Dr. James White on God's Faithfulness

God's Faithfulness in a Time of Fear and Travel

Well, good afternoon. It's good to be with you. I hope you all will turn off your cell phones so that if we all get a message about incoming missiles, we can just all go out together. Don't have to worry about it that way.

That was quite a way to wake up yesterday morning. Of course, it wasn't aimed at us, but the first I knew about it was Jeff live on Facebook. I'm like, really? Wow. Okay. And so what a way of waking up.

And let's hope that the Lord uses it. There was a lot of discussion I saw of people going, so you thought it was coming, and that's what you did with your last few minutes. That really does expose a lot of what people think about and made me wonder what would have been, how different would that have been, say, during the Cold War in the 1960s when you didn't have social media and all that type of stuff.

People were thinking about getting their last message out to the world. Well, what about trying to get in touch with your loved ones or something like that? It does make you think. There is no two ways about it.

I'd appreciate your prayers this coming week. I leave Tuesday for Atlanta, Georgia. Wednesday, it's going to be 29 for the high and 17 for the low. That's not much for people who live up in Nebraska or something, but for Atlanta, that's pretty nippy.

And certainly for me, it's going to be pretty nippy. But it happens to be the same day that I'll be debating Adnan Rashid. We're flying him in from Pakistan, at least I hope so, because this is his first visit to the United States.

And unfortunately, he happens to share the exact name with a well-known Taliban leader. And so if you could pray that he actually will be able to get into the country for the debate, that would be very helpful.

Adnan's a really nice guy. We've debated a number of times before. It'll be a very sharp debate. He's not a marshmallow-type guy. He's about 6 '4". Looks exactly like, if you think of... Which Rambo movie was that?

Rambo 3 or something like that? I think it was Rambo 3 when he was in Afghanistan. Looks like those tribal guys except bigger. And I sort of look like a really little guy next to Adnan. But we will be debating, is the cross necessary for salvation?

Which, of course, Muslims don't believe that Jesus died on a cross. They don't believe that he died at all, in fact. And so they don't believe that there is need for atonement or for sacrifice. Man is not dead in sin.

Man can basically, in and of himself, improve himself, with Allah's help, of course. But that is all within a man's capacity, and there is no need for the cross, which they don't believe actually took place.

And so tremendous opportunity to contrast the two messages and the two faiths. And, of course, we want to be praying for Adnan as well. I hope that he finds us to be an incredibly gracious people and that the Lord would be kind to open his heart and mind to the gospel.

That is, of course, our ultimate desire. And then we have the G3 Conference right after that. And I will be doing one interesting session with Dr. Kruger. Some of you may know Michael Kruger. He is the president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.

He's written a number. If you haven't seen them, let me recommend them to you, a number of excellent books on the subject of the canon of Scripture. And, in fact, when people ask me what books should I read, they're the only ones I recommend to people.

And the reason is I don't know of any other books, honestly. I mean, my couple of chapters in my book, Scripture Alone, does this, but I just don't know of any other books that approach the subject of the canon of Scripture from a theological perspective first rather than a historical perspective.

Everything else out there is going to start by going, well, this early church father said this, and this council said that, and it's all looking at it from a historical perspective. But there's a problem with that, and that is when we talk about the canon of Scripture, we're talking about the canon of something that is supernatural and theological.

We're talking about an authoritative list of what? Inspired books. If you don't start with the concept of inspiration and God's activity and the whole nine yards, you're going to end up wandering around in darkness, which, unfortunately, is what most books on the subject of the canon of Scripture end up doing.

And so we're going to be doing a whole session. I'll primarily be doing the question-asking, but since it's a subject that he and I both have done a lot of work on, hopefully good leading questions, shall we say, on that particular subject, and I think it's vitally important.

And then I'll be speaking as well as one of the plenary speakers there. So I've got a busy week ahead. Some of you may know that I'm going to need to have some wisdom because something tells me that there's going to be a few people there that are going to be looking to find some way of getting under my skin or finding some mechanism of proving that I'm just the terrible, horrible person they all say that I am.

So if you don't know why that is, don't worry about finding out. But let's just say that it's been an interesting 12 months so far. Not even 12 months. It was sort of May of last year when things started happening, and it is interesting to deal with it.

Hebrews 6 and the Purpose of the Book

Turn with me, please, in your Bibles to Hebrews 6. Let me ask you a question. As you're turning there, when you are tapping there, for those of you that are electronically inclined, as I am, when you think of the book of Hebrews, what is the first thing you think of?

