Reflections on Hebrews with Andrew Murray (3)

 

            “The cure the Epistle has for all our failures and feebleness, the one preservative from all danger and disease, is – the knowledge of the higher truth concerning Jesus, the knowledge of Him in His heavenly priesthood. In connection with this truth, the writer has three great mysteries he seeks to unfold. The one is that the heavenly sanctuary has been opened to us, so that we may now come and take our place there, with Jesus in the very presence of God.

           

            “The second, that the new and living way by which Jesus has entered, the way of self-sacrifice and perfect obedience to God, is the way in which we now may and must draw near [to God].

 

“The third, that Jesus, as our heavenly High Priest, is the minister of the heavenly sanctuary, and dispenses to us its blessings, the spirit and the power of the heavenly life, in such a way that we can live in the world as those who are come to the heavenly Jerusalem, and in whom the spirit of heaven is the spirit of all their life and conduct; the heavenly priesthood of Jesus, heaven opened to us day by day, our entering it by the new and living way, and heaven entering us by the Holy Spirit…

 

“The knowledge of the heavenly character of Christ’s person and work is what alone can make heavenly Christians.”  Andrew Murray.

 

Murray continues to point us to Jesus Christ, again and again and again. Murray writes of “our failures and feebleness”; he does not excuse it, he does not say, “That’s just the way we are,” nor does he fall back on, “Well, of course we’re sinners, what do we expect?” Instead, he points us to Christ in His heavenly priesthood.

Now, lest anyone take offense at Murray’s use of “the higher truth concerning Jesus,” let’s be clear that Murray means that we need to know more and more of Jesus Christ, who He is, what He has done, and what He is doing. Let’s not forget that it is in this very letter to the Hebrews that we read (5:11 – 14):

 

“Concerning him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”

 

Let’s also recall Paul’s words to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 3:1 – 2):

 

“And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to receive it. Indeed, even now you are not yet able.”

 

Friends, let’s face it, if we had Christian grocery stores they’d be filled with baby food, a diary department specializing in milk, and you’d have to special-order meat because any meat placed on display would spoil before anyone purchased it. This is pretty much what we had when we still had Christian bookstores, and it is pretty much what we have when we peruse popular Christian books. We would rather cope via self-help and religious therapy with our feebleness and failures, and be given something to make us feel better about ourselves, than grow in Christ.

 

Because we overlay our Bible reading with a therapeutic mentality, we do not see our deep need for Jesus Christ. Because we have conflated the Gospel to the forgiveness of sins, we do not see the fullness of the glorious love and work of Jesus Christ.

 

God in Christ has opened the heavenly sanctuary to us; He has called us to live in this sanctuary as a way of life. This way of life should be the rule, not the exception. Yet, we have been taught to think of it, when we do think of it, as the exception. We think of ourselves as citizens of earth and its ways, rather than as citizens of heaven and its Way. In Christ, and in Christ alone, is transformation; for the individual, for a husband and wife, for a family, and for a congregation.

 

Murray writes that the way of Christ is the way of self–sacrifice and perfect obedience to God. We don’t like the term “self-sacrifice” and we don’t like the word “perfect.” Self-denial is what Christ calls us to, and this self-denial has a dimension of death to it – we die with Christ so that we might be raised into the heavens with Christ. This is death to sin, death to the world, and death to ourselves – and this is most certainly a dimension of the Gospel.

 

May I ask regarding the idea of perfect obedience, “If we are not called to perfect obedience, then exactly what measure of obedience are we called to?” Friends, we are called to love as Christ, to forgive as Christ, to sacrifice (as a way of life) as Christ, to go to others with the great love of our Father as Christ, and to obey as Christ. Any measure, any goal, any ideal, any pattern, that is other than “as Christ” is something other than the Gospel of Christ.

 

It is not our insufficiency in these things that matters, it is God’s all – sufficiency. We do not look to ourselves but look to Jesus Christ. We can trust God to “will and to work in us, His good pleasure.”

 

Are we living in the world “as those who are come to the heavenly Jerusalem”?

 

Are we living as those “in whom the spirit of heaven is the spirit of all their life and conduct”?

 

Is the heavenly priesthood of Jesus, with “heaven opened to us day by day,” a present reality in our lives, in our marriages, in our congregations?

 

Dear, dear friends; our Lord Jesus desires us to live in intimate relationship with Him, our Father, the Holy Spirit and with one another. He deeply desires us to live in assurance of His love for us, of the fact that our sins have been forgiven, that His Divine Life now lives in us – indeed that the Trinity now lives in us and we live in the Trinity. He wants us to know that we are His brothers and sisters, the children of the Living God. He truly wants us to know who we are now, in Him, and leave the past behind, buried in the waters of baptism – to see Him in us and us in Him, not to look back at who we once were and live in the horrid past.

 

Can we not accept the glorious and wonderous love and grace of Jesus Christ? Can we not learn to adore and worship our Great High Priest, and to live in the Holiest of All as our Way of Life?