Hebrews 13

Hebrews 13:7-25

Section 2. (Hebrews 13:7-25.)Separation from Judaism to be absolute. Now we have the final word which is to separate the Christian from Judaism absolutely. Isaac’s weaning time is at an end, and the bond-woman and her son are to be cast out of the house. He begins by speaking to them of the leaders now passed away who had spoken to them the word of God, and, considering the issue of their conversation, they were to imitate their faith. Leaders there always will be, and all right when it is their faith, that carries them ahead of others. But faith must be in the word of God, and have this to justify itself to others. Thus true guidance is always by the Word, and this is what preserves following from being a mere following of men.

Apart from this, we may go easily astray in the path of very good men. Peter led Barnabas astray after this fashion. Paul says: “Follow me,” but he adds, “as I follow Christ.” Christ is the fulness of this Word; and the effect of true ministry is always, necessarily, to exalt Him. Christ it is, also, who, as we saw at the beginning of the epistle, has brought us the full revelation of God in contrast with all former, fragmentary communications. Thus there can be nothing to come afterwards -no addition to Him. He is Israel’s Jehovah, the unchangeable God, always at one with Himself, “the same yesterday, today and forever.” Christ is thus the measure of all that is true riches for His people, the test of all true doctrine, the object of all real faith; but this being so, He is the object of Satan’s constant enmity, whose unwearied labor it, is to weave those diverse and strange doctrines which, however contradictory of one another they may be, present to the natural taste a variety of roads by which men may wander from the one true Way; and, of all these ways, undoubtedly the most successful are those which would reintroduce, now that it has been authoritatively set aside forever, what has been man’s way from the beginning. Judaism was the trial of that way. Thus indeed it might seem to receive sanction from God Himself; but the true issue was always plainly indicated in it, and the finger pointed unmistakably beyond itself to Christ, to the new covenant replacing the old and the time of reconstruction of all things at His hands. What a triumph of Satanic skill to take out of Judaism just that mere human element which had been on trial and condemned, ignoring the condemnation, and make the finger point in fact to this as the God-commended way of blessing; making the shadow to be the substance and stamping the name of Christ upon the woof of antichrist! This bastard Judaism, as we see it in Romanism and kindred systems today, is evidence of the need of such decisive separation from the Jewish camp as the apostle presses here. In his warning against diverse and strange doctrines it is plain that he has this almost wholly in his mind, as it is, indeed, in some of its forms, the one religious scheme that men naturally accept and approve. “For it is good,” he says, “that the heart be established with grace, not with meats, which have not profited those that have been occupied therewith.” The adoption of the legal system means the substitution of law for grace, the earthly for the heavenly, the carnal for the spiritual, the degradation of an assembly called out of the world into a mere heterogeneous gathering together, the “synagogue of Satan.” For the believer entangled in it, it means uncertainty for certainty, doubt for peace, bondage for liberty; instead of communion with God the hiss of the serpent. Grace is the only thing that can dismiss fear, conquer sin, and establish the sovereignty of God over the human heart. No wonder, then, that every kind of travesty should be made of it, every form of opposition exhausted against it. But the appeal which the apostle makes here to experience will be justified by every honest and exercised soul. The apostle at once proceeds to his point. “We have an altar of which they have no right to eat who serve the tabernacle.” He is opposing now the substance to the shadow, and he naturally uses the language of the tabernacle in his insistence that the reality is not in the shadow. “We have an altar,” he says, which the tabernacle cannot furnish; and an offering, of which they who serve it have no right to partake. It is the peace-offering of which he is speaking, as that was the only offering in which all Israel could have communion with the altar; but the peace-offering at once suggests all the difference for which he has been contending. Peace! was it ever made by these continual sacrifices? Communion with God, how far could it be enjoyed by those for whom God was behind an unrent veil, dwelling in thick darkness? The altar itself, the altar that sanctifieth the gift, was the figure of Christ in Person. What else could sanctify His gift but what He was who offered it? Where, then, had the men of the tabernacle put Christ? and how could they have communion with the altar, who had refused the very Altar itself? True, they had done what their types had indicated. For every sin-offering whose blood was carried into the holy places by the high priest for sin was burned without the camp; and so “Jesus, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered without the gate” of the holy city. It was one of those signs of a deeper reality which united to proclaim the true character of the Cross. Outside the gate, in the mysterious darkness, hanging upon a tree, here was proclaimed the true Sin-Offering, forsaken of God as under the curse for sin; and this was the deepest necessity for atonement. But if this were needed for the sanctification of the people, the failure of the legal system, with all its elaborate provision for that sanctification, was manifest. The law was weak through the flesh.

