Now would you like to turn please to
Hebrews, and
though I shall be bringing the Bible study
from the AV, let me just for you
the rendering in the New International Version of
the Bible.
We're reading the 12th and 13th verses.
For the Word of God is living and
active, sharper than any double-edged sword.
It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow.
It judges of the heart.
Nothing in all creation is hidden.
Everything is before the eyes of Him to
whom we must give.
One of the most significant doctrines in the
Word of God is that which, that this
Bible is inspired.
The doctrine of the plenary, the full inspiration
of Scripture.
It is to that belief that the signature
shall be laid.
We acknowledge the Word of God as being
authoritative in its entirety.
And there are messages that we could put
before those who would question our view that
this is indeed a reasonable view.
The Word of God is God's message down
the center.
That's the reason we believe that God speaks
through the book.
The God speech, Word of God.
We believe that holy men wrote as they
received centuries ago.
And that's the reason why we've got authored
by some 30 plus over a long period
of time.
The Word of God inspired by the Holy
Spirit.
Now, when we come to these verses of
Hebrews 4, we encounter one of the grandest
statements of the doctrine of the inspiration of
Scripture.
And particularly the 12th verse.
I remember as a young Christian trying to
memorize key passages of Scripture.
And this was one of the first that
I locked away in my mind.
The Word of God is quick and powerful
and sharper than any two-edged sword.
Piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul
and spirit and of the joints and marrow.
And is the discerner of the thoughts and
the intents of the heart.
And when we come to this particular verse
of Scripture, we do so, I remind you
my friend, in the context of an illustration
which the writer drew from an experience of
the Hebrews centuries before he wrote this epistle.
He had been talking, you remember, of those
thousands of Hebrews who left the land of
Egypt and pushed their way to the borders
of the promised land and yet never entered
Canaan.
We have the tragic sight of seeing their
graves, mounds of clay, scattered around the Sinai
peninsula.
A very sorrowful picture is drawn in the
verses that precede this 12th and 13th verse
of Hebrews 4.
You remember I spent two weeks dealing with
this and I also smuggled in a gospel
address on the subject just to ensure that
the whole picture was clear.
A tragic situation, if ever you espied one.
Men and women who died in the wilderness,
never entered into the rest of God, never
inherited the blessings which had been promised to
them on condition of their obedience.
Now you might ask yourself the question, as
I often did as a youngster studying this
letter to the Hebrews, what has the 12th
verse got to do with the preceding verses?
Because verses 12 and 13, they seem out
on a tangent, out on a limb.
They don't seem to be immediately on a
casual reading to have anything to do at
all with what went before.
But if you make that deduction, you do
because you're reading with cursory.
A little bit of close investigation of the
previous verses gives you this impression.
The Hebrews so tragically died in the wilderness
because they refused to accept the message that
Moses preached.
Let me repeat that, it's an important statement.
The Hebrews died tragically in Sinai because they
spurned the message that Moses proclaimed.
I told you last week, I've argued it
previously from this pulpit.
There is only one gospel in the Old
and New Testament.
A fuller revelation of it, to be sure,
exists in the latter part of the Bible.
But in the foremost part, in the first
part of the Word of God, the gospel
is predicted.
The gospel is promised.
It's there in embryo.
It comes to full birth in the New
Testament.
Now the essence of the gospel message was
preached by Moses to the Hebrews.
And they rejected it.
That's what the second verse says of this
chapter.
For unto us was the gospel preached as
well as unto them.
But the word preached did not profit them,
not being mixed with faith in them that
heard it.
Now when you come to the twelfth verse
of this chapter, what the author is doing,
is showing us the importance that God attaches
to his most holy word.
Reject that word and you'll reject it at
your peril.
You know, in some senses, I'm caught in
a dilemma when an opportunity for personal evangelism
presents itself.
I'll tell you why.
It's because if I proclaim the gospel of
Christ clearly, in a comprehensible fashion, and the
person does not respond to what I am
saying, then their reaction is an offense to
the holy God.
Their reaction is an offense to the holy
God.
God's word is an important word.
It's directed to man, not for his consideration,
but for his acceptance.
The Hebrews rejected what God's spokesman Moses had
to say in the wilderness.
They were against saying and a disobedient people.
Constantly, though God manifested his presence in their
midst, they rejected what he had to say.
And ultimately, God rejected them.
