July 6, 2021 — A Study on the Book of Hebrews

“It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying, “I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again, “Here am I and the children whom God has given me.” Hebrews 2:10-13

‘We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block,’ says Paul And that doctrine of a suffering Messiah was the thing that stood in the way of the Jewish reception of the gospel, more perhaps than anything besides. So here we have the writer turning the tables upon the people, who might oppose it, on the ground of that discord and incongruity, and asserting that the whole of the sufferings of Jesus Christ do entirely harmonise with, are worthy of, and ‘become’ the supreme and absolute sovereignty of the God ‘for whom are all things, and by whom are all things.’” (Maclaren’s Expositions on Hebrews 2:10)

No one likes to suffer. No one! Suffering is the one thing most of us will go out of our way to avoid. We spend lots of money to reduce our suffering. We go out of our way to avoid any situation that may cause us suffering. In a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research states that living with chronic pain makes people so unhappy that they’d need to earn between $20,000 and $50,000 per year more to be as happy as they would be otherwise with no pain. That is a lot of money to spend to avoid suffering.

Why did Christ have to suffer? That has been a question I have been asked often as a pastor. Here, in Hebrews, we learn that Christ suffers so that he will be the leader of our salvation. Christ suffers because suffering is part of the human experience.

But our humanity is not only defined through suffering. We are tempted: Jesus was tempted. We are constantly faced with death: Christ suffered death on the cross. So our suffering is understood as a part of the human condition. Again, no one likes to suffer — but when we do, we know we have a savior who also suffered. It may not make suffering easier, but it gives us hope that our suffering builds within us a character of faith that transforms our suffering into endurance, and ultimately into peace.

Pastor Dave

July 5, 2021 — A Study on the Book of Hebrews

“Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels.But someone has testified somewhere, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lowerthan the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet.” Now in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them,but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” Hebrews 2:5-9

What would you do with a 19-year-old Christian young man, who wrote in his diary, “Resolved, To think much, on all occasions, of my dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death… Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.”

That young man was Jonathan Edwards, who went on to become the great revivalist preacher of the First Great Awakening. His writings are still immensely helpful to believers, 300 years later. Lest you think that he was a gloomy, depressive type, I should point out that his first resolution was, in part, “Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to the glory of God, and my own good, profit, and pleasure, in the whole of my duration; without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence.”

It seems to me that modern evangelical Christians are far too focused on the here and now. We’ve lost the central focus that Edwards had, even as a teenager, of living each day in view of death and eternity. The modern view is, “Heaven is a nice thought, but I want the good life now. If Jesus can help me succeed in my family, in business, and in my personal emotional life, that’s what I want! I’ll think about heaven when I’m in my eighties.” As a result of our shortsightedness, we don’t handle trials well. It is unknown how we might handle persecution, should such arise against the church, but it probably would free up a few seats on Sunday mornings.” (Our Glorious Destiny in Christ, bible.org,  Steven J. Cole, 2003)

We do not handle trials well, do we? We are so quick to bail out of most things when we do not get our way, do not see immediate success, and do not sense immediate change. We are quick to abandon our resolutions at the beginning of each new year. We find it difficult to maintain our Lenten disciplines after a week or two. And if someone cuts us off in traffic or won’t allow us to merge, we are quick to offer many vulgar comments and gestures because they have threatened our sense of being.

G-d has placed humans, at least according to the writer of Hebrews, G-d has placed humans lower than the angels so that we learn from the trials of life — and that we learn to live as if this might be the last hour of our life. We need to appreciate the blessings we have today — not expect that we deserve the blessings to which someone else has been blessed – and remember that blessings are always better than curses.

The trials of today teach us the wisdom we need for tomorrow so that we can appreciate the suffering and death of Jesus — from which comes life for all people.

Pastor Dave