Hebrews 13:10-14 “Go All Out For Jesus"

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church of Manhattan, KS, 8 Mar. 2019

Omitting the greyed-out text should bring verbal delivery time down around 45 minutes.

Intro

• The loss of World War I left Germany in shambles, but it was in this context that Adolf Hitler rose to power, offering the hope of a glorious future to his people if they would follow his Führerprinzip of unity under a single person’s leadership.

• And it worked! As the cities were cleaned up and the Communists pushed out of power and the bright festivals full of healthy youth returned, loyalty was quickly forged between the German people and their new Führer.

• Practically every social structure in the country – the media, the political parities, the univer­sities, the labor unions, the Roman Catholic churches – all gladly submitted to the control of Adolf Hitler’s regime... except for the German Evangelical Church (which today we would call the Lutheran church).

• In 1933, Hitler moved to bring all the Protestant churches under his authority too. He promo­ted Ludwig Muller as a state-puppet bishop over 27 Protestant denominations in Germany, then manipulated church elections to make it appear that the churches all agreed to it, and ordered “every church in Germany to be decorated with Nazi flags and a proclamation read from the pulpit, stating that ‘all those who are concerned … feel deeply thankful that the state should have assumed... the great load and burden of reorganizing the church.’ … They also passed a ruling that all pastors take a loyalty oath to Hitler and his government… and outlaw[ed] all Jews or persons married to Jews from church office.”¹

• What would you have done under those circumstances? Hitler said of the German Evangel­ical Church, “They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.” But he misjudged Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By the end of the year, Martin and Dietrich had organized a church resistance movement called the Pastor’s Emergency League with 6,000 members, committed only to the authority of “Holy Scripture and the Confessions of the Reformation.” In the following months, this Pastor’s League also passed the Barmen Declaration which stated, “We repudiate the false teaching that the state... become the single and total order of human life, and also thereby fulfill the commission of he church... The commission of the church, in which her freedom is founded, consists in this: in place of Christ and thus in the service of His own word and work, to extend, through word and sacrament, the message of free grace of God to all people.” (That last phrase “all people” was a rebuttal to the Nazi denial of Jewish conversions to Christianity.)

• Hitler told his bishops, “Christianity will disappear from Germany, just as it has in Russia… the churches today cannot get rid of the indisputable facts… history will simply leave them behind.” (Have you heard that one before?)

• Bonhoffer and Niemoller then organized a denomination called the Confessing Church. They risked losing their salaries, losing accreditation for their seminaries, being harassed by police, and imprisoned in concentration camps, but they were committed to the authority of Jesus Christ above all others in the church and in the world. On August 23, 1935, they sent a letter to Hitler reprimanding him for his unjust treatment of Jews and of political dissenters – and read copies aloud to their congregations. Bonhoeffer is quoted as saying, “We must not worry what people think. We must be the church and speak as Christ.”

• Hitler’s Ministry of Church Affairs then “declared all organizations of the Confessing Church illegal, and … began to tighten the noose around the necks of those who would not cooperate … In the following months, the great energetic unity of Barmen began to crack into a thousand fragments.” Pastors in the Confessing Church defected in large numbers. Two years later, Martin Niemoller found himself in prison. It is reported that one day, a state-sponsored prison chaplain visited Martin’s cell, asking, “Why are you in prison?” To which Martin replied, “Why are you NOT in prison?” Some seven years later, Niemoller lived to see the end of the Nazi regime, but Bonhoeffer was put to death in a concentration camp.

• Now, I may not agree with everything that the German Confessing Church said and did, but their courage in going all-out for Jesus in the face of powerful systems of blasphemy shines as a sterling example of the same kind of courage and devotion which the book of Hebrews calls Christians to – both in the first Century as well as today.

• In First Century Judea, the face of this blasphemy against Christ took the form of conserv­ative Judaism, the very conservatism of which made it all the more attractive. Most Jews reasoned that Jesus was a Johnny-come-lately, a ridiculous novelty who had been duly convicted by the highest courts of blasphemy and executed as a criminal, so it was the height of foolishness to be a Christian. “Not so!” argues back the Apostle in...

v.10-11 We have an altar² from which the men who minister in relation to the tabernacle do not have authority to eat, for the blood of such animals is brought in as a sin offering into the holy places by the high priest, [and] their bodies are inciner­ated outside the camp.

• The “blood” being “brought in” refers to the instructions God gave for sin offerings in Leviticus 4 and on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16:27 “And, as for the young bull of the sin-offering (and the goat of the sin-offering whose blood was brought into the sanctuary to make atonement), it shall be taken outside of the camp, and they shall burn their hides – and their flesh and their dung – in the fire." (NAW)

  • The sin offering therefore was one of the few that was not eaten. Its blood was sprinkled inside the temple and its body was incinerated outside the settlement. The Old Testament Jews couldn’t eat that one.

