Reading: Hebrews 12:18-29.
"Wherefore,
receiving a kingdom that
cannot be shaken, let us have grace, whereby we may offer service
well-pleasing to God with reverence and awe...".
There is a sense in which
that clause is the summary of the whole of the letter to the Hebrews.
Everything leads up to it and it is the embodiment of all that the
apostle has been saying; indeed, we may say that it is the summary of a
great deal more than this letter; it embodies the New Testament. But
for the time being it is with the letter to the Hebrews we are
particularly occupied, although we shall go outside of it in order to
come back again to it.
While it is never right to give
pre-eminence to one part of the Word of God above any other part, and
say it is more important, I think those of you who are familiar with
this letter will agree that it has a peculiar significance and value
for the present time; indeed, I know of no part of the Word of God
which would be more revolutionary than this part if it were rightly
apprehended and responded to. This fragment of it which we have quoted
seems to come to us with special pointedness and poignancy. You notice
that the context runs like this:
"Whose
voice then shook the earth; but
now He hath promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not
the earth only, but also the heaven. And this, Yet once more,
signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things
that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain.
Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken...".
That whole
part of the letter comes with
the force of a direct message in an hour like this. Perhaps I should be
more accurate or would state the matter better if I said that an hour
like this gives force to a word like that. The word has its force and
has its meaning, but very often you need a circumstance in which to
make that force felt.
There are two parts of history referred
to here.
(1) "Whose voice then shook the earth...". That had
its fulfilment at Mount Sinai.
(2) "Yet once more will I make to
tremble... the earth."
But there is this, "Yet once more", and
it also was to be history when not only the earth would be shaken, but
the heavens also.
This
universal shaking is said to be in order that there shall be nothing
left but what God Himself has established. This letter is a
comprehensive comparison and discrimination between the passing and the
permanent, the shakeable and the unshakeable; and it is important to
recognise that it was written to a people who for a long period had
held the position of a people whom God had taken out of the world unto
Himself, showing that even such a people may make their separation an
earth-bound thing and have to be warned that that kind of separation is
not God's kind of separation. God took them out of the world to be a
people for Himself, and then in the course of time they gravitated
earthward, so instead of being a heavenly people in the earth they
became a religious people on the earth, and there is a great deal of
difference. And such a letter as this had to be written to them to tell
them, the people who were once taken out of the world for God by God,
that they are to have their whole foundation shaken and their whole
system of things, in the shaking, removed. On the other hand, the
letter is a statement of permanent and final things, and the things
which constitute the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.
Going
for a few moments outside of this
letter, may I remind you that the New Testament is comprised of
twenty-seven books, most of which were written to combat some form of a
universality of effort to destroy that which had come in with Christ. I
want you to grasp that. The New Testament
is a comprehensive countering of a many-sided attempt to subvert the
church and to pervert the right ways of the Lord, and the chief point
of the attack was and is the meaning of Christ's cross as to His own
Lordship and as to the meaning of His Kingdom. In view of this mighty
effort it was necessary, and is necessary, to make known the ground
upon which security and triumph rest, and that is, of course, the
positive side of the writings.
Now I have opened up a field that could
engage us for a very long time. It is not my intention to take you
right through all the books of the New Testament to show how what I
have just said is so, but I might just take you through a part in order
to indicate the matter, and that, of course, very imperfectly.
You take the four Gospels, and they were
written to establish the four-fold claim of Christ to be, firstly, the
rightful King; secondly, the Lord's Sent One; thirdly, the Son of Man,
and, fourthly, the Son of God. Those four things were disputed. In each
of those connections He was rejected; for all of those claims a cross
awaited Him; and after He was risen and there was enough evidence in
the world that the disputed challenge was hardly well-founded, these
Gospels were written as a means to establish those claims. Now, of
course, in the light of what we know of Him as the risen Lord, and all
that has resulted from His resurrection and His exaltation, we are able
to read the Gospels in a new light and we are able to see how
confirming they are of His claims.
