Misc. Hebrews sermons
Hebrews 5:11-6:12 moves in three deliberate steps, sarcasm, then warning, then encouragement, a shape easy to miss when readers isolate the famous warning. Throughout Scripture God uses sarcasm to jolt the proud out of complacency. Warning and encouragement work together here.
Every believer is a ‘Hebrew,’ true Israel, sharing the pilgrim existence the letter assumes throughout. An outline of the whole book sets the course. The letter warns its readers to improve on their baptism and profession, and it encourages them, because Jesus has already gone before them on the same road.
Hebrews 1:1-2 says God has spoken definitively and finally, against modernist views of revelation as ongoing and open-ended. The letter’s view of Old Testament inspiration belongs to the same claim. Guidance comes from God’s word, whatever the shifting cultural consensus says.
Hebrews 11 says faith lays hold of the invisible, and that faith reaches back beyond Abraham to Adam and Eve, whom God called to it before the fall. Habakkuk’s ‘the just shall live by faith’ belongs to the same line. Faith was the creature’s proper posture toward God from the beginning, long before it became a remedy for sin.
America’s religious history sets the Pilgrim Separatists’ authentic religion in 1620 against the civil religion of the Revolutionary generation in 1776. Why God has blessed America is a real question, and it has no simple answer. The closing exhortations of Hebrews 13 give the standard for measuring both moments.
Hebrews has a deliberate structure. 2:5 announces its theme, the world to come, 3:1 announces its program, Christ as apostle and high priest, and 8:1-2 sums up both. ‘Apostle’ is an unusual title for Christ, and it matters as much as ‘priest.’ Hebrews and John’s Gospel share more of this vocabulary than casual reading notices.