It sort of depends on your background, I guess. I know that with my upbringing in a pretty much conservative, independent, fundamentalist, Baptist-type background, for most of my life, when I thought of Hebrews, I thought of a lot of Old Testament quotations and the chapter on faith and Hebrews 6 and losing your salvation.

Now, we didn't believe you could lose your salvation, but what that meant was we had to have a ready excuse for Hebrews 6 because that's pretty much how Hebrews functioned in our experience. And I remember it wasn't all that long ago.

I mean, I think it was after seminary that I finally said, you know, I took a plane flight and I said, I am just going to put everything aside and try to put all the controversies aside, and I'm just going to read Hebrews and try to figure out, is there a key to this book?

And in doing that, I really believe I did find the key to that book. I think it wasn't all that difficult to find. And that is if you understand what the fundamental purpose of the author is and keep that in mind, when someone jumps to Hebrews 6 and tries to read just a couple of verses, they say, see, you can lose your salvation.

That is a mechanism that ignores what the purpose of the book actually was. And it became very clear in just sitting down and reading it in one sitting and trying to keep the historical context in mind.

What you have in the book of Hebrews is a book of apologetics. Now you go, oh, yeah, sure. The apologists found out it's a book about apologetics. That's certainly unbiased, isn't it? Yeah. No, seriously, it is written to Hebrew believers.

It very clearly is written before the destruction of the temple in AD 70. There are just a number of verses that don't make any sense if the temple has already been destroyed because it's very clearly what's going on is these Hebrew Christians are being encouraged, pressured to go back to the old ways and offer sacrifice.

And it's sort of hard to offer sacrifice at a temple. So I clearly believe that this was this was written in the 50s or 60s. And it's easy to understand what was going on. I mean, we live in a day where we you know, we have two thousand years of Christian history and all the rest, that kind of stuff.

But in that first century, Christianity was a small, little despised group that would have been called a cult within Judaism. We see, for example, in Acts that when the Roman authorities encounter Christianity, they're just like this is just some argument amongst the Jews that we can't get involved in this.

And you all just go away. It was a small, despised group. And you can imagine what the arguments were. Let's say you chose to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and you begin to meet with this small group and you're having the Lord's Supper and you're hearing from the eyewitnesses of Jesus's life.

And and you you stop you stop offering sacrifice and you stop observing certain aspects of the ceremonial law. Well, your family, of course, is going to consider that you've lost your mind. And what kind of argumentation are they going to bring against you?

What kind of pressure are they going to put against you? And when you keep that in mind, then you realize this is one long, extended argument for the supremacy of Christ. It's one long, extended argument all the way through chapter 11 that basically says there's nothing to go back to since the one who was promised has come.

If you go back to the old ways, you're calling God a liar. Now, chapters 12 and onward, sort of like in the Book of Romans, become exhortations in light of everything has come before. But this is a book designed to make the Jewish believers steadfast in the face of the pressures that are being brought against them.

And when you keep that in mind, then you you sort of have guardrails to keep you from going off the road. Did any of you see that picture this morning of the I forget where it was, but the airliner that went off the runway and just hanging on this cliff somewhere?

I think it was South America, if I recall correctly. But I mean, it literally is just hanging on this cliff with the with the ocean right below it. And somehow they missed the guardrails. Well, that's a little bit dangerous there.

They got everybody out, thankfully, but it could have been a bad a bad thing. Well, unfortunately, what's happened with the Book of Hebrews is if you don't have that guardrail, if you don't know what it's about, the book has unfortunately given rise to some really odd beliefs and perspectives.

The other reason why the Book of Hebrews is sort of a closed book to many modern Christians is because many of us tend to be canonically challenged, canonically challenged. And that means we have about 27 books in our Bible.

Those Old Testament books are great for Sunday school stories. I mean, David and Goliath, that that'll always keep those those young guys excited to hear that story. But really inspired the way John is or Romans nine or Ephesians one.

I mean, really. And we were canonically challenged. And you can't make heads or tails out of the Book of Hebrews if you don't know the Old Testament. I mean, I really encourage you to read the Book of Hebrews with a translation that puts all the quotations from the Old Testament in some form that you can recognize it, whether it's new American standard uses block quotes or or italics or set off somehow.

