The Living Word (Hebrews 4:12-13)

Hebrews 4:12-13 and the Word That Searches the Heart

When we turn now to the book of Hebrews chapter 4, we read together verses 9 through verse 13, Hebrews chapter 4. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered his rest has himself also rested from his works as God did from his.

Therefore, let us be diligent to enter that rest so that no one will fall through following the same example of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

And there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Let's pray together before we begin. Father, you make our hearts sing through your word, and we pray that you would accomplish all that concerns us today through the preaching of your word, that you would sanctify us as your people with the truth and by the truth for the glory of Christ, who is the living truth.

Be honored today through all that is said and done here, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. Well, I have a couple of corrections that I need to make from last week's message. First, some of you observed that I had mentioned that there was somebody here in our church that is attending the University of Washington.

And though I would have sworn I said University of Idaho, from the testimony of multiple people, two or three witnesses, they all said I said the University of Washington. I don't know why I said that, because in my mind I was certainly thinking Idaho, though I was in Washington at the time that I had a conversation with this person who for the moment shall remain nameless.

So I intended to say the University of Idaho, and just I have to say that because there are some of you who are wondering who is the Judas among us, who rose up speaking perverse things to draw away people after himself and went to the University of Washington instead of Idaho, who went out from us, who was not among us, but went out so that he could display that he was not of us.

So it was the University of Idaho and not Washington. And I also have to say that some of you are ready to resign your church membership even right now over the fact that I confused those two. I in no way intended to offend.

The second thing that I needed to clarify, and this was another correction from last week, is that I said that Are You My Mother, that book that the youth pastor preached from, was written by Dr. Seuss and it was not.

It was written by P .D. Eastman. Some of you are nodding your heads as if you know this already. It was written by P .D. Eastman and not Dr. Seuss. So I was misinformed by Bryce who told me that. He put Are You My Mother into the Dr. Seuss canon and it does not belong there.

It does not belong in the canon of Seuss literature. It is an apocryphal work. It's a pseudepigraphal work. It's one of those things that we can read and we can learn from, but it's not part of the inspired Seuss canon, which helps me to realize why it is that I didn't recognize, I didn't honor that as part of the Seuss canon.

So that was P .D. Eastman. Look, there's a cat in the hat on the outside of the book. It's the same illustrator. It's the same style of writing. It's published with Dr. Seuss stuff. So I should have checked my source and not just trusted what Bryce said.

So it's his fault. Now on to better things. Speaking of inspired canons, on to better things. We're looking today at Hebrews chapter 4, verses 12 and 13, and actually just a little bit of Hebrews chapter 4.

The Living Word as the Lord Jesus Christ

We started into this last week and we're taking the opportunity here to consider with some depth and some seriousness what scripture says about itself. And the statement in chapter 4, verse 12 regarding the word of God gives us the opportunity to kind of slow down a little bit and really give some thought and consideration to scripture's testimony regarding scripture and how it is that we should hold scripture in our hearts, what it is that we should think about scripture and how we should honor scripture and what we should do with scripture and why it should be central to the life of every believer and central to the life of anything that would call itself a church.

So that's what we're giving some consideration to now. And last week we just kind of introduced it and I dropped on you something that for many of you was probably a very relatively new concept, and that is that the phrase for the word of God is a reference in the mind of the author of Hebrews to primarily probably the Lord Jesus Christ and not just to written scripture alone.

So we gave some consideration and some time to thinking through John Owen, the Puritan pastor from the 1600s, through his arguments that in the mind of the author of Hebrews, the word of God is the incarnate word, Jesus Christ, and not necessarily the inspired word.

Now what is true of Christ is true of the inspired word because Christ is the incarnation of the revelation of God, and the author of Hebrews mentions that at the beginning of the book. But it is going to serve us and our interest here to just remember that we are going to be approaching this with a dual focus and recognizing that what we are saying about the word of God is also true of the son of God.

