Introduction to Hebrews
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2024 · 9 June 2024
We’re coming tonight to our first in the series of the book of Hebrews. For in Hebrews, the message is the preeminence of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is superior to everything and everybody. Now, tonight we’re listening to an introduction to Hebrews, and it is really the first three verses. But before we look at those verses, I want to make a few remarks as a foundation for what we’re going to study.
Tonight we’re going to come to one of the most unusual adventures that you’ve ever been through, and that’s the book of Hebrews. It is a difficult book. It is a book that has many deep truths that are hard to understand lest we be diligent and faithful. There are things that are beyond understanding apart from a deep knowledge of the Holy Spirit and a commitment to deeply understand the Word of God.
Dr. Feinberg, who also taught the book of Hebrews said that you cannot understand the book of Hebrews unless you understand Leviticus because the book of Hebrews is based upon the principles of the Levitical priesthood. By the time we get through Hebrews you will have a pretty good grasp on Leviticus along with it. But it might be good if you familiarize yourself with Leviticus.
This epistle was written by an unknown author. Some say Paul or Apollos or Peter. I agree with one of the great teachers of the early church named Origin who said nobody knows. And so all the way through, we will say that it was written by the Holy Spirit. I do not believe it was written by Paul. It was written to a suffering, persecuted group of Jews outside of Israel, somewhere in the east.
There are no references to Gentiles in the book. The problem of Gentile and Jew together in the church is not here, indicating that the little congregation to which he’s writing was strictly Jewish for there was no Gentile conflict. And to this persecuted, suffering group of Jewish believers and unbelievers, he writes to reveal the merits of Jesus Christ and the new covenant as opposed to the old covenant.
Now, we do not know the location of these Hebrews, somewhere near Greece perhaps, but we do know that this Jewish community had been evangelized by the apostles and the prophets. And it had been evangelized fairly early after Christ had lived and died and risen again. And by the time the letter to the Hebrews is written, there already existed a little local congregation of believers.
Included in the same letter are unbelievers who, evidently, are also a part of this little Jewish community. Now, unlike Jerusalem Jews or Galilee Jews, they had never met Jesus. Everything they knew about Him, they got secondhand. They really didn’t even have any New Testament writings, for it hadn’t been put together. The book of Hebrews wasn’t even a part of it yet.
And so whatever they knew, they knew directly from the mouths of the apostles and the New Testament prophets. So they were the second generation Christians as a result of apostolic missionaries. It had to be written sometime after Christ’s ascension, which would have been about 30 A.D., and sometime before the destruction of Jerusalem, which would have been 70 A.D.
Because Jerusalem is still standing at this time in the letter. So it’s got to be written between 30 and 70 A.D. It’s probably somewhere likely about 65 A. D. because there had to be time for the apostolic missionaries to go evangelizing, and we know that there weren’t really any apostolic missionaries from Jerusalem until at least seven years after the church had been founded there.
And after they had been reached, they had to have a certain amount of time to grow spiritually because in Hebrews 5:12, the Holy Spirit says to them, “For when for the time as long as it’s been, you ought to be teachers. You have need that One teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God.” In other words, he says, “You’ve had enough time to be mature but instead you’re not.”
Here is the critical basis for understanding Hebrews, especially interpreting Hebrews 6. We must understand that there were three basic types of people throughout this epistle. If you do not understand these three basic types of people, then it becomes very confusing. If, for example, as some have said, it was all written to Christians, because it talks also about unbelievers, so it must be written to a combination.
And indeed there are three basic types in this little Jewish community to which the writer of the epistle writes. Group one, Hebrew Christians, true believers in Jesus Christ. They had come out of Judaism. They were born again. They had received Jesus Christ as their personal Savior. And the result of that was a tremendous hostility from their own people. Ostracized from their families, they suffered greatly.
Persecuted not only by their own countrymen, the Jews, but evidently also by Gentiles. They should have been mature, but they weren’t. They were in danger of going back into the patterns of Judaism. Not in danger of losing their salvation but in danger of confusing their salvation with legalism. They couldn’t make a break between the New Testament and all the ceremonies of their Judaism.
And especially when their own countrymen began to persecute them and they felt the pressure of this and to hold to some old Jewish traditions to at least have a foothold on their relationships to their own people. And so with their weak faith and their spiritual ignorance, they were in great danger of mixing the new with the old, creating a ritualistic, ceremonial, legalistic Christianity.
So the Holy Spirit then, directs this letter to them to strengthen their faith in the new covenant to show them that they did not need the old temple, which, in a few years would be wiped out by Titus Vespasian anyway, showing that God brought an end to that whole way of worship. They did not need the day-in-day-out sacrifices. This is all written to give confidence to these floundering believers.
The second group are Hebrew non-Christians who are intellectually convinced. People who know the truth but have never committed themselves to it. Who have heard the truth of Jesus Christ, they’re convinced that Christ is indeed who He claimed to be, but they’re not willing to make a commitment of faith to Him. And so there are some of those Hebrew non-Christians, as there are in every group.
