Hebrews 8th chapter, reading the first six verses.
Now of the things which we have spoken,
this is the sum.
We have such a high priest who is
set on the right hand of the throne
of the majesty in the heavens, and ministered
of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle
which the Lord pitched, and not man.
For every high priest is ordained to offer
gifts and sacrifices, wherefore it is of necessity
that this man have somewhat also to offer.
For if he were on earth, he should
not be a priest, seeing that there are
priests that offer gifts according to the law,
who serve under the example and shadow of
heavenly things.
As Moses was admonished of God when he
was about to make the tabernacle, for see,
saith he, that thou make all things according
to the pattern shown to thee in the
mount.
But now hath he obtained a more excellent
ministry, by how much also he is the
mediator of a better covenant, which was established
upon better promises.
Now it could easily be a proof of
the inspiration of the scriptures, or a proof
of the lack of inspiration among his ministers,
or both, that it takes us preachers about
twenty times as long to explain a thing
as it does the Bible writer to write
it.
I am now in my twenty-second sermon
on the book of Hebrews, and am only
at the beginning of the eighth chapter.
I would say that indicates a lack of
inspiration in the pulpit, or a tremendous inspiration
in the scriptures.
I believe in the latter, and I am
fearful about the former.
Now I want to ask you to follow
me here and help us to understand this,
for my job is to give you the
scripture and then give you the sense.
And try to make you understand the scripture.
That's why I'm here.
That's why any man of God ought to
stand in the pulpit, and he has no
excuse for standing there unless he is trying
to do that.
Some can do it better than others, but
we'll do the best we can.
Now to the understanding of this passage which
I read, admittedly a very difficult and involved
passage, to the understanding of this, it is
necessary that we get certain truths clear.
You see, there are certain keys that unlock
doors in which there are stored rich treasures
of other truths.
And if you don't have the original key
to the storehouse, you don't have these other
truths understood at all.
Now, one or two of the truths, maybe,
or one, or whether it's one or two,
it's one grammatically, but possibly two grammatically, but
possibly only one actually.
These truths are transcendental and mystical.
That is, I mean by this, that there
are certain concepts which are necessary to the
Christian faith.
You see, the word of God interlocks so
completely that if you destroy any one part
of it, you've destroyed the rest.
That is why I have no place in
my heart and no place in my head
for a liberal, because a liberal insists upon
believing what he wants to believe and rejecting
what doesn't suit him.
And the result is he has destroyed everything
because each thing depends upon everything else.
When we come to the scriptures, we've got
to remember that all the way through the
Bible, we are taught what has come to
be called sometimes the transcendental view of the
world.
I mean by that, and I'll try to
explain it, that word means a half a
dozen things or a dozen things in philosophy,
but I mean by that that there is
somewhere an absolute, there is somewhere that which
is not relative but fixed and final, there
is that which had no beginning and can
have no ending, there is that which transcends
life and time and space and matter and
motion and law and all these things, and
that we call that one God.
And we Christians, when we talk about him,
call him our Father which art in heaven.
Now, that is one of the great truths
of the New Testament, and it is one
of those truths in the scripture which if
you remove it, you have done to the
scripture what you do to a sweater when
you get a hold of a woolen sweater
or a glove and you get a hold
of a thread and pull, and you just
pull long enough and you've pulled it out
into one long thread and destroyed the sweater
or the mitten.
So if you take or attempt to take
this great central truth out that God is
God and that he had no beginning and
that he in the beginning, that is the
beginning of the creation, created all things in
heaven and earth that are visible and invisible,
thrones and principalities and powers and might and
dominion and all things that are named were
created through him and by him, you take
that out and you ravel the sleeve of
Christianity until you've got nothing left but a
memory.
We have to accept this truth.
Now, I know that some don't accept it.
Communists deny it and the materialists deny it
and certain scientists deny it, but we don't
care what people deny and we're not in
the business of denying things, we're in the
business of affirming things.
Our job in life is not to deny
but to affirm.
And we therefore, regardless of how it sounds
to some, affirm that there is another world
above this world of which this world is
but the shadow and that in that world
there is a throne and on that throne
there is a God ruling his universe.
And then there is the mystical element also.
By that I mean nothing of the esoteric
religion of the East, nothing like that.
I mean by mystical, spiritual, that there is
such a thing as a Christian actually knowing
God and meeting God for himself, that we
can press our way into the sanctuary, into
the Holy of Holies, and with our hearts
meet and know and feel and sense and
experience God in a manner more wonderful than
any man or woman can experience in a
human thing or in a human being.