The word of salvation became the word of
condemnation.
And as it was yesteryear, so it is
today.
The proclamation of God's word is a most
important thing, and the man and woman who
fears and rejects offends almighty God.
Well, I say that in passing, but I
do so for the simple reason that the
twelfth and thirteenth verses do not constitute a
tangent from what has preceded.
Rather, gathered up by the writer, is the
concept of the importance of God's word.
And because those ancient Hebrews rejected it, they
never entered into the rest of God.
And that very word that could have saved
damned them.
The connection between these two verses, and I'm
not sticking very close to my notes just
at this moment, I'll come back in a
moment or so.
The connection between verses twelve and thirteen actually,
again, is obvious if you dig between the,
not dig between the lines, but dig within
the actual illustrations that I use.
We've got the idea of God's word plunging
into the very headquarters of man's personality in
the twelfth verse.
There's nothing that it cannot touch.
There's nothing that it does not cut.
And in the thirteenth verse, you've got the
picture of man being exposed before God.
So if in the twelfth verse the idea
is of the word of God penetrating, in
the thirteenth verse it's the God of the
word perceiving.
Have you got that?
It's important, but it's simple to grasp.
In the twelfth verse, there's the word of
God penetrating, cutting right to the inner private
parts of a man's thinking of his personality.
And in the thirteenth verse, here is the
God of the word having everything in view
in respect of any individual human being.
As God then judged the Old Testament Hebrews
by his word, as everything was exposed as
far as their conduct was concerned, centuries ago.
So the same situation applies today.
And of course it applied at the time
of the writer to this Hebrew community who
first received this letter.
You see, the writer is somewhat anxious.
Why?
Well, he's not too sure that these Hebrews
are going on with the Lord.
He's not sure that they're giving evidence of
a genuine faith.
And he's reminding them, having had the gospel
preached, they are in a very responsible situation.
They're responsible before God for the way that
they've reacted to that word.
And he wants them to realize that they
too are exposed before the Lord and one
day will be judged by him for the
way that they reacted to his divinely inspired
message.
Well then, with those things in mind, let's
come to work through these twelfth and thirteenth
verses.
The twelfth under the general title of the
word of God.
For the word of God is quick and
powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword,
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul
and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and
it is a discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart.
God's word is quick.
It's powerful.
Or as the NIV puts it, it's living.
It's active.
And you would expect that, wouldn't you?
Because the word is directly linked by the
writer to God.
It's not any ordinary word.
It's God's word.
God is a living God.
And therefore the message that he proclaims is
an alive message, relevant to everyone.
When God speaks, he anticipates securing his objective.
So in Genesis, the opening chapter, you'll get
the six-fold stage of creation presented in
terms of, and God said, and it was
done.
God's word, powerful.
God's word, creative.
God's word, pulsating with energy, creating power, bringing
life out of absolutely nothing.
The word of God is quick and powerful.
I believe this when the gospel is preached.
His word will not return until him void.
You remember that's what Isaiah said.
I believe that we should have, as a
result of our study this evening, a greater
concept, not only of God's word, but of
God's word as it is proclaimed through gospel
preaching.
For that has the authority of the Lord
behind it.
It's a quick, and it's a powerful word.
One that creates, recreates.
One that gives energy.
But the writer doesn't just start by impressing
upon us the liveliness of God's word and
its efficiency.
He draws for us this picture of the
sword.
The word of God is sharper than any
two-edged sword.
It's like a sword very, very much.
But any illustration pales into insignificance because if
it's a sword, it's sharper than any sword
that you can possibly imagine.
Now, it's because the reference is made to
the word of God as a sharp sword
that I could not go along with some
commentators who think the writer of the epistle
in referring to the word of God is
referring directly to Jesus.
You never find reference in the word of
God to Jesus as a sword.
Rather, you find in Revelation that Jesus wields
the sword.
And you discover in Ephesians that the word
of God is the sword of the Spirit.
Well, this book, this word, this gospel, it's
razor sharp.
And it's not just razor sharp on one
edge.
It's razor sharp on two edges.
Which made the older commentators, going back to
the 3rd, 4th, and 5th century, they were
commenting on the Bible in the 3rd, 4th,
and 5th century.
And you can read what they have to
say if you've got a lot of time.
They were suggesting that the two-edged aspect
of the word of God was the Old
Testament and the New Testament.
