Hebrews 5:10-6:20
Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson
OPENING PRAYER:
Gracious Father, we thank you for the exhilaration of worshipping you together. For the sound of strong voices encouraging our hearts. And for the promise of our Lord Jesus, that He will be among us and the assurance of your word that as we sing your praise, you are singing over us in joy that your son has given himself for our salvation. And your Holy Spirit has opened the eyes of our understanding to see the glories of your dear son.
We thank you that he has finished his work upon the cross and in his resurrection and is at your right hand. But we praise you that he is still a prophet to us. That He speaks to us through His Word. We thank you for the manner in which you do this as you move among us. That your work is secret and hidden. But we pray it may nevertheless be gloriously real here today. That each of us may be conscious, that we hear the voice of Christ in the word of God. We pray that you would awaken and stimulate faith in us and love and full joy and assurance of salvation. Turn us Lord and we shall be turned. Rejoice in us and we shall rejoice. Transform us and we shall be transformed. So come, Lord and speak for your servants are listening. We pray this in Jesus’s name. Amen.
Please be seated.
SCRIPTURE READING:
We are continuing to read through the letter to the Hebrews in our morning services. We come today to Hebrews chapter five verse 11 through six verse 20. You’ll find the passage in the pew Bible page 1003. For children who have their children's Bible with them, the passage is on page 1494 1-4-9-4.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews is writing to Christians who have been through particularly difficult times. They have experienced the terrible costliness of being a Christian in their particular society. And some of them have lost, apparently, all their worldly possessions. And they face trials and persecutions. And of course, there is the temptation, therefore to go back. And he is pastoring them in what in chapter 13 verse 22, he called us a brief “word of encouragement and exhortation”. And he's urging them to keep their eyes fixed on the Lord Jesus Christ. He has told them to do this, because Christ is the apostle of God to us, the one whom the Father sent for our salvation. And now he is turning to expound a second way he has encouraged us to think about Christ, that He is not only our apostle, sent from God, but He is our high priest, who deals with God on our behalf. And in chapter five, and there you'll notice in verse 10, he had described the Lord Jesus as a “High Priest, after the order of Melchizedek”. He returns to that you, will notice right at the end of the chapter, “a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”, but he doesn't really begin to explain this till chapter seven. And the reason for that lies in our passage this morning. So let us hear God's word.
Jesus was designated by God a High Priest, after the order of Melchizedek. About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings,
or perhaps baptisms,
the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits. For it is impossible, to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God, and the powers of the age to come, if they then fall away, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.
Though we speak in this way, yet, in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things — things that belong to salvation. For God is not so unjust as to overlook your work and the love that you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do. And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
But when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
SERMON:
Many years ago now, I made one of what I imagine are quite a number of parenting mistakes. I think my children have forgiven me. Our children were small. We had a guest who had been with us for some time, and our guests invited us to dinner. We went to one of the better restaurants in town. This was in the city of Glasgow. It was a — happened to be a Chinese restaurant. And our youngest son was sitting there, small boy, enormous menu, as of course they have in the better restaurants. He happened to be a fan of the A-Team. I think you need to be in your 30s to know what I'm talking about: the television series the A-Team, starring, among others, Mr. T. And Mr. T was his favorite. As his eye looked down the menu, although it was a Chinese restaurant, he said to me, “I think I'll have the 16 ounce T-bone steak.” And this is where I put my foot in my mouth. I said, “Oh, you can't have the T-bone steak.” And he instantaneously, since this was obviously to be the apex of his culinary experience, he, he burst into tears, the little fellow, floods of tears. And instead of saying, as a good father would have done, why don't we share it? I said to him, “You can't possibly have the T-bone steak.” I wasn't actually thinking about the expense of it to our host. I was thinking about the inadequacy of his appetite to be able to digest this T-bone steak.