So this is what is taught here, and
this is basic.
If you come to the book of Hebrews
denying the presence, the existence of a transcendental
world of which God is the head and
the creator and the Lord, if you come
to the book of Hebrews denying the mystical
element in Christianity, that is, if Christianity is
reduced to a doctrine which you can explain
and there is no intuitive knowledge, no unmediated,
direct knowledge of the heart to God, then
you might as well close your Bible and
go for a walk, because you'll never understand
it.
I wouldn't give a dime to support a
teaching that denied the presence of God in
his universe and the fact that the human
heart can know God through Jesus Christ.
Now what is taught here is that the
earth is a shadow of heaven.
Sin accepted, of course.
Heaven shines downward and throws its shadows, and
those shadows we call the earth and the
things that are therein.
I say sin accepted.
Wherever sin is found, it's a shadow of
hell and not of heaven, and never can
be of heaven.
Sin is a disease and a deformity and
a plague and a blight and a treason
and a rebellion and an error and a
sacrilege and a perversion.
It's all of those things, and so it
can be no part of heaven, for there's
nothing of heaven in it and nothing in
heaven like it.
Sin is a sinister presence in the universe
which God has permitted to be here for
a little while, but its days are limited
and numbered by the determinate counsel and poor
knowledge of God, and when his good pleasure
comes, he is going to destroy sin from
the universe and beat it and chase it
out of his universe until there is no
sin left.
That's one thing, that earth is the shadow
of heaven.
And the other is that the body of
the universe is one.
Genesis 1 in the beginning, God created the
heaven and the earth.
Now, if I had said this before, I
say it now without apology, that the universe
is one.
One creator, one universe.
God made the universe and he did not
make it in everlasting contradiction to itself.
He made it as one.
He did not make several parts of the
universe opposed to each other, but working harmoniously
with each other.
And Christ taught this.
Christ, when he was on earth, taught the
unity of heaven and earth, and he held
that everything had its spiritual counterpart.
For that reason, he was as much at
home on earth as he had been in
heaven.
There's a great deal of unnecessary mourning over
our Lord coming down to the earth.
A great deal of unnecessary and lugubrious tears
are being shed over our Lord becoming incarnated.
My dear friend, our Lord could become incarnated
in the form of a man without embarrassment
and without difficulty, because when God made man
in the first place, he made him in
his own image.
And it was a simple matter for the
God who had made the image to move
into the image so that the incarnation of
Christ is not a great difficulty at all.
It's a mystery of godliness, but it's not
hard to believe, though it's certainly impossible to
understand.
But Christ could be incarnated in the form
of a man, and he could not have
been incarnated in the form of an angel,
because however high in the order of being
the angels may be, they were not said
to be created in the image of God.
Man is created in the image of God,
and therefore, when God came down to be
incarnated, he fit down into the nature of
man as neatly as a man's hands fit
into a glove.
And Jesus, our Lord, walked among men, flowers
and trees and babies and women and men
and horses and all these things just as
naturally as he walked in heaven before he
was incarnated, because heaven and earth in the
sight of God are one.
I say the only thing that separates from
the moment is that sinister presence we call
sin.
Just as a healthy man may be suddenly
very ill, and all that prevents him from
being a healthy man is the presence of
certain microbes or bacteria or virus in his
veins, so in the universe, heaven and earth
are one.
What further is present in the world now
that virus we call sin?
And by the blood of Jesus Christ and
the power of the Spirit, when that is
purged away from the world, it will be
seen that heaven can shine down on the
earth, I repeat without embarrassment, because God made
both.
Jesus walked among men, and he talked about
the birds, and he showed how the very
birds could preach a sermon that we people
all ought to listen to.
He talked about the flowers and pointed his
finger to the lily that grew yonder and
said, That lily can teach you a lesson,
for that lily grows in its beauty, and
there isn't a man in all Palestine, not
even Solomon, when he was arrayed in all
of his splendor, could be as good-looking
as this flower.
And he said, God made that flower, and
the flower had nothing to do with it.
Therefore we give God the glory, and you
stop worrying about yourself, because God made the
flowers and now the Lord will take care
of you.
And the wind and the water and light
and life and growth and reward and punishment,
all these things he talked about on earth,
showing that they were projections downward of laws
that were as old as God and that
had their origin at the throne of God.