What we say in this context about the son of God is also true of the word of God. I don't think we can say either that the author is intending to speak of either one to the exclusion of the other. I think that he intends for us to understand both of these.

I certainly, based upon the text, could not argue that this is only speaking of Christ and not the word of God, or that it is only speaking of the word of God and not of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we're going to be approaching it with sort of that dual emphasis.

We saw last week in chapter 4, verse 12, that he says, for the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. We considered what it was that the word of God is referring to, and now as we work our way through this, we're just going to look today at what it means that the word of God is living, because there's a lot of stuff that's attached to that idea that the word of God is living.

I want to make sure that we understand what we mean by that and what we don't mean by that. So in keeping with our dual focus, I'm going to first explain how the word living applies and describes the Lord Jesus Christ as the incarnate word, and then we'll talk about how the word living describes the written word of God, the inspired word, and why it is, how it is that scripture is living, and what we mean by that.

So first of all, when you read in your English translation, for the word of God is living, that word living is back there quite a ways in the verse. In the original text, in the original Greek language, the word living is the very first verse of the verse, and that was in Greek literature oftentimes a way that a Greek writer writing in Greek would emphasize a certain aspect of it.

So if you were reading this in Greek, it would say living for the word of God is. So the emphasis is there on the living quality, and I think that stands out first of all in the verse. He mentions that first of all because if the word of God is not living in the way that the author describes it here, if the word of God is not living, it cannot do anything else that is mentioned in the passage.

If it's not living, then it's not active. Have you ever seen something that is not living but is active? Walk into a corpse or a funeral home, see a bunch of things that are not living but they're very active?

No, you don't. If it is not living, then the word of God is not active, neither is it sharp, nor can it cut to the soul of your being to joints and marrow, neither can the word of God discern and critique and judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

The word of God is not living. It can't do anything else in the passage. So right at the very outset, living is the word of God. That is how the author emphasizes that aspect of it. It is living. Now, how does this apply to the Lord Jesus Christ?

We gave some attention to John Owen's arguments regarding this passage, speaking of Christ, the incarnate word last week. One of his primary arguments in the passage is that the term living, first and foremost, primarily above all else, has to describe the Lord Jesus Christ, primarily in its ultimate sense.

Secondarily, the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, the written word, and here's why. We cannot say that the word of God has life in itself in the sense that it is the beginning, the source, and the fountain of life.

The word of God has life because of what it is, because of its source, because of who gives it its life, because God has purposed and decreed to work through the word. So because it comes from God and has God as its source, therefore, the word of God is living and it cannot be otherwise.

But we cannot say of either the gospel or the written word of God that it itself is a source of life unto itself apart from God, as if there is some living quality to the arrangement of the words and the phrases or the arrangement of the books in the book that we have that we call the Bible.

It's not living because it has this quality by itself. If God didn't exist, if God did not exist, this would not be living. Of course, we wouldn't exist either. You understand that. But if God did not exist apart from God, if he had ceased to imbue this word with his power, with his energy, with his life, then the word itself would stop living.

But God can never stop living. So Owen makes the argument that first and foremost, this has to describe the Lord Jesus Christ. He has life in himself. And we can describe the Lord Jesus Christ as one who has life in himself.

And we can describe that appropriately. Jesus said that in John chapter 5, he said, just as the father has life in self, so he, the father, gave to the son also to have life in himself. In other words, the father is the source of life.

And because the son shares the same and very nature of the father, the son has life in himself as well. John 1 verse 4 says, in him that is in Christ, the word incarnate was life and that life was the light of men.

Remember all of the IM statements when we went through the gospel of John, all the different ways that the Lord Jesus Christ described himself. And so many of them were related to the issue and the idea of life.

John 6, 48, I am the bread of life. John 8 verse 12, even describing himself as the light of the world. He said, he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. John 11, 25, I am the resurrection and the life.

John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Over and over the Lord Jesus Christ described this. Why? Because he has life apart from the father? No, because he has the same, very same divine life that the father had.