Actually, the thrust of what the author of Hebrews here is saying can be expressed in exactly the same words, although he has a quite different reason for saying it. He says to these Christians, the problem is you can't have the T-bone steaks of the gospel. But the reason is not because you are a young Christian. The reason is not because your appetite, your capacity to grasp the riches of the gospel — it’s not that your capacity is, is a child's capacity. The problem is you are an adult — spiritually. But you're behaving like a child — spiritually. And you're not able to digest the steaks of the gospel, because you are stuck, as he puts it here, “with the elementary doctrine of Christ” in chapter six and verse one. The problem, as he says here in verse 12, is that they “need milk, and not solid food, because they have become dull of hearing”. And interestingly, that language in verse 11, is the same language to which he returns in verse 12, when he speaks about being sluggish. And you see the point he is making. He is saying, you know you need somebody to teach you the ABCs of the gospel, but you actually ought to be able to teach others the full riches of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And your problem, therefore, is not you are a young Christian and you haven't grown enough. The problem is, you're an older Christian, and you're actually spiritually sick.
Remember, the good old days of the family doctor when mother would take the little fellow along to the doctor because he seemed to be a bit off color. And the wise old family doctor would always say, How's his appetite? And if you were a little boy, and you heard your mother say, “His appetites gone, doctor”, then the doctor would work his magic upon ya. Look in your eyes, and your ears, down your throat, listen to your chest trying to work out what is wrong with this boy. Because he has lost his appetite. And so in later life, when we have lost our appetite, and to use the language of Hebrews, we are able to take only liquids only milk or milk products as it were, it is a sign that we are spiritually sick, and that we have become sluggish.
He wants to teach them, he says here, about Jesus Christ as a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. Melchizedek is that strange figure who appears in the life of Abraham out of the blue: King of Salem, King of Righteousness. And you remember how he blesses Abraham and Abraham pays tithes to him, honors him. And then he just disappears again, as though he had come from eternity and disappeared back into eternity. And so the author is wanting to say, I want to tell you as much as I possibly can about the sheer greatness and glory of Christ. The problem is, you have become sluggish.
I think perhaps of all the more negative proverbs in the book of Proverbs, my most favorite one is Proverbs 26:15. That describes, you remember, how the sluggard reaches out his hand to the bowl. But because he's a sluggard, he doesn't have the energy to take his hand back from the bowl, and to feed himself. And he's saying, this is how it can be in the church of God among the people of God. That the word of God is there. The glories of Christ are there. They are presented to us in the gospel bowl. The preaching of the word is the bowl in which the gospel blessings are presented to us. And, and we, we do reach out our hands. But because we are sick, and sluggardly, we don't bring our hands back to our mouths, and we don't feed ourselves. We are, as the previous proverb says, “Like the sluggard who in his bed, instead of getting up and becoming active, simply turns as a door on its hinge”.
And he's saying all this is possible. We know all this is possible. We may have seen measures of it in ourselves or measures of it in others. And the tragedy of the situation, he says, is this, that we lose our powers of discernment, and our ability to concentrate on the things that matter. We are, we are like children who have been given expensive gifts at Christmas time. And when they are, when they are simply infants, they spend most of Christmas Day playing with the wrapping paper that we we got in the January sale — the previous year. They can't see the difference between the value of the gift and the wrapping. And we lose the powers of discernment and are not able to distinguish between things that are good for us spiritually and things that are not.
And these are the people he loves. If only, if only some of these people knew how much he loved them. That's a pastor's heart, isn't it? A pastor loves even those who — who give him most hassle. And thinks, If only they knew how much I love them, they'd give me less hassle. I'm not speaking about anybody here in the congregation incidentally. And he wants to help them. And he takes them in these verses through I think three stages. The first is this, in verses one through three of chapter six. He begins with an exhortation not to be stuck with the ABCs of the gospel. Now you may say what are the ABCs of the gospel? These elementary doctrines. Well he tells us: repentance from dead works; faith towards God, instruction about washings. Which I think here may be baptism. The significance of what it means to be baptized. That's surely fundamental to what it means to be a Christian. The laying on of hands that may refer to the way in which they welcomed people into the fellowship. We give the right hand of fellowship. They characteristically may have laid hands on those who came into the fellowship of the church. The, the future joy of the resurrection from the dead, the reality of eternal judgment. He says these are the ABCs. These are the fundamentals. And of course he doesn't mean so forget about the fundamentals. He means are you building on the fundamentals? Are you growing on the basis of these fundamentals into a strong and vibrant and knowledgeable Christian who is growing in the knowledge and therefore growing in love for our Lord Jesus Christ. Because, he says, there is so much more to know. He is so great.