So I wish and pray and hope that
we Christians might get away from the notion
that earth is under a shadow far away
in some deep subterranean cave of God's universe
and that somewhere far away shining in celestial
splendor there is a city.
But there is no connection between the two.
No, my friend, the devil would like to
have us believe that, but I don't believe
it for a minute.
I believe that the Christian whose heart is
alive and alert and sensitive to the light
of God can see the city that has
foundations, whose builder and maker is God, and
he doesn't have to go to heaven to
see it.
I don't mean he sees visions in the
night, wakes his wife and says, I just
saw a vision.
I've never gone much for that thing.
I never had a vision in my life.
I never had a dream.
I couldn't explain by something I ate or
something I had seen or didn't do.
So I'm not talking about all this woozy
stuff.
I am only meaning and trying to say
that the Christian who is inwardly alive and
has the life of God in him will
find himself at home among men and at
home in heaven because he belongs in both,
just as Jesus did.
Now, when Jesus Christ walked on the earth,
he said he was in the bosom of
the Father, and there was no contradiction between
those two statements.
He was in the bosom of the Father
still.
And when a Christian walks on the earth
and tells his unbelieving friend, I live in
the bosom of God, the unbelieving friend raises
his eyebrows and shakes his head, and when
he's not looking, makes a little signal as
though there was something wrong with the Christian.
There's nothing wrong with the Christian at all.
The Christian is simply telling the truth.
He's walking on earth, but he's in the
bosom of God nevertheless.
He's in the kingdom of God, and we
are in God, and God is in you,
said Christ, said Paul.
Now, the Bible and nature bear the same
signature upon them.
The same signature, I say, is upon both,
so that we can conclude that whoever made
the one made the other.
Let's look again briefly at how nature is.
We look up above us on a clear
night and we see the stars.
I tried to count them when I was
younger and gave up the job, and I'm
glad I did because science tells us that
they are innumerable, that is, there are so
many of them.
You look up and see a little white
spot.
You call it a star, but the scientists
say that's not a star at all, but
a galaxy.
What is a galaxy?
It's a collection of stars.
Now, how many stars?
Nobody knows how many stars.
We have instruments to know how many, but
there must be billions upon multiplied billions of
them out yonder.
So when David looked up and saw the
stars, it struck him how little he was
in comparison with the world.
David got down on his knees with his
little harp in his hand and sang himself
a song to God.
When I behold the heavens, the work of
the hands, what is man, that thou art
mindful of him?
That, you see, that's just God's creation.
But along comes man.
And man begins to study it and log
it and weigh it and measure it all
up there and create big instruments to see
it so he can weigh it and measure
it better.
And we call that astronomy.
Nobody was ever blessed by astronomy, but how
many million farmers at night have walked across
the meadow on their way home from the
store, the little town away, and looked at
the stars and in their heart thanked God
they were alive and thanked God he was
alive and up there.
You see, astronomy is what man has made
out of the stars.
And it's the same with flowers.
God put the flowers everywhere.
Now, as I said at the opening of
my series on worship, I believe that everything
is here for a purpose and that God,
being a God of reason, had a reasonable
purpose for everything.
I believe that God made flowers because he
had some creatures down here made in his
image, and he knew those creatures had an
aesthetic sense.
That is, they had ability to appreciate beauty.
So instead of God putting flowers down here
and just making them ordinary, he made them
so beautiful that they bring a gasp of
delight when you see the first flowers in
the spring.
Well, those are flowers.
Now, you look around at a flower and
you say, that flower grew there without any
help at all.
It couldn't even help itself.
And you say, thank God he that made
the flowers will keep me.
But a botanist comes along and he breaks
that thing down into petals and stamen and
all the rest, and pretty soon you've got
a big book that nobody likes.
You call that botany.
And that's what you inflict upon young people
in high school and college, making them swear
quietly that they'll never look at a flower
again.
Instead of having God's beautiful world studded with
God's still more beautiful flowers, you have a
big book with fine print in it and
some fellow boring into it at night trying
to catch up so he can pass his
test.
That's what we've done to God's flowers.
We've turned it into botany.
We've turned God's stars into astronomy.
And then there are the rocks and the
hills and all the beautiful world that God
made under his heavens.
And we like to look at them.
I grew up in the state of Pennsylvania,
that fairyland.
I know now that it is, though I
didn't know it then.
I was too close to it to appreciate
it.
What you grow up with, you're not likely
to appreciate so much as something you see
later in life.