But I think modern commentators are perhaps a
little more shrewd in the way that they
suggest that the two edges of the word
of God describe the two-fold reaction that
there is to God's word.
That's the reason why we read earlier from
John's gospel and chapter 12.
Because there our Savior is preaching.
And he's saying something about the word that
he has proclaimed.
John 12, 48, What
does that mean?
That God's word can have a two-fold
effect.
It either saves or it condemns.
It's never neutral in its consequence.
It either saves a person or it condemns
him.
So when the word is wielded, it's wielded
like a sword with two edges.
With some it will be the cut that
will save.
With others it's the cut that condemns.
The Apostle Paul doesn't maintain the same metaphor
but he is teaching the same concept when
writing to the Corinthians the second letter and
the fifth chapter.
And the 15th verse he tells us about
the word of God and the way that
it either is a word to salvation or
a word to damnation.
That's a very interesting comment that the Apostle
there has to make.
This twin reaction to the gospel message.
It becomes a word of salvation.
If they accept it, it becomes a word
of damnation.
It is rejected.
So then it's a very powerful illustration we've
got here.
The word of God is quick and powerful,
sharper than any two-edged sword.
And do you not see in the early
preaching of the church the wielding of that
sword?
Here's Peter on the day of Pentecost and
he preaches about Jesus being God's Son and
the fight that the Jews have put him
to death.
And we read that some in the audience,
some in the congregation were cut to the
heart.
Cut to the heart.
It's the language of the sword.
It's the language of someone whose being has
been penetrated.
You'll get it on further occasions in the
Acts as I indicate in my notes.
No need to turn to them right now.
But the idea again is of a Christian
soldier who unseathes his sword and he penetrates
the hearts of men as he proclaims the
word.
Some, they respond positively and I repeat it
becomes the word of salvation.
Some respond negatively and the word therefore condemns
them.
But the sword remains powerful.
Always having an effect despite the fact that
the two effects seem to be at the
opposite extremes.
So the word of God is quick.
It's powerful.
It's sharper than any two-edged sword.
It pierces even to the dividing of soul
and spirit and of the joints and marrow.
Some of the early church fathers, they had
a whale of a time telling us what
the soul was and what the spirit stands
for, what the joints stand for, what the
marrow stands for.
Seems as though they were butchers in the
way that they were able to do a
sort of dissecting of human anatomy.
But it seems to me, again I think
I indicate in the notes I publish, that
John Calvin, as he so often does, saw
the truth when he says this metaphor is
indicating there's nothing so hard or firm in
a man, nothing so deeply hidden, that the
word of God cannot penetrate through to it.
The word of God is powerful.
Haven't you seen that sometimes?
Maybe you experience it in your own testimony.
I knew a man who lived in Roslin,
a town which is quite conveniently situated next
to my home city.
And he was a miner.
I remember my father making reference to him,
a very hardened man, a man who would
not have bought to the thought of murdering
someone.
And the day came when that man was
brought under the sound of the gospel.
And no one would have believed that he,
of all the people in his area, Roarmarch
was the suburb that he lived in, that
area of Roslin, that he would have responded,
that he did.
The word of God got right through.
You find illustration of this in Bristol, in
the preaching of the Wesleys and Whitfield.
These hardened miners, when they came up from,
was it called Kingswood Colliery?
And they listened to Whitfield, this man with
an angelic countenance, proclaim the word of God.
And it got through.
You wouldn't have believed it, but it did.
The thing that's kept me going sometimes in
the late hours of the night, talking to
some of those punks, was the thought that
it couldn't have been a harder heart that
Whitfield was presented with when he preached in
Bristol.
And the word got through.
And one of the things that I try
to convince our own youngsters of, is that
the word in itself, despite any secondary help
that one may have in gospel presentation, the
word itself can do its own job.
It's the most important thing.
I'm not against music.
You can have all the music in the
world.
You can have all the presentation of pictorial
displays.
I'm not against that.
But the prime thing is the word of
God, enlivened by the spirit of God.
It can get through when nothing else can
get through.
And the guitarists, Whitfield and Wesley, and other
men who've had no help at all musically,
no big choirs like the London Emanuel Choir,
just to redress the balance.
Those of you who think I'm knocking modern
music, I'm not.
I'm not knocking anything at all.
