Ezekiel 20:1-49, Hebrews 9:11-28, Psalm 107:1-43, Proverbs 27:11
Today is the 9th day of November, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is a true privilege to have a seat here. All of us together around this Global Campfire, just to be here, to gather, to come together to allow the Scriptures to speak into our lives and allow the cares of this life to diminish for a little while anyway while we take a breather and allow God to speak to us through the Scriptures and so let’s dive in. We are reading through the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the letter to the Hebrews in the new; we’re reading from the Evangelical Heritage version this week, Ezekiel chapter 20.
Commentary:
Okay, in the book of Hebrews today we have another opportunity just to see once again that Hebrews is written to the Hebrew people and it is written within the context of Jewish worship and Jewish understanding of God. And often we, especially if we’ve been believers in Jesus for a while and have spent any time in the Bible than some of the things, we the kind of grew up in and just they’ve always been an understanding or we’ve learned them over time. So, we accept them, there in the Bible, but its context, the magnitude of what’s being said is…is lost on us often. For example, I had, I mean, I grew up in the faith, and so I had always heard that the good news, the gospel of Jesus was revolutionary and was controversial. I never understood that, like I’m just reading of Jesus and I’m like, who’s got any beef with Jesus, he’s awesome. Who wouldn’t want to be like this guy? Not understanding how delicate the situation was and how controversial things were so, it was hard to see the faith as controversial or revolutionary. But in today’s reading we can see it if we’re looking for it. So, just imagine with me for a second that you have no understanding of that there is the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christian people understand as the Old Testament, we don’t know the Torah, we don’t know the prophets, we don’t really know anything, we’ve never heard these stories before. Imagine maybe that you have heard the name of Jesus before but you don’t know what the fuss is about, except for that He has a good reputation of being a wise person, a good teacher, somebody that a lot of people try to live up to, but that’s kind of the long and short of your understanding. And then, you start reading the book of Hebrews with no context, just to kind of understand some of the back story about what the fuss might be about, and you encounter our reading today. And so, I quote from the letter to the Hebrews and actually what I’m going to be quoting is a core thing, a core understanding of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, I quote “He entered once into the most holy place and obtained eternal redemption, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood. Now if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who were unclean sanctifies them so that their flesh is clean, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works so that we worship the living God”. So, if you’re imagining that you’ve never heard any of this stuff before and you don’t know the context, then we are talking about some strange things, indeed. If we’d never heard the back story at all then what is a most holy place, and why does it matter? And going into a most holy place obtained eternal redemption somehow? But it wasn’t by the blood of a goat or a calf? Is this not the point that were like wait a second, by his own blood, not the blood of gold goats and calves? Who needs the blood, where is the blood of goats and calves coming from? How does this play into the story? What is happening here? Now let’s say we have heard the good news of the gospel, we have believed and we are in a fellowship with one another as the body of Christ, and we are in deep, loving relationship with our Savior and we know that He died on the cross, He was executed mercilessly and that it was that death that made things right. He shed His blood and washed away our sins. And so, we understand that part of it. We still may not understand the magnitude, the revolutionary things, even controversial things that are being said in these small portions of Scripture that we’re looking at from the book of Hebrews. If we do bring things into context, then, as we have read the Old Testament, we saw God give the law through Moses, the Mosaic law on Mount Sinai. We saw the institution of a sacrificial system whereby animals would be sacrificed to God, to atone for the sins of the people that they had committed against God, and we can go that’s weird. Who does that? And that might be true but if we lived, you know, if we go back 3000/4000 years ago to a tribal world where this is not strange but is very normal and it would be very strange if we weren’t participating in this kind of a system than we would have a better understanding. People thought they needed to give sacrifices to appease the gods. All the nations around this area of the world were doing this. Where that became a little bit different was that God came to the Hebrew people and said I’m choosing you to be a a nation of priests to the world. We’re gonna establish a new way of doing culture and it’s going to be oriented around specific things and the main specific thing is that I, your God will be in the midst of you, I will go with you. I will lead you. I am in your midst. I am here. So, this sacrificial system became less about seeing whether or not God, the gods or whatever the local god was would give rain so the crops could grow and more about the people understanding that breaking covenant with God was sin. Sin needed to be covered and washed away so that righteousness prevailed and was a dominant part of the culture. So, if everybody was on the same page, living a righteous life then sacrifices wouldn’t have been necessary, but everybody knew their failures and so this is a constant reminder and these sacrifices went on for generation after generation after generation after generation, until the point that everybody that was alive had grown up this way. There was no knowledge of any other way. This is how you live; you are oriented around this Mosaic law and this is what you do, you have all these festivals, all these different sacrifices for all these different things and you do these rituals and this is how your culture is reminded continually of the story of who they are. It’s the origin story. It’s where they’re going and who God is and how they got here. And so, they lived with sacrifice being a part of their religious worship and it had been that way for a long, like I said, generation after generation after generation, centuries. This system eventually included a temple which was a permanent