You pass to the book of the Acts, and
there you have the Kingdom introduced from heaven and the risen Lord
proceeding with His Kingdom activity, and the book for the most part is
occupied with expansion, formation and opposition. And this opposition
becomes manifold, many-sided. There is a universality of antagonism to
what has come in through the cross of the Lord Jesus, and the rest of
the writings of the New Testament deal with the many-sidedness of that
antagonism, and each letter takes up some form of that opposition to
what has come in with Christ through His cross.
We will now refer to some of Paul's
writings alone. With the letter to the Romans we have a challenge to
the cross undoubtedly, for the point of emphasis in that letter is the
cross. Everything up to chapter 6 leads to it in every direct way, and
everything from chapter 6 comes back to it. The cross is central. But
the challenge is in relation to sin
and righteousness, and the instrument of the challenge is the law, or
external obligations. And what arises there is just the issue as to the
value of the cross of the Lord Jesus. If the law prevails, then the
cross goes out. If the cross prevails, the law goes out. If the law
prevails, sin remains and righteousness is not found in God's universe.
If the cross prevails, sin is dethroned and righteousness established.
There is your challenge.
In the first letter to the Corinthians
you have the challenge to the cross along another line. It is the
challenge of the flesh in believers, the carnal nature in the people of
God. The instrument of that challenge to the cross is just nature and
the world working together; that is, believers proceeding in their
Christian life upon a purely worldly and carnal basis. The cross is
introduced there, or Christ crucified, and if the cross prevails the
carnal nature goes out and the world is destroyed. If believers go on
in carnality and in worldliness then the cross has been robbed of its
power. That is the statement of the letter in a nutshell. It is a
challenge to the cross from another angle.
You pass to Galatians, and again it is a
challenge to the cross. See how many times the cross is referred to in
that letter, and here you have not only the law but the whole system of
Judaism rising up to destroy the value of Christ's cross. It is not
only the question of sin and righteousness, righteousness which is of
the law or of faith. That is not the specific argument in Galatians as
in Romans. Here it is the whole system of Judaism, the whole range of
that historic religion in its outward expression, and it rises up to
bring believers again into bondage; and if Judaism prevails the cross,
again, is destroyed as to its meaning and value; and if the cross
triumphs Judaism goes out.
Then you pass from Galatians to
Ephesians. It is again the challenge to the cross, and this time it is
in relation to the character or nature of Christ's church. The
Ephesians, and those included in that rather general term (for the
letter was undoubtedly a circular letter for a region), had a
background of pagan mysteries, rites, initiation, secret societies, a
whole mystical system. The peril there was to make Christianity, and
what had come in with Christ, just a mystical religion. You remember at
Ephesus it was that they made the great
bonfire and burned their books on magic and such like things. All those
books contained the ritual and order and system of this mystical line
of things, with initiatory rites into secret societies, and so on. Now
you can see the place of this letter to the Ephesians.
I am always afraid of that phrase "the
church mystical", and yet it gives point to this letter when you
remember the background of the people. Yes, the church is mystical, but
not in the pagan sense. There is initiation, but not after their order.
The church is heavenly, it is spiritual in reality, the church is not a
seen, a tangible, an earthly thing. The knowledge of the things of God
is not along the line of ordinary intellectual training and ability; it
is only by initiation, "a spirit of
wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him...". Do you see the peril?
Here you see there was a
challenge to what had come in through Christ's cross, the true,
eternal, spiritual, heavenly nature of the church which is His Body,
and how that church is entered, what is the basis of membership of that
Body, and what are the features of the life of that church as in a
heavenly place with a heavenly revelation, something that has come out
of eternity and goes through to eternity, in which time is only an
incident. Oh, there is a large field for mysticism, but mysticism is
not spirituality in the New Testament sense: it is an imitation, a
false thing,
it is Satan's counterfeit of the church, and multitudes of the Lord's
people have fallen into the snare that was lying in the path of these
converted pagans, and thinking of mystical Christianity and religion as
essentially spiritual. We have to get a right understanding of the
meaning of the word "spiritual" according to the New Testament, and not
get into that morass of death which is merely mysticism.