So ultimately we say it's the Lord Jesus Christ who is the living one. He is the one who has life. He is the resurrected one. In Revelation chapter 1 verses 17 and 18 where John describes the vision that he saw of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Isle of Patmos, John says that Jesus spoke and said, do not be afraid.

I am the first and the last and the living one. I was dead and behold, I am alive forevermore. And I have the keys of death and of Hades. And in Acts chapter 3 verse 15, Peter described Jesus as the prince of life.

Life is what characterizes the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the source. He is the fountain. He is the beginning of all life. Everything that lives and has breath, lives and has breath because he wills it.

And because he gives both physical life and spiritual life to anything that is living. And consequently, anything that dies, dies at his command. It's perfect time. He is the source and the beginning of all life.

And because he is divine, he shares the same life that the father has. That is why first Timothy chapter 4 verse 10, Paul says, we fixed our hope on the living God. God is a living God. He is alive and he is living.

And because he has that nature, the Lord Jesus Christ shares that. So he, the word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ is first and foremost living. He has life in himself. Even Hebrews chapter 3 verse 12 says that we are warned against falling away from the living God.

Hebrews 10 verses 31, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Now, both of those, Hebrews 3 .12 and Hebrews 10 .31 are both warning passages. They're judgment passages where judgment for disobedience and unbelief is warned about.

And in both of those passages, the author of Hebrew warns us and reminds us that we ought to fear and enter into this rest because the Lord Jesus Christ is the living God. He is the living one. Scripture is living because it comes from the one who has life in himself and is the fountain and source of all life.

Now, the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is living is something in itself of a two-edged sword, to borrow the analogy. It portends two things. For those who believe it is a source of tremendous comfort, tremendous grace, and tremendous promise.

To those who believe the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is alive is a promise to us of life to come. To those who do not believe and will not believe, who remain hardened and unrepentant in their sin, the fact that Jesus Christ is alive is a portending of a judgment that is to come.

Let me cash out both of those. For the believer, we look at Christ and we see he is the living God. And because he is the living one and he is the source of all life, the life that I have, which is eternal life, I share with him.

I receive that life from him. It is his life that he gives to me. He shares it with me. And so I shall live even though this body may perish, I shall live again. I know we can confess as Job says that though this body will be eaten by worms, we know that we shall stand in our flesh and we shall behold God with our eyes and not the eyes of another.

We shall see him with our own eyes. We shall be raised again. That is the promise. Of all who come to the father, the son will give them eternal life and he will raise them up on the last day. So for us believers, the reality that Jesus Christ is alive is a promise of our life to come.

It is guaranteed. It cannot be otherwise. But to the unbeliever, the fact that Jesus Christ is the living God and the living word, that is a guarantee that you will be judged for your sin. Here's how Paul describes it in Acts chapter 17 in Athens, when he said, God has overlooked the times of ignorance previously, but he has commanded now all men everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has furnished, but through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead, Jesus Christ is the appointed judge.

And the fact that he is living is a promise of a judgment to come. Now, this, this statement that Jesus Christ, the written word or the living word is a, is a, that the word of God is a living word of God.

That fact here stated in Hebrews chapter three is in a warning passage. Don't let that escape your notice. He is warning that those who do not find their rest in Jesus Christ will face the one who is the living God.

This, it is an ominous tone of judgment that rings through this entire warning passage. If you reject and you do not respond to the gospel of grace, if you reject this one who is the living one who offers you rest today, be assured of this, that this word of God who offers you rest is also the living God who will judge you on the final day.

Either find your rest in him or be judged by him. Those are the two options. All men will either find their rest in him or they will face judgment by him. The fact that he is the living God is a promise of the judgment that is to come.

And this is the lesson to the unbeliever. You will not escape. Most certainly. Why? Because the one who is the word of God, he's living. That's it. Period. Full stop. Because he lives, he can search out the motives and intents of man's heart.

