From Jim McGuiggan... WHAT THE HEBREW WRITER SAID

WHAT THE HEBREW WRITER SAID

Many discouraged Hebrew Christians were going back to an old arrangement or period or dispensation of God.

They weren’t going back to paganism or to moral chaos. They wanted to go back to what was established and authorized by God. They wanted to go back to what Moses praised and served as a faithful servant of God; back to morally ordered lives of decency and uprightness.

But in order to do that they had to go back to a place and time where Jesus Christ was not!

In order to do that they had to join the multitude that judged Jesus as a fraud and crucified him. They had to agree with their formerly bitter enemy Rome with whom they now had established a somewhat peaceful co-existence [though their Palestinian brothers and sisters suffered under the Roman consuls and governors].

They had to deny their new history as the new People of God through the “Exodus” and “return” [resurrection] of Jesus of Nazareth. They had to return to an old covenant that though in its time it had offered life to the nation it now stood in judgment on the nation for its constant covenant infidelity.

It wasn’t that there was no good prior to Jesus Christ. Man and women of faith and prophetic gifts saturated their former [and true] history. It had people like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jochebed, Moses, Joshua, Hannah, Samuel and David as part of a long line of God-loving heroes.

All that went before was good in its time and place. The faith of Moses or Samuel or Gideon was praiseworthy because they were faithful in their place, faithful in a way fitted to the place God gave them. The comparison wasn’t between things good and bad but between the temporary and the permanent, between the shadow and the fully revealed reality, between the “earthly” and the “heavenly” and between the “flesh” and the “conscience”. [When he talks about the OT tabernacle he sees it as “earthly”, constructed by human hands [even though it was by God’s will]. The new Tabernacle is at one and the same time the body of Jesus and the new way of relating/having access with and to God. That arrangement has been made “without hands”. The city to which these believing Jews were looking was not a physical one like Jerusalem but a “heavenly” city.

What’s the value of Hebrews to 21^st century Gentile believers?

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.