The Second Chance for God’s People. Timothy W. Seid
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a diagnostic machine connected to the brain and heart, which could display on a monitor your core being, the essence of who you are? The soul doctor turns the dial and the machine displays your ambitions and motives. Your deepest passions show up in a contrasting color. Compare it to what you say it is you want in life, the way you act, the way you appear to people. Turn the dial again and you see what motivates your choices and behaviors, what makes the difference for you, how you judge what to do and what not to do. Perhaps we could detach your ethereal self from the material, the spiritual from the carnal. To what extent is your character and behavior controlled by the physical nature of your body; biology and psychology ruling over theology, philosophy, and spirituality? We are all affected by the biological makeup of our bodies due to thousands and thousands of years of human adaptation to environments. We are the products of years of psychological and mental development through stages of life that go into who we are and who we will become. God knows all of what makes us who we are—nature and nurture—and judges that for which we are morally responsible.
Our Word of Accounting Responsibility (4:13)
From other people we can hide who we are and dress up our particular natures. We cannot hide from God. God sees all and through all. God does not judge a book by its cover, let alone its pretty dust jacket; we are all an open book before God. The last phrase of verse 13 could be put this way, “to God a word (Gk. logos) must be given for us.” The logos of God discerns what we should be and who we are and it is through our logos that we explain why.
We place a great deal of importance on judges and the legal system. We may not be able to know the truth about people, but we’ve developed a justice system to determine what we’ll accept as fair and reasonable. A person comes before a judge and claims he is innocent. As best it can, the judicial system analyzes all of the relevant information. The defendant is caught in inconsistencies to his story. He is not what he appears to be. The evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that he did the deed and is the kind of person who could do such a thing.
The only judge who is 100% accurate and knows all the facts is God. But just as a leopard can’t hide his spots, who we are comes out in ways that cause us to fall behind in the spiritual journey of life. The baggage of materialism and selfishness weighs us down and we become stragglers. More important than being left behind in some future rapture is being left behind, having fallen by the wayside, wasting away in a lifeless desert, never making it to the spiritual place of rest, that culmination of a life lived well.
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There is work to do for us to achieve our rest together. But we need to be open to hear God’s word that tells us who we are. We need to be aware that we will give to God our own word of accountability.
The people around you at church are the people with whom you’ve chosen to be on this journey. Their gifts are there to help you on the way. They depend on your gifts to help them. Together we are committed to working together to achieve the goal, to experience together the entering into God’s rest. The Church’s motto should be, “No Child of God Left Behind.”
It’s All about Who You Know (4:14–16)
It’s all about who you know. We normally say that when we’re being cynical. Someone doesn’t get a job and they tell their friends, “It’s all about who you know.” At a banquet, someone sees a person they know sitting at the head table with the leaders of the organization or with the guest speaker, while they are sitting at a crummy table in the back with their view partially blocked by a pillar. To make himself feel better, he comments to his friends, “It’s all about who you know.”
I’ll bet more than one person in New Orleans has said, “It’s all about who you know,” when they didn’t get help cleaning up and rebuilding in their neighborhood and people somewhere else did. If the tables are turned, and we are the ones who have received the benefit, we might explain our good fortune to others, “I guess it’s all about who you know.”
While I was in graduate school at Brown University, I met a guy named Allen who was working on his dissertation in the philosophy department and working in computer services. He and a few others organized a Computing in the Humanities Users Group, affectionately called CHUG (although I was never a witness to any chugging; maybe they just didn’t invite me). I became interested and spent a great deal of time learning about computers, some programming, and how to format text documents properly. Allen began to get me freelance work, such as doing the typesetting for the phone listings in the campus directory, creating camera-ready copy for a few professors’ books, and working on some unique jobs that involved some programming in order to create documents. Time after time I was given opportunities because I knew Allen. There was even one time at a conference in Chicago that, because of my connections with Allen and the others, I was invited to go to dinner with the people at the conference who were working on the application of technology to biblical studies—even getting to sit next to the person who was the foremost person in the field in those days. Allen is now at the University of Illinois, a leading expert in the field of digital libraries and has been interviewed on Fox television. A few years ago I contacted him and he responded with, “Look at us now. We’ve graduated and gone on to get positions in higher education, doing significant work.” My response to him for my part was, in essence, “it’s all about who you know.”
In the situation of the people to whom the book of Hebrews is addressed, there was little about their circumstances that was what they had come to know. Every week in the synagogue they would hear about the house of God where the priests would intercede for the people through prayers and sacrifices. The High Priest would represent all of the people once a year by entering into the Holy of Holies, into the very presence of God in that inner sanctuary behind the purple curtain. For these people, little was left of the former glory. Even if Hebrews were written in the 50s or 60s, many of the people had come to view the temple as a source of religious and political corruption. After the destruction of Jerusalem in the early 70s, when Hebrews was probably written, the people no longer had a temple or a priesthood. No one to intercede for them. No one to enter the presence of God. No one to offer the sacrifices. The only blood being shed in Jerusalem was the blood of the martyrs.
For some Jews and Gentile god-fearers, all hope was not lost. They believed that a sacrifice had taken place back in the 30s that once-and-for-all achieved God’s forgiveness for the sins of the people. There was no longer a need for a High Priest to make sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple. There was no reason to lament the absence on the throne of a king who is a descendant of David. All hope was not lost, even though the Romans had squashed rebellion and wrested control from the religious and political authorities in Judea.
Some people had been loyal to the Herodians. Some supported the Sanhedrin. Others had been part of various rebellions and followed this or that messiah. A number of people had fled to the wilderness and joined the Jewish monastic community by the Dead Sea. A few had come to know a man from Galilee named Jesus; they were confident that after his stellar leadership of their group, his endurance through suffering and martyrdom, that God had raised him from the dead. They were empowered by God’s spirit because of whom it was they knew.
Life for us often seems out of control. The dominant voices in our society are those that promote materialism, advocate the use of power to get what you need, and getting ahead in life is based on who you know. We feel insignificant in the big scheme of things. Who’s going to help us? How can we get anyone to listen to us? Who knows what I’m going through enough to show me a little sympathy? When am I going to get a break? Hebrews has two words of encouragement at this point: First, we need to do our best to stay committed (4:14–15); second, we need to go to God when we need help (4:16).
Do Our Best to Stay Committed (4:14–15)
The main clause in verse 14 is “let us hold fast to our confession.” Followers of Jesus commit their allegiance to him and with it hold to a particular way of life and ways of thinking about God. The most important part of being a member of the group of Jesus followers is to maintain one’s allegiance, to “hold fast.”
The opening clause is subordinate and gives the basis for why we should be doing our best to stay committed. Verse 15 will give a second reason. First