Because he lives, he knows every thought, every motive, every deed. Because he lives, he remembers and knows it all. And because he lives, no purpose of his can be thwarted. Because he lives, there is a judgment to come.

Because he lives, he will return again. And because he lives, he will raise all men, some to eternal life and some to eternal damnation. That is a promise to those who believe of life to come. And there's a certain promise of a judgment to come to those who will not believe.

So it is a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. Enter that rest or face the living word of God as your judge. It is also a reference to scripture. And this is our dual focus. We say that the Lord Jesus Christ is living.

We can also say this of the word of God. And it's important that we understand why the word of God is living, how the word of God is living, and what that means for us. And so that's what we're going to be talking about.

Some of this, for those of you who study theology and love theology, is going to be something of a review. But we're going to cover here a couple of doctrines that we mentioned last week, starting with the doctrine of inspiration.

Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Preservation of Scripture

What does it mean when we say that the word of God is given by inspiration, that it is inspired? There's some confusion about what the doctrine of inspiration means. And we go back to the doctrine of inspiration because it comes from God.

That is what makes it living. So we're analyzing now, what is it that makes scripture unique? What is it that makes it a living word and not a dead word? What sets scripture apart from all other documents by all other authors through all of human history?

One of the things that sets it apart is the fact that it is given by inspiration of God. What does inspiration mean? There's some confusion about it because the word inspiration is sometimes abused and misused.

And we use the term inspiration to describe all kinds of things that have nothing to do with what we mean when we talk about scripture being inspired. For instance, we might say that I had a moment of inspiration.

I was writing a letter to my dying aunt, and I just felt the words flow out of my hand and right through the pen. And I just felt so inspired while I was writing that. Or that song or that movie or that poem really inspired me and lifted up my heart.

Is that what we mean by inspiration, that scripture is inspired? See how we use that term wrongly all the time to describe things that have nothing to do with what we're talking about with scripture. It doesn't mean that our hearts are warmed by it or that scripture simply came out because somebody just felt real freedom to write or anything like that.

What we mean by inspiration, we are describing a process and not the Bible itself. And this is important to remember. The Bible is not inspiration. Scripture is not inspiration. Scripture is given by inspiration.

Inspiration describes the process by which God delivered to us authoritative, divine, and living revelation of truth. Inspiration describes the process, not the product. So we don't say that the Bible is inspiration, because if we say that, then it communicates that when I read the Bible, my heart is warmed, and I can kind of snuggle up next to the Bible if I want to feel a little bit of its inspiration.

See how perverse that thinking is? So inspiration doesn't describe the product, inspiration describes the process. From the book Biblical Doctrine, here is a good definition of inspiration. Quote, it describes the process of divine causation behind the authorship of scripture.

It refers to the direct act of God on the human author that resulted in the creation of perfectly written revelation. It conveys the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, whereby he used the individual personality, language, style, and historical context of each writer to produce divinely authoritative writings, close quote.

I just want to emphasize that last sentence, and I'll read it again. It conveys, the word inspiration conveys the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, whereby he used the individual personality, language, style, and historical context of each writer to produce divinely authoritative writings.

So we can affirm of scripture, of the Word of God, the 66 books, which we have in our Old and New Testaments, we can affirm these two things. It is a human product in the sense that God used human authors to inscripturate and to write out his Word.

It is a divine product as well. It is both a human writing and a divine writing. Paul's writings are uniquely Pauline. John's writings are uniquely Johannian. Peter's writings are uniquely Petrine. Those are all the beautiful flowery words that they use to describe the language, the grammar, the syntax of each individual author.

Not everybody writes like Solomon in Ecclesiastes. Can we all recognize that and be thankful for that, right? Not everybody wrote like that in scripture. Every author had his unique context, his unique motivation, his unique concerns that he expressed in a very unique way.

So the Bible is a human product in the sense that it is the compilation of books written by men over hundreds of years, over three different continents, in various languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, over a long period of time, different men from different backgrounds, each book being just unique in its own way.