So you can see that pretty much every paragraph has got quotations from the Old Testament in it. And especially when you get in discussion of Jesus as a high priest. Oh, good grief. You can't you can't have any idea what the author is talking about.

If you don't know how the tabernacle was set up, not the temple, the tabernacle in the wilderness was set up and what the holy place was. And and where the various instruments were and what was inside the veil and outside the veil, because he makes reference to all this stuff just in passing as if you're following along.

And so I think in a lot of situations, the Book of Hebrews becomes a closed book to modern Christians because we just don't know that stuff. I mean, right now. OK, it's early January. So everybody's doing pretty good.

And you're in Genesis somewhere, right? But everybody in this room knows what I mean when you say, yeah, I had real good intentions to get through the Bible, but Leviticus killed me. You know, you get to the stuff about leprosy spots and showing it to the priest.

Is there hair growing out of it? And it's like, I think I'll go read, John. You know, it's just like I'm out of here. And that's a problem because Leviticus is the second most cited book in the New Testament from the Old Testament.

And especially in the Book of Hebrews, all the stuff about the high priest, everything else straight out of the book of Leviticus. And so if we don't know it real well, then it can become extremely mysterious.

And then in church history, once origin comes along and develops the concept of allegorical interpretation. Wow. The Book of Hebrews became a really closed book until the Reformation itself. And the sad thing about that is that I can't think of any New Testament book that has a longer, more involved, more specific discussion of the intention of the atonement and the purpose of the atonement and the result of the atonement than what you have in the Book of Hebrews.

I think one of the reasons that the modern church has pretty much a emotions based, sentimental view of the cross, rather than a truly theological, biblical view of the cross is because the Book of Hebrews just is not near the top of the list for most Christians when it comes to their reading and their understanding and their confidence and things like that.

So when we come to chapter six, it's really sad that for the most, for most folks, if you go, so Hebrews chapter six, what's it about? Well, that's the apostasy chapter. Well, OK, the first few verses.

But as a result, there is this incredibly deep text of scripture that is super encouraging and just one of the greatest gifts I think scripture gives us as to why we should stand fast and hold firm. It just gets lost.

It just I hardly ever hear sermons on this text. It's almost like, well, you know, it's like I'm not going to preach on James chapter two either, because, you know, all the Mormons have that one memorized backwards.

So, you know, I'm just if you have to correct a text. And I had that happen to me when I was a senior in high school. My Bible study teacher, I was at a very, very large Southern Baptist church, 20 ,000 members.

That gives you an idea which one it was. It doesn't have 20 ,000 members anymore, but it did back then. And one Sunday, my Bible study teacher in the small group and his wife, who was with a girls group, decided they were going to teach everybody against the teachings of the church.

They could lose their salvation. And guess where they went? Hebrews chapter six. And that was the first that was the only time in my young life I was raised to be pretty respectful of people and things like that was the only time I ever got up in a small group and said to the teacher, you're teaching against what this church stands for and I'm not going to stand for and walked out.

And so I even experienced it myself that this this this chapter would just sort of just be marked off in my mind in that way. But we're missing something if we if we view it that way. So let's let's skip the apostasy part.

I'm not even going to go through it. Sorry if you're going, oh, I was really looking forward to. No, you have to deal with that later. I did an 80 sermon series on Hebrews, which is available on sermon audio.

If you want to hear the first part of the chapter, you can you can go there and do that. But beginning in verse nine, Hebrews chapter six, verse nine. But beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you, things that accompany salvation, though we are speaking in this way.

I think that's obviously key as to what's actually going on before that. The author is specifically talking here. He says we're convinced of things that accompany salvation. Well, that means the stuff beforehand was not that which necessarily accompanies salvation.

But but we are convinced of better things concerning you. And so remember, he's encouraging these people, by the way, who do you think wrote Hebrews? Now, I don't know what Jeff's theory on this is. Has he mentioned anything about who he thinks wrote Hebrews?

No one's even brave enough to go. Yes, sir. Paul. OK, well, that's what the King James says, says right there, the epistle of Paul to the Hebrews. But the manuscripts don't say that. Here's the problem.

If you translate Romans from Greek and then you translate Hebrews from Greek, there is one thing you will be one thousand percent convinced of. The same guy didn't write those two books, the language, the vocabulary, and especially what's called syntax, the relationship of words to one another.