  • John Calvin commented: "No wonder if the rites of the Law have now ceased, for this is what was typified by the sacrifice which the Levites brought without the camp to be there burnt; for as the ministers of the tabernacle did eat nothing of it, so if we serve the taber­nacle, that is, retain its ceremonies, we shall not be partakers of that sacrifice which Christ once offered, nor of the expiation which he once made by his own blood; for his own blood he brought into the heavenly sanctuary that he might atone for the sin of the world."

• In the Old Testament, a priest was not a priest without an altar. The altar was the only place where God and man could connect. We saw earlier in Hebrews 7:13 that Jesus was from the priesthood of Melchizedek which had never offered any sacrifices on the altar of the Leviti­cal priests, but in the Hebrew manner of thinking, if Jesus was a priest at all, He had to have an altar. And a portion of practically every offering made on the Levitical altar was given to the officiating priest to eat. But where was Jesus’ altar?

  • After the portions of every fellowship offering were burned on the Levitical altar, the priest and the person who offered the sacrifice would eat the meat together in the temple to show that sin had been dealt with and fellowship with God had been restored.³

  • But where was the Christian’s altar? Was this not proof of the inferiority of Christianity to Judaism? Christians had no place to go to get forgiven of sin and be reassured of renewed fellowship with God!

  • Or did they? Consider the altar mentioned repeatedly in the book of Revelation which is before the throne of God in Heaven (Rev. 6:9; 8:3, 5) and which was a center from which the Apostle John witnessed the prayers of God’s people rising to God and from which God spoke and acted (Rev. 9:13; 11:1; 14:18; 16:7).

  • Within a few years, the tables would be turned. The altar in Jerusalem would be destroyed, never to be rebuilt again, whereas the news of this altar in heaven for Christians was dis­bursed far and wide with each copy of the New Testa­ment. Christians have an altar unshake­able in heaven where they can get their sins forgiven and be renewed in fellowship with God; the Jews have no altar.

• Once again, our apostle drives home the fact that the Jews, who carried on in the ceremonial law and kept on offering animal sacrifices, had missed the boat, since Jesus had claimed the High Priesthood and Kingship as the Anointed One – the Christ.

• Jesus is mentioned throughout the New Testament as being invested with rights/authority to give eternal life, to forgive sin, and to judge and rule the world⁴, and He even conferred that authority to His followers to act as children of God, to preach, to cast out demons, and to rule (Mat. 10:1, John 1:12, 2 Cor. 10:8, Rev. 2:26).

• Furthermore we see a “right” mentioned in Revelation 22:14 that includes eating in the pres­ence of God which was only symbolized in the temple fellowship meals: “Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right [authorization] to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city." (NKJV)

• Don’t miss the contrasts here:

  • “We have” vs. “They have”

  • And a “tent “versus “God”: the Levitical priests “served/ministered in regard to the tabernacle/tent,” but back in Hebrews 12:28 & 9:14, it is declared that Christians “serve/minister to God.” Is your devotion to a tent or to God Himself?

  • The contrast couldn’t be more stark!

• Hebrews 8:1 "Now the sum of what is being said is: we have such a high priest who took office at the right hand of the throne of the Greatest One in the heavens, a minister of the holy things and of the true tabernacle which the Lord constructed and not man... 9:8 "The Holy Spirit is showing that .... the tabernacle... has been a parable in which both donations and sacrifices are being offered that are not able to perfect in conscience the one who mini­sters - 10 and that are only being imposed until a time of rectification, in regards to foods and drinks and various baptisms and regulations concerning the flesh. 11 But Christ, the high priest of the impending good things, having come along through the greater and more perfect tabernacle - not the hand-made one (that is, not the one of this created-order), 12 entered once-for-all into the holy places, and not by means of the blood of goats or calves but by means of His own blood, after having obtained eternal redemption." (NAW)

• "We have an altar, not a material altar, but a personal one, and that is Christ; he is both our altar, and our sacrifice; he sanctifies the gift. The altars under the law were types of Christ; the brazen altar of the sacrifice, the golden altar of his intercession... [T]hat which is eaten... at the gospel altar... is... not... the very sin-offering itself, as the papists affirm; for then it was not to be eaten, but burnt; but the gospel feast is the fruit and procurement of the sacrifice, which those have no right to who do not acknowledge the sacrifice itself." ~Mat. Henry, 1714

• “We Christians are permitted spiritually to feast on this sacrifice – to ‘eat the flesh and to drink the blood of the Son of Man.’ We are allowed to feed on the sacrifice offered up for our sins… a far higher privilege in reference to sacred food, not merely than the Israelites, but even than the priests themselves enjoyed… Eating of the sacrifice was a natural emblem of deriving from the sacrifice the advantages it was intended to secure…. The language is figur­ative… It is, in plain words, our deriving from the sacrifice of Christ the blessings which it is intended and calculated to obtain… the forgiveness of our sins, the sanctification of our natures, and spiritual favorable intercourse with God as our reconciled Father.” ~Dr. John Brown of Edinborough, 1830

v.12 so also Jesus, in order that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate.