I'm just making the point that the word
of God, unaccompanied by anything else, when the
power of the spirit is in evidence, can
get through to a man.
And there's nothing else that can do just
that, right through.
So it becomes a discerner of the thoughts
and the intents of the heart, the headquarters
of the personality.
That word can penetrate.
I think in one sense, without being at
all, in any sense, too stern or even
verging on the sadistic, there's no more wonderful
sight than to see a man rising in
conviction.
Because that means the word is having its
effect.
One of the things that's missing today, it
seems to me, when we're preaching, and that
would indicate, therefore, my lack of spirituality.
I confess that publicly before this congregation.
I can see no other reason for the
lack of fruit in some areas in our
evangelism here.
But one of the things that's missing is
the conviction.
When the word of God is preached, the
word is able to do its work.
I wonder if the lack is not within
my own spirit.
Your own spirit.
That we're not able to handle that word
well enough.
Or maybe we're not holy enough for the
Spirit of God to act upon the word.
And bring men and women to that state
of abject despondency.
That they rise in conviction and cry out,
What must we do?
One of the hardest things, I challenge anyone,
you're welcome over there this evening.
One of the hardest things is to get
some of these radical punks to acknowledge that
there's such a thing as sin.
When you talk about forbidden fruit, they laugh.
When they talk, you talk about morality, they
laugh.
When you talk about sexual ethics, they don't
even know what the term indicates.
They've got no yardstick.
They've got no judgment.
They can't relate it back to a mother
and father who lived a moral life.
Very often their parents didn't.
And in any case, we put the television
in front of them.
We're responsible as a nation at any rate
for what is projected on the screen and
on the cinema screen.
The lack of holiness, it's not there.
Or rather the concept of holiness is not
there.
And it's like preaching in a vacuum.
They've got no yardstick.
And nothing seems to touch them at all.
And maybe that's one of the reasons why
in our desperation we try every conceivable method
to get their attention.
But I'm assured that the best method is
to bathe our preaching with prayer and to
love these young people as Jesus loved folks
when he was on this earth.
Well, it's the word of God that penetrates
the inner citadel.
It's this word of God that is so
powerful that it can pry into the very
intimate details of a man's life and make
him feel an absolute worm shrinking from the
presence of God.
And you see, you get the flip side
of this in the 13th verse.
The word of God, that's emphasized in the
12th.
The God of the word is emphasized in
the 13th.
There's such a connection that in one sense
you can't drive a wedge between God and
his word because as the writer of the
Hebrews tells us in the opening verse, he
is the God who communicates.
God who hath spoken.
He is the speaking God.
God is never dumb.
God is never silent.
And what his word achieves, it does so
because that is what he wanted it to
affect.
When his word penetrates the mind, the heart
of a man, he perceives as the God
of the word, the innermost state of the
human being.
Neither is there any creature that is not
manifest in his sight.
All things are nature and open unto the
eyes of him with whom we have to
do.
We've moved from the armory.
We're now in the hospital.
We're in the x-ray theater.
And here is God scanning humanity.
And he never misses.
He never misses anything that's revealed on the
plate.
He sees the malignancy, the cancer of our
sin.
There is no one who can hide themselves
from the living God.
That can be a frightening thought.
It can be a terrifying thought.
But it can also be a very comforting
concept.
Hagar was very pleased, as I point out
in my notes, that God saw her in
her state.
You remember, ostracized from Sarah and Abraham's camp,
thinking that life would be taken from her.
But no, Hagar, God has got his eye
upon you as he's got his eye upon
everybody.
There's nobody who is in any way unknown
to the Lord God.
Neither is there any creature that is not
manifest in his sight.
You remember when the Lord Jesus was on
earth, that he picked a handful of men
and he made them his disciples.
And he did so on the basis of
knowledge.
He understood what was in Nathanael before Nathanael
was introduced.
He didn't make a mistake with Judas of
Caria, Judas Iscariot.
He realized that this was a man who
would betray him.
He was not in any way ignorant of
the fact.
Jesus has x-ray vision.
That's the reason why the author of the
fourth evangelist, the author of the fourth gospel,
says at the end of the second chapter
he didn't entrust himself to man.
He knew the treachery of men's hearts.
God understands.
And just in case we don't appreciate what
the writer is here getting at, he repeats
it.
Neither is there any creature that is not
manifest in his sight, but all things are
naked and open unto the eyes of him
with whom we have to do.