So he wants them to be looking at the gospel menu, and saying, Give me a good steak here. Tell me as much as you possibly can about our Lord Jesus Christ. Show me how great and marvelous he is. But his concern is that they’re, they’re relatively indifferent to that. Matthew Henry says somewhere that “dull listeners make it difficult to be a good preacher". Now, we would have every good reason for saying and dull preachers make it very difficult to be good listeners. But this is what he's saying. He's saying, I can't do it for you. It's not that I don't know what to say to you. It's that you have become sluggish in your hearing. And so he gives them this marvelous exhortation: “Let us, let's leave the foundations in this sense, that we need to build on the foundations and go on to spiritual maturity.” Wonder if you're suffering from infantile regression — spiritually? You've been stuck with the ABCs. And you have said this, as many people do, the ABCs will be quite enough for me. Now, let me illustrate the position. If you've got the letters A, B, and C, you will not get very far in speaking the English language. Actually, you'll not get very far in speaking the English language without the letters A, B, and C. But if you're going to grow, you need all the letters in the alphabet. And so he is urging us here with this great exhortation to go on to maturity.
But then he takes a step further. And I think it’s this that, that so impresses me about the author of Hebrews. Because I take it that he would have said to their face, what he says in letter. You would hope so wouldn't you? You would hope for those of us who preach that we wouldn't get at you in a sermon, if we weren't prepared to get at you face to face. That we wouldn't say something in a letter that we weren't also willing to talk to you about face to face. That would be cowardly. And there's every indication that this man is not cowardly. And so he issues them with a very serious warning. Earlier on, you remember, chapter two, it was the danger of drifting. Now in chapter six, it is the danger of going back. The danger of what he calls turning away — committing apostasy.
My first boss, dear George Bailey Duncan. That's a fine name, who had a voice that made Craig Wilkes’ voice look ordinary and sound ordinary. Tremendous power in his voice and extraordinarily tolerant of his young assistant in the early 1970s. He used to use this illustration that much irritated me, because I thought it was a terrible illustration. He said, living the Christian life is like riding a bicycle. If you don't keep pedaling, you’ll fall off. Actually, now I know myself a little better. I realize the real reason that irritated me is I've never ridden a bicycle in my life. And I think it was that, that was really so sore Because I still remember the illustration and it's true. You can never stand still in the Christian life. You're either progressing in Christ. Or you are regressing from Christ.