It is a divine product in the sense that behind all of those men superintending and directing the process is the Spirit of God himself, who put into writing through those instruments exactly what the Spirit of God wanted so that we would have a divinely authoritative, inspired, living revelation of who God is and what God demands.

Make sense? So it is both a divine book and a human book, which is why Peter can say in 2 Peter chapter 1, no prophecy was ever made by a human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit. Like wind blows in a sail, men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

2 Timothy 3 .16, all scripture is God-breathed. We memorize that with the word inspired. Inspired is a horrible word because it doesn't mean to breathe into something, it means to breathe out something.

God breathed out scripture through human authors so that we could have the living breath of God in the pages of scripture. And so it is inspired by God or breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof for correction, training, and righteousness.

So the product is the Word of God, which is a living book. Now, here's what we do not mean by inspiration. What we do not mean is sometimes what is called a dictation view. As if an author sat down with pen in hand and paper before him and heard a word or a phrase and wrote down the word of the phrase and listened.

Heard another word or phrase and wrote that down and listened. That's not how they did it. Heard another word or phrase, well, maybe not, not certain about that one. I guess I'll go back to washing dishes.

No, heard another word, but write that one down. That's not how inspiration was given. It's not the dictation view. There are times in scripture when they quote God and they say, God has spoken this, and they heard the Word of God and they put quotations around that, but not all of scripture is direct quotations from a voice of God, which they audibly heard.

Some of it is, but most of it is not. That's not what we mean. Not that men heard a voice and dictated and everything was spoken audibly and they transcribed it. When we talk about the Word of God, that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about inspiration. It's not what we're talking about, not the dictation view. Second, not a conceptual view. That is that God sort of inspired the ideas as if God sort of tried to put it on Isaiah's heart to write something really warm and fuzzy about God.

And so Isaiah woke up one day and just felt, you know, I just feel some general concepts about God that I want to share with others. So I'm going to sort of sketch out what I think and what I'm feeling, the general concepts.

Some people say that's inspiration, that the ideas or concepts behind scripture, that there is a God, that he's great, that he loves us all, that he's in control. Those concepts are kind of inspired, but the authors themselves were left up to the individual words or ideas that they wanted to put into scripture.

And so it could be authored and it could be filled with different errors that you find in scripture and different authors said it different ways. And sometimes Paul got it wrong, you know, concerning the roles of women in the church and human sexuality and marriage.

Paul didn't quite get that right. But the idea that God is really good, Paul got that right. That's the conceptual view. That's not what we mean. Nor do we mean the natural view of divine inspiration.

Natural view is that God chose men who were really pious and really wise to share with us the deep human insights that they had from what they observed from humanity. So that what we have today is a collection of words shared by the great sages of the ages.

And it's shared with us in the pages of scripture so that God just chose these men and they wrote whatever they wanted to write. But we have the best of the collection of these writings, which is the collection of wisdom over the ages.

By that view, in a couple hundred years, we might as well throw the U .S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Shakespeare's works into the canon as well, because that's what you're going to get with that kind of a view.

No, what we mean is that the word of God itself is the word of God, that God breathed out his word through human instruments, different occasions and different times to give us exactly what it is that he wanted.

Because it is the breath of God, it is living. It cannot be otherwise. We'll talk about this in the next week or two. When God speaks, it is always divine. It is always authoritative. It is always inspired.

It is always living. It cannot be otherwise. It cannot be otherwise because of its source, because it comes from God. It is always anything that comes from him that he speaks is his word in that sense.

Now, a related doctrine to that, to inspiration, is inerrancy. And I mentioned this last week. I was talking about inerrancy while I made all of the mistakes that I corrected at the beginning of this message.

Inerrancy means that it is without error, and we say that it is without error in its original autographs. We recognize that there are individual copies in manuscript traditions that contain scribal errors.

We can identify these. We know where they're at, textual variants, misspellings, mispronunciation, etc., contractions and things like that that are in there. They're inconsequential in terms of the meaning of it.