Nothing could improve the man in the flesh so as to make him acceptable with God. Put him under the most favorable conditions, “the mind of the flesh is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be;” nay, more, it is “enmity against God.” For this nothing but judgment can avail with Him. That judgment is what the Cross expresses; but with this, therefore, the whole legal system is of necessity set aside. The “camp” is just the people upon that legal footing, and it is given up. All the grace of God for man is found in the Cross, and so outside it; and all the glory of God is found there also. The glory of God had been outside before. After the golden calf, when the legal covenant, in its first form of pure law, had come to an end with the first tables, Moses had taken the tabernacle and pitched it outside the camp, afar of from the camp, and there the cloud of ministrant glory descended and the Lord talked with Moses. When, after far longer trial, the legal covenant, in its form of mingled law and mercy, had only manifested man to be “without strength” as well as “ungodly,” at the time of the Babylonish captivity, the glory was seen by the prophet Ezekiel again to take its departure from the midst of the people, and city and temple were given up to destruction. Now for the third time, to one who has seen it in the face of Jesus, the glory is outside, and now under reproach. “Let us go forth therefore to Him without the camp,” says the apostle, “bearing His reproach: for we have not here an abiding city, but we seek one to come.” Our faces are not even towards the Zion of the future, but towards “Jerusalem which is above, which is our mother.” We are priests of the sanctuary, but it is the heavenly one; and the brazen altar is for us done away. Offerings have ceased there, for the virtue of the true Sacrifice abides once for all. Our only altar is now the golden altar of the sanctuary, which is still Christ, and by Him we are to “offer the sacrifice of praise continually to God, that is, the fruit of the lips, confessing His name.” There is another form of this sacrifice -“to do good and to communicate forget not, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” How beautiful is this as the expression of a Christian life! How perfectly does it show the value of Christ’s one work for us, while giving to our practical life its highest character! Our work is nothing else but praise -a thank-offering; and thus the praise of our whole life is the sacrifice with which God is pleased. “Inside the veil” and “outside the camp” go necessarily together; -necessarily, for the true heavenly tabernacle has been always outside. While Judaism in the strict sense is what is here, yet every legal system comes under this in principle. Properly, there is indeed no real going back to Judaism; no one can reinstate it or go back where prophets and holy men of old once were. That is impossible. To bring it back into Christianity was, as the Lord Himself has taught us, only to make a “synagogue of Satan.” Of course, we have to remember that people are now brought up in systems of such a character, and that many of the Lord’s people are entangled in them. They are like those who in Thyatira, suffered the woman Jezebel, while they were not Jezebel’s children; and we must make the same distinction that the Lord does there. The system is, of course, no less evil for the lapse of centuries, rather the reverse. The apostle closes now with some brief exhortations mingled with prayer, and to which are added a few words of salutation. Their guides or leaders are again referred to, now the living ones; and they are exhorted to obey them as those watching for their souls. This is plainly not official, but something to which love would prompt, and which ought to be found among us if the true-heartedness of a remnant characterizes us, whatever the broken condition of things may be. “As those that shall give account” means, of course, for themselves -their own conduct as caring for the souls of others; but that involves the condition of those for whom they watch; so that the unprofitableness there might be in it for these is easily to be understood. How many of us recognize such responsibility as to the souls of others? The apostle then seeks their prayers as one having a good conscience, in all things desiring to live honestly -words of wonderful lowliness, considering the man who speaks. And then he breaks out into a prayer for them quite in the line of his thoughts in this epistle -that they may be perfected in every good work to do the will of God." It is the blood of the covenant which he speaks of in it as the foundation of everything. By this we have, brought again from the dead for us, a “Great Shepherd of the sheep;” and it is “the God of peace,” of whose counsel of peace this is the fruit, who has raised Him up. Peace is the fruit wrought out for us by Him upon the cross -a peace of conscience the moral effect of which is peace in heart and life -a peace which is a true reconciliation of man to God, a taking of Christ’s gentle yoke and learning of Him who was meek and lowly of heart, so as to find rest to the soul. For this the God of peace has been working -the glorious harmony in which He is in that relation to His creatures which alone can satisfy Him. It is a peace in which the heart and life go up in worship, and thus the natural completion of Hebrews itself is found in such a prayer. He beseeches them to suffer the word of exhortation (which the whole epistle is), which, if it smite upon Jewish prejudice, has in it such compensation of blessing. The epistle closes with the usual salutations.