.
I get mad and leave the office.
I can go to another surgeon.
But if I go to Christ and I
don't like what he tells me, where else
do I go?
Peter said, Lord God, I have the word
of eternal life.
Where can we go to?
There is no appeal, no escape, no other
help.
He is God's last word to us, the
last word.
And there isn't any other word that ever
will be spoken by God except he speaks
it through his Son, heads it up in
his Son.
He is the light of the world, and
to refuse that light is to shut ourselves
into darkness while the ages roll.
In our communion service we try as best
we know how to remember his death, looking
forward to his coming.
Let us not believe with some that in
the meantime we stand in a vacuum between
a speaking God who speaks and a speaking
God who will speak, but a God who
is now silent.
There is no such vacuum.
There never has been such a bracket any
time in history, and there isn't now, that
God who speaks is speaking, and the words
I speak unto you they will judge you
in the last day.
So the God who spoke is speaking and
will speak.
So he is saying to us that we
are to examine ourselves, that we are to
put our confidence in the blood that was
shed and the body that was broken, that
we are to believe in the high priest
who has gone up on high with our
names in his breast and his hands and
his shoulders, to be our high priest forever
at the right hand of God, or to
be our high priest at the right hand
of God until he has fulfilled his purposes
for this dispensation, and then to come back
to take us into his presence where we
will hear that voice without any intervening medium
of any sort.
But it will be the voice of God
speaking directly to us, and we'll understand it,
and we'll know the voice of the shepherd,
and we'll look on his face, and his
name will be in our foreheads.
So it's to that time we'll look.
May God bless us, each one.
Amen.