• Jesus offered Himself as a sin offering, following the pattern of the Old Testament sin offerings in Leviticus 4.

  • “Outside the camp” parallels “outside the gate.”

    • The Hebrew settlement at the writing of Leviticus was a camp with a tent-tabernacle in the Sinai desert,

    • but the settlement of the Jews of Jesus’ day was a city with a tabernacle-temple and gates which defined the boundary of the city.⁵

  • Just as the carcass of the bull sacrificed as a sin offering was dragged outside the camp and burned up, so Jesus was moved outside of the city of Jerusalem to be put to death on a cross.

  • This suffering involved “His own blood” being shed rather than that of another animal – the blood of the Son of God who had truly become Son of Man. As has been pointed out earlier in Hebrews chapters 9 & 10, Jesus’ blood is more efficacious than the blood of mere cattle.

• Jesus did this “in order that He might sanctify the people”

  • For "without the pouring out of blood, forgiveness doesn't happen!" (Heb. 9:22b, NAW)

  • This hearkens back to the introduction of the Book of Hebrews, verse 3, after the Son of God “made purification from our sins with His own self, He took office [as priest] at the right hand of [God]...” (NAW)

  • The theme of a sacred/holy God “sanctifying” - making us holy is found throughout the book of Hebrews:

    • 2:10-11 “For it was appropriate to Him, the chief-leader of their salvation... to ac­complish success through sufferings, having led many children into glory, because both the One who makes holy and the ones who are being made holy are all of one kind, on account of which He is not ashamed to call them brothers…”

    • 3:1 “In view of which, holy brothers... the High Priest whom we acknowledge is the Messiah Jesus...”

    • 9:13-14 “For, if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of a heifer's ashes makes those who had been rendered unclean holy to the purification of their flesh, how much more will the blood of the Anointed One (who, through the eternal Spirit offered His faultless self to God) purify y'all's conscience from dead works for devotion to the Living God?”

    • 10:10ff “Because of His desire, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ singularly. Furthermore, every priest (on the one hand) has offi­ciated [day] after day, ministering and frequently offering the same sacrifices, yet [at] no time are such things able to divest sins, but (on the other hand) this Man, after of­fering one sacrifice for sins, took office in perpetuity at God's right hand... As a result, by means of one offering, He has perfected in perpetuity those who are being made holy… by the blood of the covenant...”

  • And who is it that Jesus blood “sanctifies”? When the phrase “the people” occurs in the New Testament, it refers, not to all humans, but rather to a particular set of humans with whom God has a relationship:

    • In many cases, it is a relationship defined by a covenant with an entire nation (as it was with the people of Israel)⁶,

    • other times it is defined as a local body of worshipers in a particular meeting⁷,

    • still others, it is a relationship defined spiritually by faith in Jesus⁸.

    • Romans 10 & 11 explains the crossover⁹ of the covenanted nation of Israel to the international church that believes in Jesus: "...First Moses says: 'I will provoke you to jealousy by those who are not a nation, I will move you to anger by a foolish nation.' But Isaiah is very bold and... to Israel he says: "All day long I have stretched out My hands To a disobedient and contrary people." I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benja­min. God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says... 'I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.' Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the elec­tion of grace... What then? Israel has not obtained what it seeks; but the elect have obtained it, and the rest were blinded. Just as it is written: 'God has given them a spirit of stu­por, Eyes that they should not see...' [B]lindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved..." (Romans 10:19-11:26, NKJV)

  • P. E. Hughes, one of my father’s seminary professors, made the observation in his comm­entary on Hebrews that, in going outside the camp, “God draws near to us in the person of his Holy One who, on our unholy ground, makes his holiness available to us in exchange for our sin which he bears and for which he atones on the cross…. ‘This act of sanctifica­tion marks the abolition of the necessity of holy places for sanctification.¹⁰’” In fact, “ the people’s sin of apostasy had separated them from their God and had defiled the holy ground of the camp, with the result that it was now necessary for anyone who sought the Lord to go forth outside the camp,” as it was in Exodus 33, when Moses pitched the “Tent of Meet­ing” outside the camp. “Thus the normal situation in which all territory outside the camp was regarded as unholy and the man who left the camp… became unclean was at this time reversed. Sin had rendered the camp unholy, and Moses’ withdrawal in order to establish a holy location outside the camp prefigured the setting up of the Christian altar, Christ’s cross, outside the gate and the necessity for God’s people to join Christ there.”

v.13-14 So now, let’s keep going out to Him outside the camp, bear­ing His ridicule, 14 for we don’t have an enduring city here, but rather, it’s the impending one that we are eagerly seeking.

