Heb No.9 God's Word Ch4

Now would you like to turn please to Hebrews, and though I shall be bringing the Bible study from the AV, let me just for you the rendering in the New International Version of the Bible. We're reading the 12th and 13th verses. For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword.

It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden.

Everything is before the eyes of Him to whom we must give. One of the most significant doctrines in the Word of God is that which, that this Bible is inspired. The doctrine of the plenary, the full inspiration of Scripture.

It is to that belief that the signature shall be laid. We acknowledge the Word of God as being authoritative in its entirety. And there are messages that we could put before those who would question our view that this is indeed a reasonable view.

The Word of God is God's message down the center. That's the reason we believe that God speaks through the book. The God speech, Word of God.

We believe that holy men wrote as they received centuries ago. And that's the reason why we've got authored by some 30 plus over a long period of time. The Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Now, when we come to these verses of Hebrews 4, we encounter one of the grandest statements of the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. And particularly the 12th verse. I remember as a young Christian trying to memorize key passages of Scripture.

And this was one of the first that I locked away in my mind. The Word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. Piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow.

And is the discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. And when we come to this particular verse of Scripture, we do so, I remind you my friend, in the context of an illustration which the writer drew from an experience of the Hebrews centuries before he wrote this epistle. He had been talking, you remember, of those thousands of Hebrews who left the land of Egypt and pushed their way to the borders of the promised land and yet never entered Canaan.

We have the tragic sight of seeing their graves, mounds of clay, scattered around the Sinai peninsula. A very sorrowful picture is drawn in the verses that precede this 12th and 13th verse of Hebrews 4. You remember I spent two weeks dealing with this and I also smuggled in a gospel address on the subject just to ensure that the whole picture was clear. A tragic situation, if ever you espied one.

Men and women who died in the wilderness, never entered into the rest of God, never inherited the blessings which had been promised to them on condition of their obedience. Now you might ask yourself the question, as I often did as a youngster studying this letter to the Hebrews, what has the 12th verse got to do with the preceding verses? Because verses 12 and 13, they seem out on a tangent, out on a limb. They don't seem to be immediately on a casual reading to have anything to do at all with what went before.

But if you make that deduction, you do because you're reading with cursory. A little bit of close investigation of the previous verses gives you this impression. The Hebrews so tragically died in the wilderness because they refused to accept the message that Moses preached.

Let me repeat that, it's an important statement. The Hebrews died tragically in Sinai because they spurned the message that Moses proclaimed. I told you last week, I've argued it previously from this pulpit.

There is only one gospel in the Old and New Testament. A fuller revelation of it, to be sure, exists in the latter part of the Bible. But in the foremost part, in the first part of the Word of God, the gospel is predicted.

The gospel is promised. It's there in embryo. It comes to full birth in the New Testament.

Now the essence of the gospel message was preached by Moses to the Hebrews. And they rejected it. That's what the second verse says of this chapter.

For unto us was the gospel preached as well as unto them. But the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it. Now when you come to the twelfth verse of this chapter, what the author is doing, is showing us the importance that God attaches to his most holy word.

Reject that word and you'll reject it at your peril. You know, in some senses, I'm caught in a dilemma when an opportunity for personal evangelism presents itself. I'll tell you why.

It's because if I proclaim the gospel of Christ clearly, in a comprehensible fashion, and the person does not respond to what I am saying, then their reaction is an offense to the holy God. Their reaction is an offense to the holy God. God's word is an important word.

It's directed to man, not for his consideration, but for his acceptance. The Hebrews rejected what God's spokesman Moses had to say in the wilderness. They were against saying and a disobedient people.

Constantly, though God manifested his presence in their midst, they rejected what he had to say. And ultimately, God rejected them. The word of salvation became the word of condemnation.

And as it was yesteryear, so it is today. The proclamation of God's word is a most important thing, and the man and woman who fears and rejects offends almighty God. Well, I say that in passing, but I do so for the simple reason that the twelfth and thirteenth verses do not constitute a tangent from what has preceded.

Rather, gathered up by the writer, is the concept of the importance of God's word. And because those ancient Hebrews rejected it, they never entered into the rest of God. And that very word that could have saved damned them.

The connection between these two verses, and I'm not sticking very close to my notes just at this moment, I'll come back in a moment or so. The connection between verses twelve and thirteen actually, again, is obvious if you dig between the, not dig between the lines, but dig within the actual illustrations that I use. We've got the idea of God's word plunging into the very headquarters of man's personality in the twelfth verse.

There's nothing that it cannot touch. There's nothing that it does not cut. And in the thirteenth verse, you've got the picture of man being exposed before God.

So if in the twelfth verse the idea is of the word of God penetrating, in the thirteenth verse it's the God of the word perceiving. Have you got that? It's important, but it's simple to grasp. In the twelfth verse, there's the word of God penetrating, cutting right to the inner private parts of a man's thinking of his personality.