And I've seen all those hills and those
little streams running among the hills and those
pine-clad mountains pushing up against the sky.
And I saw all that.
Those are rocks and hills and they're beautiful.
And along comes some fellow with a microscope
and a little hammer, and he is a
geologist and he teaches geology.
And so we have, instead of rocks and
hills, we have geology.
Then there were the birds.
We used to see the birds, the birds
that came in the springtime early and laid
their eggs and hatched and sang among the
branches and went back to the south again
when the bitter autumn winds began to blow
and the brown discouraged leaves were flying all
about.
Well, those were birds.
And I used to like to see the
birds.
I used to like to see the pigeons
come wheel and light on the peak of
the barn and coo and puff out their
necks at each other.
I was enjoying the birds.
But you give a bird and a rabbit
to a professor and he turns it into
zoology and you don't have a thing left,
you know.
Now, that's the way to do in nature.
Nature has reduced a system instead of enjoyed
for itself.
God gave Adam the Garden of Eden and
the trees and the view and said, Here,
it's yours.
Help yourself.
Just take care of it.
But help yourself.
It's yours.
Then man sinned and when Adam, if he
ever got back to see it, he had
his book under his arm.
And all of that beauty is reduced to
astronomy and botany and geology and zoology and
some of the other.
Now, they do that same thing with the
scriptures.
God gave us the word of the Lord.
It's a letter from the home.
We used to sing a little song back
in the camp meeting days.
I have letters from my father in my
hand, in my hand written by my elder
brother.
They are grand, oh, so grand.
Wasn't a very good hymnology, but a wonderful
truth that we have a letter from God
in our hands.
Give, put that in the hands of a
professor with big glasses and very shortly he
has theology that nobody will read.
A student in the Christian college wrote me
one time and said, Will you please help
me?
Am I backsliding or what's going wrong?
I should suppose theoretically that the study of
theology would be the most thrilling, the most
delightful, the most enjoyable thing in the world
because theology is the study of God and
the ways of God.
I would assume that it ought to be
a delight, but this professor makes it impossible.
I can't even enjoy it.
I don't want to hear it.
Well, I wrote back and explained it the
best I could because I'd been up against
that, too, in my life.
So you see, the Bible is here, the
letters from God to his people.
And then we take it and reduce it
and systematize it and pretty soon we have
it so you have to have a good
education to understand it at all.
And the Lord never meant that.
He meant that all of his children, all
of his children, this continent, my brothers and
sisters, was conquered and settled by people who
had never been more than through grade school.
McDuffie's reader was about all the education they
had, but they could read and they did
have translations given to them by men who
were scholars.
And so they lived on those good translations
and never even knew those anything else.
Simplicity and childlikeness.
God hid these things from the wise and
prudent and revealed them unto babes.
And I have met many, a little old
lady dressed in her old-fashioned black who
hasn't had a thing up to date nor
the latest fad for twenty-seven, twenty-eight,
or thirty-five, forty years.
She's in style back there, but not in
style up here.
And she may think that's spiritual.
It isn't.
It just happens that way.
But I've seen those little old ladies and
they'd quit living in the earth at all.
Oh, they cooked and sewed and cleaned house
and went to store and all that, but
they weren't living here.
They were walking that far off the sidewalk,
living with God all the time.
They were not brilliant people and they were
not well-educated people, but they were people
who looked out on God's truth and saw
it as a child sees flowers.
Looked at God's truth and saw it as
David saw stars.
Looked at God's truth and saw it as
Isaiah saw the mountains.
Direct, unmediated, unsophisticated, unspoiled.
The Lord said there was a pattern in
the mount.
There is in heaven a sanctuary, he said,
a true tabernacle, where there is an altar
and a mercy seat and a high priest.
And he said that if Jesus were on
earth, he wouldn't be a priest.
He said he couldn't be a priest because
there were priests already here on the earth
after the order of Levi.
But he said, according to the Old Testament
scriptures themselves, there has to come a priest
who is above the Levitical priests after the
order of Melchizedek and this Jesus is the
one.
And he said this Jesus has a more
excellent ministry than Levi.
Levi had the tabernacle and if you discipline
yourself a little bit, if you haven't been
spoiled by Reader's Digest, if you discipline yourself
a little bit and settle down to get
quiet and read, actually read, and you'll read
the book of Leviticus and the book of
Exodus and get acquainted with it and see
what it says, you'll see how beautiful that
was.
There was something utterly beautiful about that Old
Testament tabernacle, the old Levitical order.