• Jesus did not establish Himself in the city of Jerusalem, either in the palace of Herod or in the temple of Caiaphas. Instead, Jesus died “outside” the city on the hill of Golgotha, and then, when He rose again from the dead, He established Himself at the right hand of God in heaven as the King of Kings and Great High Priest of the heavenly Jerusalem, not the earthly one.

• So, the logical conclusion is that, in order to be a citizen of that heavenly city, if we want to enjoy reconciliation with God under Jesus’ high priesthood, if we want to enjoy liberty and justice under Jesus’ reign, we need to exit the earthly Jerusalem and seek Jesus spiritually in the heavenly Jerusalem, no matter how much ridicule there will be from earthly-minded men.

• To fortify us in our resolve to make this exit and bear the ridicule for it, God gave us exam­ples to follow:

  • Chapter 11 highlighted Abraham’s exit from civilization in Ur to follow the Lord: “With faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed [and] went out to the place which he was going to receive as an inheritance – indeed, he went out, not knowing where he was go­ing. With faith he migrated into the country of the promise like it was a foreign one, re­sid­ing in tents... for he was expectantly-waiting for the city that has the foundations, the crafter and builder of which is God! ... having confessed that that they are foreigners and pilgrims upon the earth. Now, those who say such things bring to light that they are eagerly seeking a father­land. Furthermore, if indeed they had been bringing to mind the one from which they had gone out, they'd be making occasion to double-back. But... a better one is what they long for – that is, a heavenly one; therefore God is not ashamed of them... He even prepared a city for them!” (Hebrews 11:8-16, NAW)

  • Moses also left the opulent and indulgent lifestyle of a prince in Egypt to be with the Lord (and His people) out in the desert. Hebrews 11:26 said that he was “ridiculed/re­proached” for this. And certainly, without the perspective of the shortness and limited-ness of this life compared to the greatness and eternal-ity of the life to come, it would be easy to think of Moses’ wild goose chase to some “promised land” as sheer madness and to make fun of him for it… that is, until you drowned in the Red Sea.

  • Jesus also left us His example. He taught in His “Sermon On The Mount” that food and drink and clothes “are what the nations are eagerly seeking... But you keep seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added onto you.” (Matt. 6:31-33, NAW) He also said: “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Y'all are being blessed whenever liars reproach you and persecute [you] and speak every evil against you for my sake. Keep rejoicing and leaping for joy, because your reward is bountiful in heaven...” (Matt. 5:1-12, NAW). Then He walked out of Jerusalem and died to show He meant business, and rose and became our leader-in-chief enthroned in heaven.

  • Hebrews 10:33-34 also mentions the example of the early church that followed Jesus, enduring sufferings “that [consisted] of being made a public spectacle of, with both in­sults and oppressions… knowing to have a possession that is better and lasting.” (NAW)

CONCLUSION

• “It [wa]s imperative, therefore,” wrote commentator Phillip Hughes, “that these Hebrew Christians, tempted as they are to insulate themselves from the reproach and the reality of the cross ‘outside the gate’ by retreating to the traditional respectability and apparent solidity of a system which Christ’s coming had rendered obsolete, should learn that here, in this present world order, we have no lasting city.”

• Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer left the mainstream of the German church¹¹ when it replaced Jesus with Hitler as its head; they endured suffering to be with Christ – even imprisonment and death

• We too must be willing to go outside the mainstream in order to follow Christ instead of the latest popular leaders, and we need to be willing to suffer in this life in order to be with Christ rather that spend eternity apart from Him.

• What are the systems today that we need to leave in order to seek the enduring city of God which is to come?

  • What systems around us have supplanted Christ with a substitute?

  • What man-made organizations have repudiated Jesus’ saving power and supreme authority and replaced that with a man-made solution to the world’s problems and a human authority that answers to no one?

  • I can think of government agencies, educational institutions, denominational churches, non-profit organizations, secret societies, and business partnerships which have done just that, but my job isn’t to list them, but rather to warn you against joining any which deny Christ – and to exhort you to leave any which the Holy Spirit convicts you to abandon.

• Leaving (or not joining) may result in you experiencing reproach, insults, fault-finding, derision, disapproval, criticism, scorn. Are you willing to endure that without getting flustered, for the sake of being with Jesus forever?

• Let me close with what A. T. Robertson wrote in about this verse in his Word Pictures In The New Testament: “The only decent place for the follower of Christ is beside the Cross of Christ with [its] reproach and [its] power.”¹²

APPENDIX: Greek Text & English Versions of Hebrews 13:10-16^A