And in the thirteenth verse, here is the God of the word having everything in view in respect of any individual human being. As God then judged the Old Testament Hebrews by his word, as everything was exposed as far as their conduct was concerned, centuries ago. So the same situation applies today.

And of course it applied at the time of the writer to this Hebrew community who first received this letter. You see, the writer is somewhat anxious. Why? Well, he's not too sure that these Hebrews are going on with the Lord.

He's not sure that they're giving evidence of a genuine faith. And he's reminding them, having had the gospel preached, they are in a very responsible situation. They're responsible before God for the way that they've reacted to that word.

And he wants them to realize that they too are exposed before the Lord and one day will be judged by him for the way that they reacted to his divinely inspired message. Well then, with those things in mind, let's come to work through these twelfth and thirteenth verses. The twelfth under the general title of the word of God.

For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. God's word is quick. It's powerful.

Or as the NIV puts it, it's living. It's active. And you would expect that, wouldn't you? Because the word is directly linked by the writer to God.

It's not any ordinary word. It's God's word. God is a living God.

And therefore the message that he proclaims is an alive message, relevant to everyone. When God speaks, he anticipates securing his objective. So in Genesis, the opening chapter, you'll get the six-fold stage of creation presented in terms of, and God said, and it was done.

God's word, powerful. God's word, creative. God's word, pulsating with energy, creating power, bringing life out of absolutely nothing.

The word of God is quick and powerful. I believe this when the gospel is preached. His word will not return until him void.

You remember that's what Isaiah said. I believe that we should have, as a result of our study this evening, a greater concept, not only of God's word, but of God's word as it is proclaimed through gospel preaching. For that has the authority of the Lord behind it.

It's a quick, and it's a powerful word. One that creates, recreates. One that gives energy.

But the writer doesn't just start by impressing upon us the liveliness of God's word and its efficiency. He draws for us this picture of the sword. The word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword.

It's like a sword very, very much. But any illustration pales into insignificance because if it's a sword, it's sharper than any sword that you can possibly imagine. Now, it's because the reference is made to the word of God as a sharp sword that I could not go along with some commentators who think the writer of the epistle in referring to the word of God is referring directly to Jesus.

You never find reference in the word of God to Jesus as a sword. Rather, you find in Revelation that Jesus wields the sword. And you discover in Ephesians that the word of God is the sword of the Spirit.

Well, this book, this word, this gospel, it's razor sharp. And it's not just razor sharp on one edge. It's razor sharp on two edges.

Which made the older commentators, going back to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th century, they were commenting on the Bible in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th century. And you can read what they have to say if you've got a lot of time. They were suggesting that the two-edged aspect of the word of God was the Old Testament and the New Testament.

But I think modern commentators are perhaps a little more shrewd in the way that they suggest that the two edges of the word of God describe the two-fold reaction that there is to God's word. That's the reason why we read earlier from John's gospel and chapter 12. Because there our Savior is preaching.

And he's saying something about the word that he has proclaimed. John 12, 48, What does that mean? That God's word can have a two-fold effect. It either saves or it condemns.

It's never neutral in its consequence. It either saves a person or it condemns him. So when the word is wielded, it's wielded like a sword with two edges.

With some it will be the cut that will save. With others it's the cut that condemns. The Apostle Paul doesn't maintain the same metaphor but he is teaching the same concept when writing to the Corinthians the second letter and the fifth chapter.

And the 15th verse he tells us about the word of God and the way that it either is a word to salvation or a word to damnation. That's a very interesting comment that the Apostle there has to make. This twin reaction to the gospel message.

It becomes a word of salvation. If they accept it, it becomes a word of damnation. It is rejected.

So then it's a very powerful illustration we've got here. The word of God is quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword. And do you not see in the early preaching of the church the wielding of that sword? Here's Peter on the day of Pentecost and he preaches about Jesus being God's Son and the fight that the Jews have put him to death.

And we read that some in the audience, some in the congregation were cut to the heart. Cut to the heart. It's the language of the sword.

It's the language of someone whose being has been penetrated. You'll get it on further occasions in the Acts as I indicate in my notes. No need to turn to them right now.

But the idea again is of a Christian soldier who unseathes his sword and he penetrates the hearts of men as he proclaims the word. Some, they respond positively and I repeat it becomes the word of salvation. Some respond negatively and the word therefore condemns them.

But the sword remains powerful. Always having an effect despite the fact that the two effects seem to be at the opposite extremes. So the word of God is quick.

It's powerful. It's sharper than any two-edged sword. It pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow.

