River Road Church Baptist

November 9, 2003

Dr. Cecil E. Sherman

“It’s All About Jesus”

Hebrews 9:23-28

…of another time and place. But think of the New Testament this way. Paul reasoned with us and Hebrews is a third way to approach the subject and probably is the way that is least helpful to moderns; although there are some commentators who tried to make it otherwise. It’s a third way to put forward the idea that Jesus is a clearer picture of God and the best way to peace with God. So all of them are about Jesus and Hebrews in a peculiar way is on subject.

Our text begins by speaking of sketches of heavenly things. There was, in the author of Hebrews mind, an idea that in heaven there is a perfect model. There is the real thing. All things on earth that are meant to be like what’s in heaven are imperfect and less than. So, our worship today is imperfect and it is in anticipation of a worship that we will do in heaven when we see God face to face. Now this idea is suggested from time to time by people who never put forward this rather platonic idea. That is, that there is a perfect and all things on earth are less than and some day we will be in contact with the perfect. Do we deal in symbols around church? A great deal of what we do is symbolic. A long time ago some of you heard people say, “Do you want Jesus to come into your heart?” This is symbol. It’s talking about the interior life that being a Christian encompasses. And whatever we do on the outside is with the intent that something happens on the inside.

When I used to talk to people about being baptized I would seek some kind of a symbol. Oft times my audience was partly children and I would hold up my left hand and say, “What does this ring mean?” Interestingly, the girls always knew, sometimes the boys did. I said, and they get it eventually, “This means that you’re married. Well, if I lost this ring would I stop being married to Mrs. Sherman?” By the way, that was not a simple a question to them as it is to you. Some of you thought, well, maybe you would be. I said, no, this is a symbol of something that’s inside. A promise I have made to my wife. Now, this tells you about something that you can’t see. Baptism is that way. Do we want everybody to be sold out to Jesus when they’re baptized? Yes. But is it so? How would you know? If you have a thermometer that can take that temperature I want it. We’re talking about something on the outside that suggests something on the inside. Church membership…sometimes it is an accurate indication of the interior of a person. And other times it doesn’t mean very much at all. So, we are in the symbolic business all the time. Jesus told about two men who went up to the temple to pray and one boasted to God and the other was repentant and humble and Jesus said, “Which one of these people went from the temple reconciled to God?” He’s talking about outward things as clues to an inner state. This goes on all the time and the symbols change, but the idea remains constant.

Now, understanding that was true then and now, then we get into Jesus has elevated, raised to a higher level, our understandings of words that were familiar in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, there evolved as worship a system whereby a priest, one is elevated to be the high priest for a year, and this priest takes a perfect lamb, sacrifices it, goes into the holy of holies and offers this perfect sacrifice in covering of the sins of a people for a year. Then next year we do it again and next year we do it again and next and so on. The writer of Hebrews says, “Jesus is a perfect priest.” He goes at great length to make that argument. But then he argues also that Jesus is a perfect sacrifice. The cross, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world…he’s still working out of those old forms.

Now, if Jesus is a perfect priest and a perfect sacrifice, then this is done in a heavenly realm and it’s done once for all and it doesn’t need to be done anymore. Interestingly, this may have been written soon after Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. That system has not been reconstituted. People who are not Christians have come to see that the symbolism was crude, need not be repeated, so I don’t know anymore if you can go and find a sacrificial system. There may be such; I’m unaware of them. And there is finality to this and Jesus has dealt with this problem permanently and forever. Now this suggests two things—one of them quite attractive and one of them not so attractive to moderns. The attractive side is the most important thing in religion is your read on Jesus. The New Testament is all about Jesus. Hebrews is all about Jesus, though it’s in a language that’s difficult for us to decipher. And all the other teachings are on a second shelf, another rank below and what theologians call Christology, the teaching of the Bible about Jesus is the big idea. All the rest feed from it. That’s good; church is emphasized too much and asked people to believe more than they needed to believe to fit. There are lots of places where you can get put out of the church for not saying the right things about this or that, or not doing the right things. A lot of that stuff is legalistic and unnecessary and asking people to believe more than the scripture requires.

There’s another side to it that’s not so attractive to moderns. It suggests that Jesus is the final word on salvation and that while other religions may be in process to this understanding, they are incomplete, imperfect, and they await correction; that doesn’t go down very well with moderns, some don’t buy it. It’s pretty firmly in Hebrews. It’s the mainspring of missions. A lot of people think it’s narrow or arrogant. There are pieces of the Christian religion that are sticky. It’s not nearly as smooth; it’s not as sugarcoated as we sometimes try to suggest that it is. So, Jesus represents us before God, described almost as a lawyer. He becomes our high priest, and folks, everybody needs some help getting to God. The word priest is fallen into disrepute. Protestants have tried to resurrect it and say everybody is a priest. There’s a sense in which that’s so and there’s a sense in which nobody is a priest like Jesus. He ushers us into the presence of God and almost argues our case before God.

In this age of do- it- yourself religion, this suggests a dependency we would do well to recognize. Everybody needs a priest and before God, I’m not nearly as confident as I am before you. I’ll take all the help I can get. I’ll need it. This is the nature of my humanity and in your company it doesn’t rise up to haunt me, but it’s not your company I’m bothered about. It’s when God looks through me and knows me too well. I’ll need help and this is when Jesus is described as there and loaning me of his goodness and I borrow it, and it is grace and standing in his shadow or behind him. The text says that I will be acceptable to God when I borrow my goodness from him. There is humility in this. And it’s a description of a time and place that lingers in the mind and it may be a picture that will help you think about a future date that provides some mercy and some encouragement. It’s not a fearful thing. The last text says that Jesus will come again, not to deal with sin, but to find those who are his and save them. You see, it’s all about Jesus. I have not spoken this as well as I’d like. That’s because I’m not as at home in Hebrews as I’d like to be. I can work with Paul and his reasoning better than I can work from Hebrews, but it’s an idea and a picture in the mind. Sometimes when you read the text of hymns you’ll see they’re drawing on it. It’s an idea that offers me some comfort. There’s beauty in this, there’s gentleness in it, there’s hope. We need those.

CES; lmk, mt