You may think that is very much up in
the air, far above us all, but, do not make a mistake, it is a snare
for every one of us. There are those to be found very near at hand who
are always probing into things to try and get something that is not
obvious, something that is remote, and they think that if they can get
behind the thing said and find some extraordinary interpretation that
they have got the inner secret of the Word of God; and so we find a lot
of these extraordinary, fantastic interpretations of God's Word by a
probing into it and trying to draw out some fanciful interpretation. It
is called spirituality, and larger and deeper knowledge, and it leads
nowhere, only to death. There is all the difference between mystical
interpretation and divine revelation.
It is the cross which is
basic to the church, and if the cross is put aside you can get a false
and mystical kind of church, but not the church of God. So it was a challenge to
the cross.
Passing
to the letter to the Colossians,
you have another challenge to the cross, and this time it is in
relation to Christ's supremacy. You know the whole line of that letter,
the marvellous part of the first chapter in its presentation of Him.
Here again the challenge came, this time through what was called
Gnosticism, the people who claimed to know, to have extra knowledge.
Such believed that that system of thought which saw the universe of the
unseen as arranged and ordered in a great hierarchy of angelic beings,
all in different ranks and orders, from the supreme archangel down in
ever-widening circles and ranks of archangels and angels, coming down
to the more inferior spirits. This was what lay behind the visible
universe and governed it, and in the interpretation Jesus was just the
supreme Archangel in the spiritual system. He
was that and nothing more. They allowed Him the supreme place there,
but that was as far as they could go.
Now
you see the point of this letter.
The apostle tears that theory to fragments, and says that in Him,
through Him, unto Him were all things created, things in heaven, things
in earth, things under the earth; angels and principalities were
created by Him, and He is above all, all are in Him, all things held
together in Him. He is appointed by God to have the pre-eminence. And
that, all hung upon His cross. That is why in such a letter as the
letter to the Colossians you have such emphatic passages as that in
chapter 2 verse 12 about the circumcision of Christ, in which the whole
body of the flesh is put away in baptism. If you do not have the
application of the cross to your fleshly mind you become fantastic, and
your fantasticism means that Christ is given a less place than God has
given to Him. You may exalt Him, but to a lower place than His rightful
place. There must be the circumcising of the mind and of the heart of
man; he must know what it is to be buried with Christ in baptism. Do
you see what hangs upon the cross? So much!
You
pass to Philippians, and again the
challenge comes in in relation to the ultimate object, the prize of the
upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. That third chapter of the letter
to the Philippians is one upon which hangs God's highest purpose for
the saints.
"If
by any means I may attain unto the
out-resurrection...", and that connected with the prize. And what is
the prize of the upward calling? It is the throne. Saints are called to
be joined with Him in His throne. "To him that overcometh will I grant
to sit with me in my throne, as I have overcome and am sat down with my
Father in his throne." Paul's aspiration is to that, the prize of the
upward calling of God in Christ, and as a true aspirant he says, "this
one thing I do... I press on... if by any means...".
There
is an assault upon the cross,
because that is the supreme issue for the saints. How does the assault
come? Along the pathway to the throne. It is that simple, commonplace
language: "I beseech Euodia, and I beseech Syntyche, that they be of
one mind in the Lord." Do you see the relationship? If the enemy can
get in between saints and get them at variance in mind and heart, get
them divided, get the love of the Lord in them for one another damaged
and interrupted, he has struck a blow at the prize, he has arrested
their course on the way to the throne. Jesus, equal with God, emptied
Himself, being found in fashion as a man, taking the form of a
bondservant, humbling Himself, and becoming obedient unto death, yea,
the death of the cross; wherefore God highly exalted Him. He has
emptied Himself to come down, to be obedient unto death, in order that
He should be there, not alone but having His church with Him, He loved
the church and gave Himself for her, that He might present the church
to Himself not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, a glorious
church.