There is a very Paul lean way of speaking. And it's consistent in Romans and Galatians and Ephesians and Philippians. And it's just it's just how Paul does stuff and not Hebrews. What's Hebrews? In fact, when you teach Greek, when you start translating books, generally you'll do for like First John, maybe one of the gospels like Mark, then maybe Philippians.

Those are sort of on the lower level. And Paul would be between like a four and a and a six or seven on a scale of 10 for difficulty. If you want to drive everyone out of the class, you translate Hebrews.

It's 10. It's top. It's the toughest Greek in the New Testament. Right along with Luke and Acts. Luke and Acts. Very much the same. Very classical Greek. Not not not nearly as coin a very classical. So here's my theory.

My theory is this is a sermon preached by Paul. In Hebrew or Aramaic, depending on where it was, he was preached is meant for to encourage. Hebrew Christians to continue on the faith, but then maybe Luke goes to him and says, you know, there are a lot of other people that need to hear that.

Can I put that into Greek so that we can communicate it to the churches outside of where Aramaic was spoken to the other churches where there are Jewish believers and they need the same the same encouragement.

So I think because the theology is Paul's. The language is Luke's. And so given Paul and Luke's relationship to one another, and we know Paul used him and UNC, he used scribes, even names a couple of them, as did Peter.

I think this is a sermon from Paul that was originally delivered in Semitic language, Hebrew, Aramaic, and then Luke writes it down in Greek and it is distributed in that form. That's my theory. As Luther said, who wrote Hebrews?

God knows that's obviously the safest answer for almost any type of question you can come up with. But I think that really fits when you translate it, when you work, when you work through it. And so here, whoever wrote this, we can say Paul, that's fine.

Whoever wrote this is seeking to encourage these individuals. And even though he says there's a number of warning passages because he's addressing the gathered believers as a whole. See, one of the problems that we have is we tend to hyper-personalize things.

For example, when it says, but beloved, we are convinced there are things concerning you. It's a plural pronoun. He's addressing a group. We tend to hear that individually first when we should hear it corporately first and then make application individually second because we're Westerners.

And we have the Bill of Rights, right? You know, I've got, I have my rights, you know, and I'm, we are much more individualistic in our thinking and our thought than the people who wrote these letters and to whom they were written.

And so we need to keep that in mind. And so he is writing to a group and he warns them. He warns them in Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 3 and Hebrews 6, knowing that there is the reality of apostasy. There are people, you and I know that there were people who used to sit in this room with us today that do not sit with us today.

They're gone.

Apostasy, Warning Passages, and Corporate Encouragement

Apostasy is a real thing. I mean, if you've not seen it, you must be really young. I've been an elder for decades now. And sadly, when I start thinking about this, I can start seeing the faces of those people who once partook of the Lord's supper with us and do not anymore.

It is a reality. There were people in the early church. We have historical documentation of people in the early church that went back and offered sacrifice and cursed the name of Jesus. It happened. So how do you deal with that?

Well, you address the people as a whole. And recognizing that I cannot look out over this room and I cannot look into your hearts. And so I can speak to the people of God as a whole and say to those who have truly been changed by the work of the spirit of God, you are going to hold on.

Your faith is going to survive. Here's how it's going to happen. I'm going to encourage you along those lines. But I can't look into all your hearts and you can't look into mine. And so when you when people get confused, well, why are there warning passages?

If Christ can not lose his sheep, then why would there be warning passages? Because God uses the warning passages. God ordains the ends and the means. And those strong warning passages have echoed in the ears of many a person who was flirting with the idea of apostasy.

And I've been privileged many times to have people contact me to say, you know, I was I was losing it. I was really getting tempted by name, a particular religion I deal with. And then the Lord used one of your debates, one of your books.

And those warning passages came real to me. And I'm I've I've repented of playing around with those thoughts. And the Lord used those mechanisms to keep his people where they need to be. And so he is encouraging the people and he says, for God is not verse 10.

God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward his name and having ministered and still ministering to the saints. And so God recognizes these people. They have not yet, according to the book of Hebrews, resisted unto the point of blood.

But that would be coming. And in fairly short term, that also is one of the texts that tells me this is very early. Very, very early in probably, like I said, in the 50s, in Paul's ministry experience.

And so God's not unjust. He's not going to forget what you have done. And we, the apostles, desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope unto the end.

So you will not be sluggish or lazy, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. And so here you have these strong words. We desire each one of you now becomes personal in the application of the individual to show the same diligence, the to show the same discipline, the good order, the zeal so as to realize the full assurance of hope unto the end.