All things are naked and open.
You remember how Samuel has to have this
message impressed upon him by the Lord.
Samuel, who has the rather difficult task of
choosing a replacement for Saul as the next
king of Israel, and he interviews the sons
of Jesse and the six older sons passed
before him, and Samuel is singularly impressed by
each one as he engages in an interview.
But God says, no, not one of those.
There's somebody else.
And young David, an insignificant ruddy-cheeked lad,
this youngster, looking after his father's sheep, stands
before Samuel, and Samuel hears from the Lord,
that's the lad.
That's the one.
Man looks on at the outward appearance, but
God looks on the heart.
What fools we are sometimes, my friend.
My Christian friend, I say, what fools we
are.
We feel sometimes that we can do things
on the quiet that God doesn't somehow see.
We think that, like the ancient Hebrews in
their tents, engaged upon that which was unlawful
under the cover of canvas, so we may
have a private area in our life.
There is nothing private.
Privacy does not belong to us.
It is not a luxury that God has
granted to us.
He saw fugitives, Jonah, as he set sail
out of God's will, booking a passage on
a ship to take him away from Nineveh.
In no way could Jonah escape.
The psalmist was theologically more understanding than was
Jonah, when in the 139th Psalm, you remember,
he says, if I took the wings of
the morning, if I descended down into the
depths of the sea, even there would your
presence be.
His presence, it circumnavigates the globe.
Our God sees all.
Our God is a spectator upon this scene
of time.
And that's why the writer of this Hebrew
epistle not only says that there is no
creature that is not manifest in his sight,
and that all things are naked and open
before his eyes, but he attends to that,
that very sobering little phrase, with whom we
have to do, we have to give an
account to this God, of all our activities.
And you see, the writer has come full
circle in his argument.
He's back with a thought of these Hebrews,
and those mounds of clay that indicate their
untimely death.
In Sinai, they had to give an account
of the way that they'd lived their lives
before the eyes of God, having rejected his
word.
And they got no answer.
And the judgment of God fell upon them.
And here, the writer of this epistle, he
terrifies us.
I can think of nothing more frightening in
the whole of Scripture.
I'm not using purple language of some extravagant
journalist at the moment as I say this.
I can think of nothing more fearful, nothing
more awful, than for God to have seen
everything that I have done in my life,
and to have it recorded, and to bring
me to judgment, to bring me to book.
I find this, I say, one of the
most sobering passages of Scripture in the whole
of the word of God.
His word, it finds me out.
It penetrates to the citadel of my personality.
There is no stiff resistance that I can
mount to blunt the cutting edge.
I stand there, absolutely pierced by his word.
And then, not only the word of God,
but even more terribly, the God of the
word.
He reveals himself.
He reveals himself as a holy God, as
a God of consuming fire.
And I stand there terrified in his presence.
As my dear brother Paul Tucker once said,
In my hearing, the unforgiving sinner would take
one look into the eyes of God, and
he would gladly plunge into hell itself.
Our God is so holy.
Our God is so righteous.
Our God sees all the rebellion and iniquity
and cancer within our souls.
And here, then, is this passage of Scripture
that becomes frightening, and we wonder who is
sufficient for these things, and how shall we
react when the word of God so terrifies
us.
But you see, the author is not true.
He has to frighten us before he can
console us.
Before he can console us, he has to
speak truthfully before he can apply the balm
of the gospel.
And he says, don't get too frightened.
Don't get so full with depression when you
see the tragic example of those Hebrews whose
carcasses are in Sinai.
There's something else.
Something else that God has to say.
Someone else that God will reveal.
Seeing, then, we have a great high priest,
one that is passed into the heaven, Jesus,
the Son of God.
Let us hold fast our profession, for we
have an advocate.
We have an intermediary.
We have one who not only intercedes before
the Father for us, but we have one
whose blood was shed to cancel out our
sins.
We have one who comes to save.
And the sinner, convicted by the word of
God, is directed to the Christ of God.
And there he finds pardon.
There he finds forgiveness.
There he is promised the ministry of a
barrister who plead his cause, his case, in
the heavens and enable him to enter into
a full and free pardon and become part
of the family circle of God himself.
Well, I shall show you next time I
have the privilege of conducting these Bible studies
of the nature of the high priest and
how he continues to intercede on our behalf.