Look at Hebrews 10:26. What is the greatest sin that a man can commit? The sin of rejecting Christ, isn’t it? Look at verse 26. “For if we deliberately go on sinning after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.” Verse 27: “but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire about to consume the adversaries.” That’s what you can look for.
Verse 29, “How much worse punishment do you think one will deserve who has trampled on the Son of God, who has regarded as profane the blood of the covenant by which He was sanctified, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?” Hebrews 12:15 says, “Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many.”
The third group is in Hebrews 9:11, “But Christ has appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come. In the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands.” Verse 14, “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works so that we can serve the living God?”
He is the mediator of the New Testament that by means of death, for the redemption of those that were under the Old Testament. Verse 27-28, “And just as it is appointed for people to die once, and after this, judgment 28 so also Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for Him.”
Now, those are messages given to one who is an unbeliever, not to a Christian and not to one who is necessarily convinced intellectually, but to that one who needs to know who Christ really is, and there are many other such illustrations. So the key to interpreting Hebrews, is to understand to which group he is speaking. And if we don’t understand that, then we confuse the issue.
Hebrews is a presentation of Christ, the Messiah, the author of a New Testament, greater than the old one that God had made in the Old Testament. Not that the old one was wrong, it was only incomplete. The theme of this book is the preeminence of Christ. He’s better than the Old Testament persons. He’s better than the Old Testament institutions. He’s better than everything before.
It begins in the first three verses. The superiority of Christ to angels, the superiority of Christ to Moses, the superiority of Christ to Joshua, the superiority of Christ to Aaron, the superiority of Christ to the old covenant, the superiority of Christ’s sacrifice to old sacrifices, the superiority of Christ’s faithful to all faithless, the superiority of Christ’s testimony to the testimony of others.
To the Jew, it had always been a dangerous thing to approach God. And on the great day of atonement, Yom Kippur, which occurred one time a year, at that time alone could the High Priest enter into the holy of holies where God’s presence was. He didn’t stay around a long time. In fact, the Bible says, “He could not linger there lest he put Israel in terror.” So God offered Israel a special relationship with Himself.
He would be their God and they would be his people. They would have a special access to Him if they were obedient to His laws. And to break the law was sin, and sin interrupted access to God, and since there was always sin, this access was always interrupted. So God instituted a system of sacrifices. The whole Levitical priesthood, and all the sacrifices were to atone for sin.
Man sinned which broke the covenant. The sacrifice was made for sin that dropped the barrier so that that relationship could be consummated. They had to sacrifice incessantly, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year, they never stopped. And the priest were all sinners too, and they had to make sacrifices for their own sins to make sacrifices for the sins of the people.
It was a losing battle to remove the barrier. And what man needed was a perfect priest and a perfect sacrifice who could open the way once and for all. Some kind of a sacrifice that didn’t just deal with one sin, but something that just took it all away at once. They needed a perfect priest to bear that perfect sacrifice. And that, says the writer of Hebrews, is exactly what Jesus was and what He did.
This is the message of the book of Hebrews to the Jewish people. To the believer, He’s saying have confidence in it. To the intellectually convinced, receive it. And to the unbeliever, He says, how much better it is to receive Christ. The writer is saying all your lives, you’ve been looking for the perfect final sacrifice. I present the solution, He is Jesus Christ. This is not easy for Jews to accept.
By clinging to the Messiah, they had been banished from everything they’d ever known. For a Jew is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but one who is one inwardly. So throughout the book of Hebrews, He speaks to these beloved Christians and tells them to put their confidence in the New Testament. Put your confidence in Christ, the mediator of a better covenant, the new great high priest.
And outside of our natural creation is the supernatural, and somewhere down inside of us, we know it’s out there. And whether it’s a cult or whatever, get out of the box, but the problem is you can’t get out. The natural man cannot escape into the supernatural. And every religion is man’s attempt to jump out of the box. There’s only one religion in the world that’s the opposite, and that’s Christianity.
Which says for the Son of man has come to seek and to save. Every religion is man’s attempt to discover God. Christianity is God bursting into man’s world and telling him what He was like. God must invade His world, and so God spoke. And God first spoke through the words of the Old Testament. Now, you know that men didn’t write it. They were used as instruments, but God was the energizing author.
God spoke directly to a man, told him to write, didn’t He? Sometimes in a vision. Sometimes in a parable. Sometimes through a type or a symbol. Now, men were used and their personalities were used and their minds were used, but they were totally controlled by the Spirit of God so that every word they said was the word that God decided that they should say and delighted in them saying.
Some of the Old Testament is history. Some of it is poetry. Some of it is law. Some of it is prophecy. But it is all God speaking. And it was fragmentary in the Old Testament, it was incomplete. It came over 15 hundred years by all those 40-plus writers, all in different bits and pieces, each one with an element of truth and it began to build. And the Old Testament is what we call progressive revelation.
Now, all throughout the New Testament, this is affirmed. 2 Peter 1:21 says, “Because no prophecy ever came by the will of man; instead, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” And in 2 Timothy 3:16 it says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” So the Old Testament is true and the Old Testament was the progressive preparation for Jesus Christ. Let us pray.