And it's very interesting what he puts his finger on here in our lives. I think what he's doing is saying, I know what you're saying. I know you're saying, I know I'm not growing as I should be. But thank God, I have so many spiritual experiences in my past. And he lists them. And they're very striking aren't they? He speaks in verse four, about having been enlightened. About having tasted the heavenly gift, having shared in the Holy Spirit, having tasted the goodness of the Word of God, and the powers of the age to come. But he says, You can experience all that and fall away. Absolutely fall away! He says, You can experience all that and fall away and it'd be impossible for us to restore you. And as you go on in the Christian life, you encounter this kind of thing. And this is another place isn't it, in the letter to the Hebrews, as earlier on where we're inclined to say, but I was taught one saved always saved. But this is precisely his point, once saved, always saved, but the issue is were you saved? Because the evidence that you are saved is that you are being saved. That your life is being transformed. That God's salvation is evident in your life. And so you see, he says, it's possible to experience all these things: to be enlightened, to share with the people of God, to go out of the church and say that — that was a glorious sermon, if there are occasions when it was in fact a glorious sermon. And to sense the power and presence of God and to see his mighty works. You say someone who has done that is obviously a Christian. No, my dear friend, that's the most accurate description of Judas Iscariot anywhere to be found in the New Testament. He had tasted the goodness of the Word of God. He had tasted the power of the age to come. He had shared in the heavenly gift, so much so that his fellow apostles trusted him enough to be the treasurer of the apostolic band. And we’re told that when he left to betray Jesus, they thought he was going on a work of mercy ministry. But he was never really a Christian at all. He had experiences. But it's very evident, isn't it, that he didn't have Christ. Wasn't that one of the things we learned in Dr. Thomas's series on Pilgrims Progress the other year? The number of characters in Pilgrims Progress who have had great experiences and who can talk about all the spiritual experiences they've had. And they were never true believers in the first place. They didn't come by the way of the cross. And he says, you see what happens. He says, they end up holding up the Son of God to contempt. Can't read this without thinking of a friend I had when I was a student who, who seemed to experience one of the - most - glorious conversions to Christ I think I've ever seen in my life. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone so radically joyful. So eager! And yet he turned away because he had all the experiences but he’d actually never experienced the A, B, C's of repentance from sin and faith in the Lord Jesus.
That's why the author of Hebrews then turns to his friends, and he says, notice the language he uses in verse nine, “though we speak in this way. Yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things. Things that belong to salvation.” That clinches the deal, doesn't it? He's saying you can have all of these experiences, but they're not necessarily the things that belong to salvation. How is that? Because you look through that list of things and you realize there's no mention of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. There's no mention of the radical turning to the Lord and seeking His forgiveness and knowing something of his grace and pardon. It's all about experience! But it's not about the Lord Jesus Christ! And because it certainly looks from this as though he had seen these things in his own ministry, that he issues this serious warning. It just reminded me when we were singing Robert Robinson's hymn, Oh to Grace How Great a Debtor: Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. You know the story about Robinson? He was, he was riding in a carriage one day, and there was a young woman sitting across from him. As they would do in those old carriages — and bumping along the road. And she was humming the tune to Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. And he, he inquired if she liked that tune and hymn. And she said, she loved it. And Robinson confessed to her he was the author of the hymn. And that he would give everything he had to be in the position he had been in when he had written the hymn.
Now you know, when we are in the situation, and we know that we are not pursuing the Lord. First of all, we appeal to the experiences we have had. And we characteristically miss out faith and repentance. And the other thing that we typically do is say to ourselves, Well, I'm only backsliding. I'm only backsliding. And we lose sight of this: that we are not capable of distinguishing between the beginnings of backsliding and the beginnings of apostasy. Because apostasy, turning away from Christ, begins with backsliding.
And this is his passion. He would never say this, if it were not out of a passion to protect the flock over which the Lord has made him an overseer. I mean I don't know which of us who are, you know — we are all wired differently, but it would be — I’d say, it would be very difficult for me to speak this kind of language to a congregation if I were not already here in the Word of God. And I'm glad, therefore, that this man cares enough, cares enough about us as we're given the scriptures through him, not only to give us an exhortation but to. to thrust that home the importance of listening to the exhortation to keep our eyes fixed on Christ and ever to pursue him. Because the alternative is to end up as he says, here, like a field which has been watered and on which the sun has shone in the word of God in the presence of God. But what has come out is thorns and thistles that have choked the word of God. And eventually, all we have been left with is that we had experiences, but we never possessed the Lord Jesus Christ.