Now
here is the challenge. Called into
union with Him in His exaltation. What will defeat it? How can it be
arrested, prevented, hindered? Just in this way: Euodia and Syntyche -
and all whom they represent - at variance with one another. You will
never get to the throne that way. What is the remedy? It is the remedy
of the cross. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,
who... emptied himself...". Why will Euodia and Syntyche be at
variance? Because of some pride which keeps them back from saying, I am
sorry! I was in the wrong! They are standing upon their dignity. "He
emptied Himself, He took the form of a bondslave, He became obedient
unto death, yea, the death of the cross" - shame, ignominy,
humiliation, degradation. Sometimes in order to get to the throne it is
necessary for us to degrade ourselves (if you will use that word, for
pride often uses that word and says it will be a degradation). He did! There
is the challenge to the cross along the line of Christians at variance,
an attack upon the issue of the cross, the Throne.
We
close with a word about Thessalonians,
for here is the challenge of the cross in
relation to its ultimate crisis, the Lord's coming, the church's hope
and dynamic.
We have reached Hebrews
12:28, a Kingdom which cannot be shaken. Do you see what the Kingdom
that cannot be shaken is? It is all those things that we have been
speaking about. Hebrews summarises all Paul's letters:
- Romans. The sin question dealt with
and a righteousness established. That runs right through the letter to
the Hebrews; the priesthood of the Lord Jesus, His sacrifice.
-
Corinthians. A life in the Spirit, not in the flesh.
- Galatians. An emancipation from an
earthly system of religion into Christ. That is Galatians, and that is
Hebrews.
- Ephesians. Heavenly union with the
risen and ascended Lord. That is Hebrews again: "Holy brethren", says
the apostle to the Hebrews, "partners in a heavenly calling".
- Philippians. "The prize",
corresponding to: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the
son of man that thou puttest him in charge?"
- Colossians. The absolute sovereign
headship of the Lord Jesus. Well, read again the first chapter of the
letter to the Hebrews: "Whom He appointed heir of all things, through
whom he made the ages". That is a summary of Colossians.
- Thessalonians. The heavenly hope.
"Receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken". That sums it all up.
Now, of course, we ought to go back and
have a look at these components of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.
We are not going to do that at the moment. This is only an introductory
word, but it is a call which has been reinforced during these days with
tremendous pointedness. Are we quite sure that we are receiving now the
Kingdom which cannot be shaken? Note the language, note the tense.
"Wherefore receiving (present active) a kingdom which cannot be
shaken". It does not say the Kingdom is going to come; the Kingdom has
been introduced, and the Kingdom is going to be consummated: it is
progressive and it is spiritual. The question, put quite bluntly, is
this: Are we quite sure that we are founded and grounded in the
spiritual and the heavenly realities of Christ and His cross, or are we
simply linked up with some system of truth, doctrine, practice? Are we
dependent upon the externalities of our faith, or have we the risen,
living Lord resident in our hearts,
and is He answering to all the need of our spiritual life, as
represented by that system which has been put aside? Has the question
of sin been for ever settled for us by His one offering? Is the
question of sanctification settled for us? Is the question of glory
settled for us? Is the question of going through triumphantly settled
for us?
How
practical the Kingdom is, as seen in
the light of the Philippian letter! How practical it is as seen in the
light of the Ephesian letter! You ask me what the Kingdom is. I say it
is the message of all those letters. Are we receiving in a spiritual
and living way what is there? You begin with Matthew: Jesus is King.
Receiving the Kingdom is first of all to have received Him as King, as
Lord, and so on.
May
the Lord Himself bring His own appeal to our hearts.