A Study of the Book of Hebrews
Jesus
is Better
Sermon # 12
“An Anchor For the Soul”
Hebrews 6:9-20
“A little over a month before
he died, the famous atheist Jean-Paul Sartre (SAHR truh) declared that he so strongly
resisted feelings of despair that he would say to himself, “I know I shall die in hope.” Then in
profound sadness, he would add, “But hope
needs a foundation.” [Our Daily Bread, April 17, 1995]
The whole letter to the Hebrews offers
encouragement to believers on the Christian journey, knowing that difficulties await at
every bend. If you ever find yourself struggling to keep pressing on as a believer or
assaulted by doubts or tempted to throw in the towel and give up as a follower of Christ.
Or if you just have become sluggish in responding to the trials that come in life, then
this section of the letter to the Hebrews is for you! The same help and hope offered to
original readers is yours as well. All of us, at some time or another, will find ourselves
needing a stabilizing anchor for our souls.
“I heard of a picture of an
old burned-out mountain shack. All that remained was the chimney...the charred debris of
what had been that family’s sole possession. In front of this destroyed home stood an
old grandfather
-looking man dressed only in his
under-clothes with a small boy clutching a pair of patched overalls. It was evident that
the child was crying. Beneath the picture were the words which the artist felt the old man
was speaking to the boy. They were simple words, yet they presented a profound theology
and philosophy of life. Those words were Hush
child, God ain’t dead!
That vivid picture of that
burned-out mountain shack, that old man, the weeping child, and those words God ain’t dead. Instead of it being a
reminder of the despair of life, it has come to be a reminder of hope! We all need
reminders that there is hope in this world. In the midst of all of life’s troubles
and failures, we need mental pictures to remind us that all is not lost as long as God is
alive and in control of His world.” [James DeLoach, associate pastor of the Second
Baptist Church of Houston, quoted in When God Was Taken Captive, W. Aldrich,
Multnomah, 1989, p. 24.]
After the previous words of warning in
chapter six now come words of encourage-ment. He begins in verse nine by saying,
“But, beloved, we are confident of better things concerning you, yes, things that accompany salvation, though we speak in this manner. (10) For God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name, in that you have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (11) And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, (12) that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises."
He encouraged them to not give up, to move on
to maturity and to not become sluggish in their faith. He now reminds them of the value of
faithfulness by holding out the example of Abraham in both patience and in service (v.
15). He reminds them that God gives his promise of a blessing and had sworn an oath to
support his word. A promise made by a God who cannot lie was designed to give comfort and
encouragement to these struggling believers.
One of the greatest dangers facing
Christians is to lose sight of the basis of our hope. When we become so burdened with the
stormy blasts of life that we forget our hope, then we face the slippery slope of
sluggish-ness, doubt, and even worse, the possibility of hardening our hearts against the
gospel. So, to remedy this danger, our writer reminds us of the promise of God. These
morning I want to share with you the Three-Fold
Encouragement Available To Christians.
First, We Have The Profound Comfort of the Person
of God. (vv. 13-16)
Abraham is a favorite character of this
writer as well as other New Testament authors. Here the writer of Hebrews brings to mind
the scene of how the Lord encouraged Abraham to continue on in faith. You will recall that
Abraham was called out of paganism to follow after the Lord. And he did just that,
believing the promise of the Lord that He would bless him and make of him a great nation
and that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3). When he
struggled with God’s fulfillment of the promise, the Lord gave him assurance and
Abraham “believed
in the Lord” and that faith was accounted to him as righteousness (Gen.
15:6).
It
was a long time before Isaac, the son of promise, was born to Abraham. I am sure that the
gap between the promise and its fulfillment was in the writer’s mind as he wrote
exhorting the Christian’s to remember the example of Abraham. If things appear slow
with God, it does not mean that He has forgotten or that He will not perform.
` And then God told him to do the
hardest thing imaginable, to offer his son as a sacrifice upon Mount Moriah. Isaac was the
immediate fulfillment of the promise, yet Abraham believed that God could raise him from
the dead to continue to fulfill His promise to him (Gen. 22). It was after this
testing of his faith that the Lord confirmed through an oath that he would fulfill the
promise given to him recorded in Hebrews 6:13, “For when God made a promise to Abraham, because He
could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, (14) saying,
“Surely blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I
will multiply you.” (15) And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained
the promise.”
The writer of Hebrews is reminding these
struggling Christians that Abraham, who was living with much less light of
We Have The Profound Comfort Of the Person of
God and …
Second, We Have The Profound Comfort Of The
Promise of God. (vv.
16-18)
Verse sixteen says, “For men indeed swear by
the greater, and an oath for confirmation is for
them an end of all dispute. (17) Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the
heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel,
confirmed it by an oath, (18) that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God
to lie, we might have strong consolation, who
have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us.”
Why did God make an oath to Abraham? It was certainly not due to any
unreliability on God’s part. Rather the oath was due to the sinfulness of man. Philip
Hughes rightly comments, “That God should bind himself by an oath is a
reflection not on the divine credibility but on the perversion of the human situation”
[Hebrews, 229]. Abraham already had God’s promise;
that in itself should have been good enough. But we see that Abraham did not ask God to
swear to him; God chose to do it as an encouragement to Abraham.