And that brings him to the third stage. There is an exhortation and there is a warning. And because he is a pastor to them, he understands this. He understands that if you say this, to the people of God, there will be some present in the congregation who say, as the Apostle said when Jesus said, “one of you will betray me”, and they all said, I wonder if it's going to be me. And some of us are so sensitive that we can be almost paralyzed when we hear this kind of thing. And so he wants to take us from exhortation through warning, to in verses nine through 11 the conclusion of his words in this section with wonderful encouragement. Exhortation, warning, and now encouragement. “I feel sure of better things in your life, the things that belong to salvation.” And you see what he's doing. We do this with one another, don't we? We, we find a brother, a sister and they're, they're struggling with these things. The Word of God has cut through them. They’re, they’re wondering if in fact, they have fallen away from grace because they are not what they know they both longed to be and are called to be. And we sit down and we, what do we say to them? We say to them, but you love your fellow believers, don't ya? You long to live for Jesus Christ. You trust and you love him. Yes! Yes! Yes! All of these things are true. And we say, Dear One, we can see things in you that at the moment seemed to be hidden from your eyes. And this is what he's saying. He's saying, I've seen what he calls here, “their work of love for the Lord Jesus Christ, and their service of the saints”, because they love the saints. They love to be with the saints. They love the Lord Jesus. And they love to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. And so he's saying make sure, make sure that you build on that.
But then you notice he has more to say, doesn’t he? As this chapter concludes. You might be thinking he’s surely not going to deal today with verses 13 through 20? And the answer is no, he's not going to deal today with verses 13 through 20. He's not going to deal with them next Lord's day either, because not knowing that we were going to be studying Hebrews, we dealt with these on the first Sunday night of the year. But I do want you to notice what he's saying. He's saying to these dear Christians, he's in a sense, he’s put them through the wringer here. And he has exposed their frailty and his concern for them, and the danger some of them may be in. And he's concerned for those who are true, and yet who are frail. And he says, Look to what God has promised to do for ya.
And he tells us these three things. First, that there is an unchangeable purpose in God's heart to bless His children. Second, that there is something that is absolutely impossible for God to do. And that is to make a promise and to be lying about it. And then he says, there is this glorious truth, that as the people of God, you have an immovable anchor. And you are tied to the Lord Jesus Christ. And he has gone through the veil, that is, he is in the very presence of God, and you are anchored to Jesus Christ. So if God has promised to bless you, if it's impossible that God should lie in giving you that promise, and if you are anchored to Jesus Christ, frail believer be gloriously encouraged. Because God has not only given you his promise, but as he did with Abraham, he has sworn an oath, on top of that promise to reassure you that no matter the world be filled with devils ore he is able to save you to the uttermost through His Son our Lord Jesus Christ.
So how do you know these encouragement are for you? How do I know they're for me? Well, simply because I'm still able to say, because I believe it. You believe it with all your heart. Trust and obey. For there's no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
You become sluggish about Jesus? Perhaps even beginning to see in your life that you've drifted into the danger area where you're actually in danger of holding Christ up to contempt. Either by what you say or don't say, by what you do, or don't do, or by your heart response to every occasion in which Jesus is held up as the glorious Savior and Lord that He is. Oh then listen to his exhortation. Listen to his warning. Be stirred up. Do not drift away. Do not stop pedaling. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus Christ. Long to know more of him. And as that begins to happen you will discover God willing, that the Lord is able to say, Now, then I think you're just about ready for me to explain to you what it means that Jesus is a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.
Now where are you? We're all here this morning and our hands go into the bowl. The Word of God has set before us Sunday School here in the morning, again in the evening, for some of us Wednesday, lunchtime, Wednesday evening, other occasions. Christ, Christ is held out to us in the bowl of the exposition of the gospel. Now is your hand gone out to him and taken him back into your life by faith, to trust Him, serve Him, love Him. Discover what a glorious, glorious Savior He is. Trust and obey. No other way. You a happy Christian? No other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
CLOSING PRAYER:
Heavenly Father, thank you that your word such us but that it's searching power cleanses us that there is an exhilaration in being deconstructed inwardly by our Lord Jesus Christ because we know he does it to clear the ground in our lives. To remove the rubble in our lives. To dig up the roots of the thorns and thistles in our lives so that we may fully be his and that he may fully and ever be ours. Lord, we thank you for him. We pray that You would help us to gaze upon Him by faith. To live for Him and to rejoice in him. So hear us we pray, as we commit ourselves and our families and one another to you. In our Savior’s name. Amen.