Some of the early church fathers, they had a whale of a time telling us what the soul was and what the spirit stands for, what the joints stand for, what the marrow stands for. Seems as though they were butchers in the way that they were able to do a sort of dissecting of human anatomy. But it seems to me, again I think I indicate in the notes I publish, that John Calvin, as he so often does, saw the truth when he says this metaphor is indicating there's nothing so hard or firm in a man, nothing so deeply hidden, that the word of God cannot penetrate through to it.

The word of God is powerful. Haven't you seen that sometimes? Maybe you experience it in your own testimony. I knew a man who lived in Roslin, a town which is quite conveniently situated next to my home city.

And he was a miner. I remember my father making reference to him, a very hardened man, a man who would not have bought to the thought of murdering someone. And the day came when that man was brought under the sound of the gospel.

And no one would have believed that he, of all the people in his area, Roarmarch was the suburb that he lived in, that area of Roslin, that he would have responded, that he did. The word of God got right through. You find illustration of this in Bristol, in the preaching of the Wesleys and Whitfield.

These hardened miners, when they came up from, was it called Kingswood Colliery? And they listened to Whitfield, this man with an angelic countenance, proclaim the word of God. And it got through. You wouldn't have believed it, but it did.

The thing that's kept me going sometimes in the late hours of the night, talking to some of those punks, was the thought that it couldn't have been a harder heart that Whitfield was presented with when he preached in Bristol. And the word got through. And one of the things that I try to convince our own youngsters of, is that the word in itself, despite any secondary help that one may have in gospel presentation, the word itself can do its own job.

It's the most important thing. I'm not against music. You can have all the music in the world.

You can have all the presentation of pictorial displays. I'm not against that. But the prime thing is the word of God, enlivened by the spirit of God.

It can get through when nothing else can get through. And the guitarists, Whitfield and Wesley, and other men who've had no help at all musically, no big choirs like the London Emanuel Choir, just to redress the balance. Those of you who think I'm knocking modern music, I'm not.

I'm not knocking anything at all. I'm just making the point that the word of God, unaccompanied by anything else, when the power of the spirit is in evidence, can get through to a man. And there's nothing else that can do just that, right through.

So it becomes a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart, the headquarters of the personality. That word can penetrate. I think in one sense, without being at all, in any sense, too stern or even verging on the sadistic, there's no more wonderful sight than to see a man rising in conviction.

Because that means the word is having its effect. One of the things that's missing today, it seems to me, when we're preaching, and that would indicate, therefore, my lack of spirituality. I confess that publicly before this congregation.

I can see no other reason for the lack of fruit in some areas in our evangelism here. But one of the things that's missing is the conviction. When the word of God is preached, the word is able to do its work.

I wonder if the lack is not within my own spirit. Your own spirit. That we're not able to handle that word well enough.

Or maybe we're not holy enough for the Spirit of God to act upon the word. And bring men and women to that state of abject despondency. That they rise in conviction and cry out, What must we do? One of the hardest things, I challenge anyone, you're welcome over there this evening.

One of the hardest things is to get some of these radical punks to acknowledge that there's such a thing as sin. When you talk about forbidden fruit, they laugh. When they talk, you talk about morality, they laugh.

When you talk about sexual ethics, they don't even know what the term indicates. They've got no yardstick. They've got no judgment.

They can't relate it back to a mother and father who lived a moral life. Very often their parents didn't. And in any case, we put the television in front of them.

We're responsible as a nation at any rate for what is projected on the screen and on the cinema screen. The lack of holiness, it's not there. Or rather the concept of holiness is not there.

And it's like preaching in a vacuum. They've got no yardstick. And nothing seems to touch them at all.

And maybe that's one of the reasons why in our desperation we try every conceivable method to get their attention. But I'm assured that the best method is to bathe our preaching with prayer and to love these young people as Jesus loved folks when he was on this earth. Well, it's the word of God that penetrates the inner citadel.

It's this word of God that is so powerful that it can pry into the very intimate details of a man's life and make him feel an absolute worm shrinking from the presence of God. And you see, you get the flip side of this in the 13th verse. The word of God, that's emphasized in the 12th.

The God of the word is emphasized in the 13th. There's such a connection that in one sense you can't drive a wedge between God and his word because as the writer of the Hebrews tells us in the opening verse, he is the God who communicates. God who hath spoken.

He is the speaking God. God is never dumb. God is never silent.

And what his word achieves, it does so because that is what he wanted it to affect. When his word penetrates the mind, the heart of a man, he perceives as the God of the word, the innermost state of the human being. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight.

All things are nature and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. We've moved from the armory. We're now in the hospital.

We're in the x-ray theater. And here is God scanning humanity. And he never misses.

He never misses anything that's revealed on the plate. He sees the malignancy, the cancer of our sin. There is no one who can hide themselves from the living God.

That can be a frightening thought. It can be a terrifying thought. But it can also be a very comforting concept.