The strength of an oath is found in the character of the one offering it as well as the value placed upon the oath. If a habitual criminal makes an oath then you probably will discount his reliability. But if he makes an oath on a Bible or swears by something he holds valuable, then you might have more cause to believe him. For he would be saying, if I were lying, then the Bible upon which I swear is a lie. Or if I am lying then my deceased mother upon whom I swear is a liar. “The degree that you value and esteem the basis of your oath, to that degree your word can be trusted” [John Piper, www.soundofgrace.com/piper96/11-10-96.htm].
By what would God swear? One swears by
something greater, something of more value than himself in order to give credibility to
his oath. “When a
witness takes an oath in court, he is confronted with the words, ‘so help me God.’ We call on the
greater to witness for the lesser. None is greater than God, so he swore by himself.”
[Warren Wiersbe. “Be
Confident” (Wheaton, ILL: Victor Books, 1982) p. 68] God could go no higher than himself. Nothing
can even come remotely close to exceeding the value and precious-ness of his own word.
In verse eighteen God’s purpose is given
as an encouragement “to
lay hold (or take hold) of the hope set before” you! “More abundantly” is a superlative
adverb which means “even more” - that is used to make
the point more emphatic. Yes, the Lord worked on Abraham’s behalf and gave him great
encouragement to put his hope in the divine promise and continue pressing on.
But
even more so,
God has resolved to give you greater encouragement so that you might give up.
But the promise made is only as valuable as
the one who makes it. So we are meant to be encouraged! For it is God who makes the
promise and “it is
impossible for God to lie.” Here is the bottom line: you can have complete
confidence in the sufficiency of Christ and the gospel, for the God who has promised to
save you and to bring you home to heaven cannot lie.
We Have The Profound Comfort Of The Promise of God and…
Third, We Have The Profound Comfort Of The Presence
of God. (vv. 19-20)
“This
hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, (20) where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever
according to the order of Melchizedek.”
He gives three descriptions of this anchor
of hope.
First, it is “sure.”
The word implies that it is outwardly safe. There is nothing that can topple the
believer’s hope. Paul had this same idea in mind when he penned the words found in Romans
8:38-39. “For I am
persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, (39) nor
height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love
of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It
is as if the Apostle Paul picked out every imaginable external opponent and declared that
none of them could succeed to separate us from the intensity and security of Christ’s
love. We are safe with the anchor of hope.
We also find the anchor of the soul is “steadfast,” this points to the inward
stability of this anchor of hope, that it is firm within itself. In other words, there is
no weakness in hope as the anchor of the soul. We do not have to concern ourselves with
hope going bankrupt or encountering a scandal of some sort. It is thoroughly established
and firm.
The third description of
hope as the soul’s anchor demonstrates the place where the anchor rests. An anchor
grabs onto the floor of the ocean and holds the vessel securely. But the shifting sands of
this world offer nothing to secure us for eternity. So our anchor does not go down to the
ocean below, but upward into the glories of heaven. For our anchor of hope is “one which enters the
veil.” The scene is that of the high priest who could only enter the Holy
of Holies once a year and that with the sacrifice for the sins of Israel. He trembled as
he entered knowing that he was in the presence of the Lord and that he dare not fail to
carry out his duties. But once the duty was done, he immediate turned and walked out
through the veil. But that is not the case with our anchor of hope! It is firmly anchored
in heaven, on one end, and firmly attached to the believer’s soul on the other. An
anchor does not do any good if it is solidly hooked onto the ocean floor but not tied to
the boat! Our “anchor
of the soul” is fixed securely in our lives through the work of Christ.
And the pull of the other end is “within the veil” eternal secure in the presence of
the Lord.
Jesus is there as the one who went before
us as our “forerunner”
(v.20). The term as it is used here is one that describes the scouts who went ahead of the
troops. Just as the forerunner was one who was ahead of the troops, going before them,
Christ, our prodromos,
has gone on ahead. And here is what he wants you to under-stand: we
will be where Christ is, within the veil; for He has gone before us to prepare a place
that we might be with Him forever. In fact he left us a message recorded in
(John 14:2-3), “In My
Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I
would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. (3) And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be
also.”
Conclusion
“The great scientist Michael Faraday
was also a great Christian. When he lay dying, some journalist questioned him as to his
speculations about a life after death. “Speculations!”
he said, “I know nothing of speculations. I’m
resting on the certainties. I know that my redeemer liveth and because he lives, I shall
also.” [Paul Van Tan. Encyclopedia
of 7,700 Illustrations. (Rockville, Maryland: Assurance Pub, 1979) # 1039]
“The director of a medical
clinic told of a terminally ill young man who came in for his usual treatment. A new
doctor who was on duty said to him casually and cruelly, “You know, don’t you,
that you won’t live out the year?”
As the young man left, he stopped by the
director’s desk and wept. “That man took away my hope,” he blurted out.
“I guess he did,” replied the director. “Maybe it’s time to find a new
one.”
Writing about this situation Lewis Smedes wrote, “Is there a hope when hope is taken away? Is there hope when the situation is hopeless? That question leads us to Christian hope, for in the Bible, hope is no longer a passion for the possible. It becomes a passion for the promise.” [Our Daily Bread, December 19, 1996]