Apathy is not a Christian virtue. The idea of skating along, I'm doing as well as everybody else, I compare myself to everybody else, I'm pretty good. That's never something that the spirit of God places within our hearts.

That's the flesh. That's the flesh. It doesn't want to be disciplined. That's the flesh that that enjoys taking it easy. That's the flesh that likes living in the world and getting along with the world and thinking like the world.

Whenever you seek to truly live in the spirit and crucify the flesh, the world is going to fight you. You are not going to have easy days when you seek to live in holiness. You're not going to have easy days.

And so if we want easy days, we can find ways of doing so religiously by comparing ourselves to others. What the writer is saying, no, you need to show the same zeal, diligence, so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end.

So that sounds like that sounds like doing something. Yes, the spirit of God is active in his people. The spirit of God is active in conforming us to the image of Christ. The spirit of God is active in bringing conviction of sin.

The spirit of God is active in causing us to desire godliness and to desire Christ. And when we talk about, oh, I truly want to be one who has full assurance. I want to embrace the hope of Christ. Well, there needs to be some diligence.

There needs to be some zeal in all of that. And so the desire of the apostles is each one of you. We want to see that diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end so that you will not be lazy.

So that you will not be sluggish. But the opposite of being lazy and sluggish is to be imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. And of course, you're going to be given an entire chapter eventually of examples of those who through faith and patience inherited the promises.

God wants us to look at those that he has worked in before us. There is a reason. We realize that there have been excesses. We realize that when Rome makes people saints and makes up stories about how they did miracles and stuff like that, that they never actually really did, that they are overdoing something.

But the tendency on our part is to run the other direction too far and to forget that God's been building his church. And it's good to look back and to see, you know what? We don't have it nearly as bad as most people who came before us.

It's so easy for us to go, oh, you know, they're shadow banning me on Twitter. And by the way, when the first shadow ban list came out, guess who was on it?

Me.

My name was right there. First day someone snuck it out and released it and said, hey, guess what? I was like, oh, well, that's nice. Someone likes me. Is that persecution? Well, I guess, you know, we see, you know, Tony Miano being arrested and the guilty verdict.

And we see Facebook shutting people down because they're saying things about homosexuality. And it's very obvious that the time is coming when not only will it be Google and Facebook just saying, no, we will not allow you to communicate your ideas to anybody, but it's going to be the government.

Unless unless God is is merciful to this nation, it seems that our leaders with ears over their hands, over their ears and their eyes closed are running toward the cliff of destruction that way. Because when you do that to God's people, God knows and he will judge and he will judge justly and and properly.

But but in comparison to what believers in North Korea are facing, that really ain't much. And historically, when you look back at what people have faced in the past, we ain't facing anything yet. And so when we look back, we can see people.

Did any of you see that little four minute video I posted at Fritz Urba's cell in the Vartburg Castle? Anybody, anybody? Just a couple of you did. Look it up. I really think I think that was important.

When I was in Germany back in September, we we shot a little video at the Vartburg Castle where Fritz Urba had been imprisoned from 1541 to his death in 1548. In this hole in the center of the South Tower of the Vartburg Castle in with no windows, a hole at the top where his food was was lowered down in pitch blackness for seven years over the issue of baptism.

And we we talked about just how strange that was, that that was the same building in which Luther translated the New Testament that he then read, came to a different perspective than Luther and ended up imprisoned in there for seven years before he died.

There have been people that have given a whole lot more than anything we're being asked to do. And so we can look back, we can see these people. We need to be imitators of those who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises.

When we look at those who've ended well and they've lived life well, then we need to look at them and draw encouragement for them, not by elevating them up and praying to them and making icons out of them or something like that.

But it's the faith and the fact that God worked in them in that way that can give us such value. And then we have this argument for when God made the promise to Abraham, since he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself, saying, I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply you.

So what gets our loss there is that in the Hebrew you repeat things so as to increase the the force with by which it's being said. So it doesn't really show up in English that well, but God's speaking.

I will do this. So I I'm the highest authority here. And so I swear by myself. And so having patiently waited, he obtained the promise. So God made a promise to Abraham. And so Abraham patiently waits and he obtains that process.

Now, you might say. Really, was he really all that patient? Does Ishmael come into this somewhere? Well, we don't have time to get all that today. We can get in that when you look at Hebrews chapter 11 and some of the things that said there.