Hagar was very pleased, as I point out in my notes, that God saw her in her state. You remember, ostracized from Sarah and Abraham's camp, thinking that life would be taken from her. But no, Hagar, God has got his eye upon you as he's got his eye upon everybody.

There's nobody who is in any way unknown to the Lord God. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight. You remember when the Lord Jesus was on earth, that he picked a handful of men and he made them his disciples.

And he did so on the basis of knowledge. He understood what was in Nathanael before Nathanael was introduced. He didn't make a mistake with Judas of Caria, Judas Iscariot.

He realized that this was a man who would betray him. He was not in any way ignorant of the fact. Jesus has x-ray vision.

That's the reason why the author of the fourth evangelist, the author of the fourth gospel, says at the end of the second chapter he didn't entrust himself to man. He knew the treachery of men's hearts. God understands.

And just in case we don't appreciate what the writer is here getting at, he repeats it. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight, but all things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. All things are naked and open.

You remember how Samuel has to have this message impressed upon him by the Lord. Samuel, who has the rather difficult task of choosing a replacement for Saul as the next king of Israel, and he interviews the sons of Jesse and the six older sons passed before him, and Samuel is singularly impressed by each one as he engages in an interview. But God says, no, not one of those.

There's somebody else. And young David, an insignificant ruddy-cheeked lad, this youngster, looking after his father's sheep, stands before Samuel, and Samuel hears from the Lord, that's the lad. That's the one.

Man looks on at the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. What fools we are sometimes, my friend. My Christian friend, I say, what fools we are.

We feel sometimes that we can do things on the quiet that God doesn't somehow see. We think that, like the ancient Hebrews in their tents, engaged upon that which was unlawful under the cover of canvas, so we may have a private area in our life. There is nothing private.

Privacy does not belong to us. It is not a luxury that God has granted to us. He saw fugitives, Jonah, as he set sail out of God's will, booking a passage on a ship to take him away from Nineveh.

In no way could Jonah escape. The psalmist was theologically more understanding than was Jonah, when in the 139th Psalm, you remember, he says, if I took the wings of the morning, if I descended down into the depths of the sea, even there would your presence be. His presence, it circumnavigates the globe.

Our God sees all. Our God is a spectator upon this scene of time. And that's why the writer of this Hebrew epistle not only says that there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight, and that all things are naked and open before his eyes, but he attends to that, that very sobering little phrase, with whom we have to do, we have to give an account to this God, of all our activities.

And you see, the writer has come full circle in his argument. He's back with a thought of these Hebrews, and those mounds of clay that indicate their untimely death. In Sinai, they had to give an account of the way that they'd lived their lives before the eyes of God, having rejected his word.

And they got no answer. And the judgment of God fell upon them. And here, the writer of this epistle, he terrifies us.

I can think of nothing more frightening in the whole of Scripture. I'm not using purple language of some extravagant journalist at the moment as I say this. I can think of nothing more fearful, nothing more awful, than for God to have seen everything that I have done in my life, and to have it recorded, and to bring me to judgment, to bring me to book.

I find this, I say, one of the most sobering passages of Scripture in the whole of the word of God. His word, it finds me out. It penetrates to the citadel of my personality.

There is no stiff resistance that I can mount to blunt the cutting edge. I stand there, absolutely pierced by his word. And then, not only the word of God, but even more terribly, the God of the word.

He reveals himself. He reveals himself as a holy God, as a God of consuming fire. And I stand there terrified in his presence.

As my dear brother Paul Tucker once said, In my hearing, the unforgiving sinner would take one look into the eyes of God, and he would gladly plunge into hell itself. Our God is so holy. Our God is so righteous.

Our God sees all the rebellion and iniquity and cancer within our souls. And here, then, is this passage of Scripture that becomes frightening, and we wonder who is sufficient for these things, and how shall we react when the word of God so terrifies us. But you see, the author is not true.

He has to frighten us before he can console us. Before he can console us, he has to speak truthfully before he can apply the balm of the gospel. And he says, don't get too frightened.

Don't get so full with depression when you see the tragic example of those Hebrews whose carcasses are in Sinai. There's something else. Something else that God has to say.

Someone else that God will reveal. Seeing, then, we have a great high priest, one that is passed into the heaven, Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our profession, for we have an advocate.

We have an intermediary. We have one who not only intercedes before the Father for us, but we have one whose blood was shed to cancel out our sins. We have one who comes to save.

And the sinner, convicted by the word of God, is directed to the Christ of God. And there he finds pardon. There he finds forgiveness.

There he is promised the ministry of a barrister who plead his cause, his case, in the heavens and enable him to enter into a full and free pardon and become part of the family circle of God himself. Well, I shall show you next time I have the privilege of conducting these Bible studies of the nature of the high priest and how he continues to intercede on our behalf.