It was spoiled and stained by blood everywhere
for sin had spoiled and stained the world
and it took blood to wash the world.
So all through the Old Testament order there
was blood, blood of lambs and blood of
pigeons and blood of goats.
But it was all pointing to the Lamb
of God that should come to take away
the sin of the world.
Now, says the man of God, this whole
tabernacle has been lifted and it is now
in heaven and we have a priest there
who offered himself as the Lamb to end
the sacrifice of all lambs forever.
We have an altar there, not the altar
in Jerusalem but the altar in heaven.
We have a Lamb there to take the
place of all the beasts that were slain
on Jewish altars.
And we have an altar of incense there
where our Lord pleads to take the place
of that transient altar of incense in the
old tabernacle in Judea.
This is what is taught here, my friends.
It is taught that Jesus Christ is the
true priest and strictly he is the only
priest there is.
In a secondary sense, all of his people
are priests.
In a primary sense, there is only one
priest and that is Jesus Christ, the Lord.
He is the high priest.
Now, what does all this mean to us?
It means that this glorious remedy remains now.
This glorious remedy remains now.
In old Jewish days, once a year, the
priest came dressed in his resplendent robes and
with blood not his own, he went in
through a veil so sacred that it was
only necessary to remove once a year and
sprinkle blood on a mercy seat between the
wings of the cherubim where glowed the fiery
Shekinah.
But all that was fulfilled when our Lord
gave up the ghost and said, It is
finished and died on a cross, yonder.
That is what is taught here.
And then what is taught here also is
that when this happened, Jesus Christ washed the
heavens, so there is nothing between man and
God now if man will believe it.
That by the blood of the Lamb, God
washed the heavens so that there is a
friendly heaven arching over us now.
Come unto me, all ye that labor and
are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest, said Jesus.
The Spirit and the Bride say come, and
whoever is athirst, let him come.
And all that hear say come, says the
last book of the Bible.
So the blood of the Lamb has by
blood washed away the evil that kept us
away from God.
And now whoever will come, may come, regardless
of how dark may be his stain and
how far off he may be from God.
Any prodigal is the same distance from God
as any other prodigal.
We have been hearing of rapists and murderers
and all the rest.
More recently, it seems to me, in the
last few months than ever since I can
remember in my time.
And yet, that rapist who rapes and kills
there in the park in the dark of
the night, is no further off from God
than that proud businessman surrounded by his adoring
family who reads Shakespeare and listens to Beethoven.
All are sinners.
And all have come short of the glory
of God.
And we're all without hope and without God
in the world.
But there is yet hope in God if
we'll believe.
Because the Scriptures tell us that there is
a way open now through a fountain in
the house of David and a way open
through the rending of his flesh.
And the rapist in the park, though we
shudder at the thought of the terrible, terrible
act he's committed, he can come home if
he will come.
He's a sinner, and the man who is
up and out, he can come, too.
The cultured sinner can come, and the uncultured,
base sinner can come.
All can come.
Because heaven and earth are united.
And Jesus Christ has washed away the division,
the difference.
Now we can come.
Sin's still loose in the universe like a
virus still in the body.
And the world is sick, desperately sick.
But Jesus is the physician of souls, and
he can cure us and bring him to
himself by his blood.
Our Father used to sing a song.
It isn't in our book, but it runs
like this.
Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish
altars slain, could give the guilty conscience peace
or take away the stain.
But Christ, the heavenly Lamb, takes all our
guilt away, a sacrifice of nobler name and
richer blood than they.
My soul looks back to see the burdened
office bare while hanging on the cursed tree
and knows my sins were there.
Believing we rejoice to see the curse removed,
we bless the Lamb with cheerful voice and
sing his bleeding love.
We ought to sing that song often, for
this is our hope for this world and
our hope for the world to come.
A priest, an altar, a temple, a tabernacle,
a shrine, and an advocate above, a Savior
by the throne of love.
This we Christians have.
What bothers me is how we can keep
so quiet about it, and why it is
that we can take it so soberly, almost
sadly.
It seems to me that we Christians ought
to be the happiest people in all the
wide world.
Now I want you to sing.
I don't know for the grave what song
is announced, but I'm sure that these musicians
as well as the congregation can sing anything
as easily as they can sing or play
anything else.
So I'm going to ask you to sing
number 311, 311, which is considered to be
probably the greatest hymn ever written.
And it's about what I preached about this
morning.
Let's sing it reverently as our closing feature.