But for men, that's sort of outside the argument right now for men swear by one greater than themselves. And with them, an oath given as confirmation is an end of every dispute. So, by the way, this will help you understand something later on.

We have the promise. And then we have an oath. There are two different things. One's the substance of what's being promised. The oath is I will fulfill it. That's going to become important in just a second in verse 18.

When it says two unchangeable things, those are the two unchangeable things. Everybody always asks, what are the two unchangeable things? It's the promise and the oath. We normally don't differentiate them that way, but that'll help you a little bit later on.

For men swear by one greater than themselves. And with them, an oath given as confirmation is an end of every dispute. Oh, that would be nice if we lived in a day when that was the case, huh? Now you have polygraphs and all the rest of that kind of stuff, because that idea of your word being your bond, not so much in a secular world.

In the same way, God desiring even more to show to the heirs the promise, the unchangeableness of his purpose. Now, just stop right there. We're only halfway through a sentence. That's normally not the best place to stop, but I just want you to catch something before we miss it.

Desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise, the unchangeableness of his purpose. Have you ever thanked God that he desires? We talk a lot about the desires of God. Well, one of the desires of God specifically laid out for us in Scripture is to show to the heirs of the promise, the unchangeableness of his purpose.

I remember back when I was the same age as the two more missionaries I was talking to, Elders Reed and Reese. I remember we met and Alpha and Omega Ministries came out of this and the whole nine yards.

And we met on a Monday and a Thursday for about three hours each time. And at the end of that second meeting, I didn't know about Mormonism yet. I mean, I'd started reading some books, but that was what got me started in that lengthy, lengthy period of study and learning.

But I had learned enough in talking with them and in reading a few books to have gotten a fair grasp on the LDS doctrine of God and the fact that he evolves and he's changed and he was once something he's not now, and the concept of exaltation and all the rest of that stuff.

And the last thing I said to those missionaries, which would be the same thing I'd say to missionaries today, was that, gentlemen, someday you're going to need to know the God who does not change because your God could change tomorrow because he's changed in the past.

You don't have a meaningful foundation for trusting the promises of a deity that has changed. And how often do we thank God that he desires to make known to us the unchangeableness of his purpose? We take that for granted.

We take for granted that tomorrow he's going to be as he is today, that the gospel is going to be the same tomorrow, that God doesn't just wake up one morning and go, I'm going to add a few stipulations, a few codicils to the contract.

You know, this just faith in Jesus was nice for a while, but we're going to up the ante a little bit. Or maybe we're going to make it simpler. We're not going to worry about the Jesus part anymore. That's not a possibility.

It's not a possibility. And God actually wants to reveal to the heirs the unchangeableness of his purpose, which means, hey, if that's what God desires, then we should highly value what God desires. It should mean the world to every believer in Christ that God is not going to be changing the promises that he has made to you and I.

We can absolutely trust implicitly to that last gasp of breath his promises to us. That's such a given. Most of us are like, oh, yeah, sure. But you see, you got to understand, that's what we've grown up with, especially if you were raised in the church.

That's what we've grown up with. The gods of this day were fickle, changing beings. This was revolutionary. This was odd. We accept it as a given, but it was an amazing thing at that time. So he wants to show, he wants us to see the unchangeableness of his purpose.

And so he interposed with an oath so that by two unchangeable things, the promise and the oath in which it is impossible for God to lie. We who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us.

That is a tremendous phrase. Verse 18, we who have taken refuge. That's an interesting description, isn't it? It's not the natural result, unfortunately, of much gospel preaching today, that people would view themselves as believers, as those who have taken refuge.

Refuge from what? How is that even descriptive of a believer taking refuge? I mean, let's admit, if I had handed out a sheet of paper and had asked you to write down ten descriptions of believers, do you think that would have even appeared on anyone's sheet?

I hope so, but probably not. That's just not the normal terminology that we use. Taken refuge. In fact, the way the gospel is preached today, it's more like God was really lucky to get me. He's just so blessed to have someone as talented and wonderful as me.

Now, what does it mean to take refuge? Well, some have pointed out that possibly, and this certainly has merit to it, maybe this is in reference to the cities of refuge in the Old Testament, where those who had taken a life inadvertently were able to flee to the cities of refuge, and there the families of those could not extract justice upon them in the sense of taking their lives because they were in the city of refuge.