And because we can identify textual variants, we can come to a conclusion as to exactly what the original manuscript said. Inerrancy is something that is conveyed to the original autographs. It is the piece of paper that the Apostle Paul wrote is exactly inspired, and it is inerrant.

The copies are not inerrant or without error, but we can compare copies to copies, and we can get back with almost 100 accuracy exactly what the authors wrote. And there's no doctrine. There's no will of God.

There's no revelation of God, no major doctrine of theology that is at stake with the various manuscript traditions or copyist errors in the copies. So we're not talking about that when we're talking about inerrancy.

In the original autographs, it is without error, absolutely perfect exactly as God gave it. What we have today is an accurate and true and faithful and 100 certain representation of what was written back then.

So that's inerrancy. Related to that is infallibility. Infallibility means that God's word cannot fail to accomplish what he has purposed to accomplish. If God has willed to reveal himself and his truth and his will through Scripture, the Scriptures cannot fail to do what God sends it to do.

God's word cannot fail to accomplish the purposes that he has purposed for it. This is an important doctrine because there are some who say that the Bible is fallible, or there are some who suggest that over the course of time, the Bible has been corrupted by men, by the freewill decisions of men, and men who inserted things into it and changed things in inspired Scripture.

Or they lost, cut out certain books, so they threw in books that really weren't intended to be there. Listen, if God intends for his word to do something, namely to be available to us and accurate and living for us in our day, his word cannot fail to accomplish what he in eternity past determined and decreed that his word would do.

So in that sense, it is absolutely infallible. Not only does it not contain any errors, his word cannot err. All error rests with us, the recipients, but his word itself cannot err. And related to infallibility is preservation.

So we've gone through inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, and now preservation. Preservation is related to all of this. All of this is the logical, I'm just building for you a logical case of what Scripture says regarding itself.

Because God is a God of truth, he cannot err. Because God speaks what he speaks, his word is incapable of committing an error. And because God is who he is, he must and he will preserve his word. And this is simply just the next logical step in the process.

God himself has promised to give his word to his people and to preserve his word for his people. That's God's promise. Now, if you deny that Scripture has been preserved for us exactly as God gave it, if you deny that, then you must call God a liar.

Because Scripture says that that is God's intention. God has intended to preserve his word for us. And to deny that he has is to say that God is a liar. He is the one who sovereignly has preserved his word against corruption.

It's nonsensical, inane, and rank stupidity to suggest that God who gave his word and moved so powerfully in and through those men to write down what he wanted for us is then, over the course of time, unable to preserve it or to keep it from human corruption or perversion.

To suggest that God can do that, and he can do everything else, but he cannot preserve or keep his word over time, that is just rank stupidity to suggest that. The God of the person who thinks that way is not the God of the Bible.

He's not. The God of the Bible is able to give his word and to preserve it perfectly and to keep it. No purpose of his can be thwarted. And if God says, my intention is that this word would stand forever, it will stand forever.

Because no purpose of his can be thwarted. No man can stand against him. No man can corrupt what God wants to preserve. Because the minute he tries to do it, God would strike him dead. He has the power to do that.

If he has the power to give his word, he has the power to preserve his word. And this is what Scripture says, Psalm 119, forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Your faithfulness continues through all generations.

You establish the earth and it stands. They stand, that is the earth and God's word. They stand this day according to your ordinances for all things are your servants. In other words, the Psalmist is saying, everything that is created serves God's purposes.

So God created the earth, he established it and it stands. God gave his word and it is forever settled in the heavens and it cannot be perverted. They, the earth and God's word stand and are established and forever settled because everything serves his purpose.

And there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can change his purpose. Psalm 119 verse 152, of old I have known your testimonies that you have founded them forever. Psalm 119 verse 160, the sum of your word is truth and every one of your righteous ordinances is everlasting.

Isaiah 40 verse eight, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Jesus said in Matthew 5, 18, truly I say to you, heaven and earth pass away, but not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until it is all accomplished.