structure that replaced the portable structure known as the tabernacle. There is a temple, and in that temple was a most holy place and there was a high priest who served and was able to go into this holy place, most holy place, once a year to sacrifice for everybody. So, we can be like okay yeah, heard that, know that, kind of understand that, I’ve definitely been taught that before. What does that got to do with Jesus? How does this become revolutionary, why is this controversial? What the letter to the Hebrews is saying today to Hebrews, right so, to Jewish people who have never known it any other way than the understanding of this sacrificial system, though the writer of Hebrews is announcing that the last sacrifice in this system has occurred. That last sacrifice was God made flesh, God becoming the sacrifice to…for all people, ending this system. It is no longer necessary to atone for your sins with the sacrifice of an animal, the blood of Christ, which is God in the flesh, willingly paying the price that no one could ever pay, you could only ever try to atone for yourself with some sort of sacrifice of an antlike blood. Something had to be lost in order for your life to be preserved, that has ended. Christ has covered it all, for all time. So, you can begin to see that if you were a Jewish person who had grown up and known it no other way and you’re being told this, on the one hand you’d have to thing okay no more blood sacrifice, which rituals do we need to keep, how does this work. You have to begin to re-think how everything is done because you’ve been using all of these rituals and in obedience to this law in order to have fellowship with God and now you are being told, God has come for you to be in fellowship with you. There’s nothing else that you have to do. In fact, there’s nothing else that you could do. You can’t earn it. It’s being given to you as a gift that you don’t deserve, nor will you ever deserve, it’s a gift to you. You can now consider yourself a child of the most high God with all of the benefits that would go along with being an heir, an heir of God. That’s revolutionary, my friends, that is a revolutionary and as we can see clearly from the Scriptures, not everybody was on board and not everybody bought it. In fact, it was so controversial that people died in the process of it, not the least of which was Jesus. And again, like taking this like one step further, if we have no previous knowledge whatsoever of the idea of covenant or of covenantal language that we have seen in in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, where covenants are entered into and ratified and of course broken repeatedly, than repentance and kind of a re-inauguration or a re-commitment to a covenant, if we don’t understand that that was part of the story, then we don’t understand that what Christ had done, according to the letter to the Hebrews, is to inaugurate or to institute, and then to mediate a new covenant and this new covenant is more perfect and replaces the old covenant, the sacrificial system of the old covenant is retired once and for all time, redemption has been offered through Jesus Christ, the new covenant. So, maybe we can at least get a glimpse into the controversy of it. How many people who were devout and had only been taught one thing, one way we’re being told things have changed and how difficult that would have been for them to accept and understand why they would’ve moved against it and why it would’ve become a problem which we see in the New Testament. So, we can see the difficulty of believing it but at the same time what’s being told about this new covenant is something that they had been hoping for, something that they had thought was coming in some configuration somehow there would be a savior, that’s part of the story and so they did expect somehow but what they were expecting was military overthrow, what they expected was that they could storm Jerusalem, which is the holy city, the capital city. They could storm the capital city and defeat the enemies. The Romans pushed them out, that God would against all odds, restore their land to their own governance. It’s just that we’ve been reading the Old Testament and we know that God did that for them many times, rescued them many times and it didn’t work. This is a whole different paradigm. Everything has shifted here. So, let me quote from the letter to the Hebrews once again “Christ was offered only once to take away the sins of many, and He will appear a second time without sin, to bring salvation to those who are eagerly waiting for Him.” So, that’s like the new promise and that’s the promise that we live into as believers in Jesus. Understanding that this letter was written to Jewish people who did believe this to bolster and reinforce what they believed but to also explain to nonbelievers, who do not believe in this paradigm shift, what we’re even talking about here. Like, explaining it in a way that they can understand, giving a Hebrew context, for what has been going on here. And so, hopefully that helps us, once again, kind of glimpse into the situation so that we can understand the challenges that were being faced. And for us to once again appreciates deeply, maybe even more deeply than we’ve ever been able to grasp before, how good the good news actually is.
Prayer:
And so, Father, we invite You into that, these are the things that have come up in the Scriptures today, these are the things that we’re thinking about and meditating upon. So, Holy Spirit, come and lead our thoughts, lead us into the things that we’re considering as we consider the good news and what a change that it has made in our lives but what a change, what a shift it was in the world. Help us to appreciate this and know what kind of story we are in. We ask this in the name of Jesus, the Savior, the one who made this conversation and all of this redemption possible and we thank You Jesus, we worship You with deeper humility and appreciation as we become more and more aware of the story that You entered and shifted and the way that You changed the story in ways that we take for granted. We thank You for the gift of relationship. We thank You that once and for all You have covered our sins, that You have restored us and made us right with God so that we can…we can call him Father and not be intimidated or afraid. We are children of the most high. We thank You for this and we appreciate this anew from what we’ve learned from the Scriptures today. So, we invite Your Holy Spirit to come and plant it deep within us that we might hold onto these things for dear life. And we pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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And that’s it for today. I’m Brian, I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here, tomorrow.