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Sunday School and Worship Service at Kootenai Community Church
If you haven't found a seat yet, please come in and find a place to sit down. We're gonna begin our Sunday school. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer. Our gracious God, we thank you for this place to meet, for the ability to be here, that you've called us together.
And we thank you that you have given us your word and a written revelation of you and your redemptive plan and your grace toward us in Christ. And we pray that you would give us understanding today into how you have preserved that for us.
Help us to understand the issues surrounding canonicity and what gives a book its authority. We pray that you would grant me clarity in my thinking and in the presentation, and grant us all the ability to understand these things and to appreciate them, that we might know your mind and your heart in these issues.
And bless this time of teaching and our time of meditation here upon the subject of your word, we pray in Christ's name.
Amen.
All right, we are in lesson 11, and I'll give you a bit of an overview or review here in just a moment. This, I think the first time I taught through this back 12 years ago or so, we went through lesson 11 in one lesson, and we're now two in, and we're not quite even halfway done with it yet.
And the purpose of going through this a little bit slower this time is not just for the sake of going slower. But last week, we didn't even get through a fraction of what I had intended to get through last week.
But I could tell, I think, from the questions that you were asking and from the thoughtful looks on your faces and the way that you were thinking through some of these issues that I think that thinking through this on a bit of a deeper level is a bit fruitful for you, at least I hope it is.
And I'm kind of picking up that that is the case. So today, we're just going to, we're gonna continue in lesson 11, and I'll just give you the payoff of, or the big idea of what we looked at last week.
Last week, we basically looked at this central idea that the church does not determine what books are canonical, and early Christians did not determine what books are canonical. The church discovers what books are canonical.
What makes a book canonical is the fact that it is authoritative, and it is authoritative not because a group of bishops confers authority on a group of books. A book is authoritative because God wrote it, God spoke it, and because it is inspired, it is therefore authoritative.
It is inerrant, it is infallible, and it therefore belongs in what we call the canon or the group of collection of inspired books that form for us the rule of faith and practice. So what makes a book authoritative is not an external quality that it has, that it's old, or that it was written, or that it encourages the hearts of Christians, or that it was accepted widely.
Those are not criteria that we look for to determine if a book belongs in the canon. What makes a book belong in the canon is the fact that God wrote it. And so we begin, this is the only way of avoiding that sort of circular reasoning that we looked at last week, is to finally get out of that and say, there's somebody who determines what is canonical, and it is the one who wrote it, namely God himself.
So today, are there any questions from what we covered last week or from that statement? If you weren't here last week and didn't catch it, any quick questions regarding that that we can cover before we get into our lesson for today?
We're all up to speed?
Yes.
Yes, we're in lesson 11. So Rick wasn't here last week. Just find a place and start writing it down. We're gonna start with Roman numeral five, canonicity in the early church. Thanks, Rick, appreciate it.
What's that?
Page 37. Page 37, Methel says. Okay, canonicity in the early church. Did the early church recognize New Testament canon? Did the early Christians in the first century recognize a corpus of divinely given revelation other than the Old Testament?
Now, we would assume that Christians in the first century would have recognized the Old Testament as inspired. Jesus affirmed the inspiration of the Old Testament. The apostles all quoted from the Old Testament in their writings.
The apostles would have recognized the authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility of the Old Testament text following the lead of Jesus. So there's no doubt that early Christians would have recognized the canonicity of the Old Testament, that that was the word of God, a revelation given around that first covenant that God made with the Jews after redeeming them out of the land of Egypt.
But then the question is, did the early Christians expect or did they recognize a corpus, a body of divinely given revelation, inspired documents during the first century? Did they recognize a body of books in the first century?
So let me give you a quick review of back what we covered in lesson three. And actually, this is just reviewing what we covered almost all the way up until now. I'm gonna just quickly give you some bullet points to remind you of the table that I've already set for this.
It's been almost a year ago that we started this study now. All right, first, Jesus promised inspiration of the Holy Spirit to the apostles.
Do you remember that?
He said, I'll bring to your mind all things that I've said to you. And he promised the aid of the Holy Spirit in giving to the Christians, through inspiration, by the work of the Holy Spirit, an inspired document.
The apostles were to teach with divine authority all that Christ taught, so that what they said was the Lord's command. Peter viewed the scriptures, sorry, Peter said that what Paul wrote was scripture, and Peter viewed the scriptures as inspired by God.
Paul claimed Luke was inspired. Paul puts his own writings on par with scripture. John claims divine inspiration and authority for the book of Revelation. All of Paul's epistles lay claim to divine authority and inspiration.
And Paul expected his epistles to be read in the service just like other scriptures were. So with that sort of overview of what we covered so far, did the apostles, here's a question, did the apostles understand that when they wrote things, that they were writing divine scripture?
Do you think the apostles understood that?
Okay, so what would be some of the evidences that we would point to to say that they had every expectation that they believed that they were writing scripture? Holy Spirit conviction, okay, that's a subjective one.
That's right. Okay, Rick? 2 Timothy 3, 16, there Paul's appealing to the Old Testament scriptures, right? Not necessarily his own writings, but what Mike just said is pertinent to this, that Paul expected his writings to be treated almost like they treat, exactly the same way that they treated other scriptures.
To be read in the public worship service, to be obeyed as God's commandment, right? He claimed to have apostolic and divine authority in more than one of his epistles. In 2 Corinthians and in the book of Galatians, he defends his own apostolic credentials.
Peter, did you have something? Yeah, sometimes they said this is the word of the Lord, sometimes this is God's commandment. Okay, so the apostles did themselves recognize that they were the authors, the writers of divine inspiration.
And one thing to remember is that revelation was given in chunks. You look at it throughout the history of Old Testament revelation. Some people think that revelation, Old Testament, sort of trickled into people's usage just a little bit at a time, but that's not how it was at all.
Peace is to give that revelation. So in answer to the question, did Christians in the first century view the apostolic writings as authoritative and inspired scripture, yes or no? Okay, so when then did Christians recognize.
These canonical books in the first century,.
When they received them? When you received a letter from the apostle Paul, do you think anybody said, hey, you know, this is, this book Titus, this is really good stuff. Someday, someday, Christians are gonna recognize this as scripture.
Probably two, 300 years from now, somebody is gonna say that belongs in a collection of these kinds of books because this is that type of quality book. You think anybody thought that way? Or do you think they said, if this comes from the hand of John, if this is written by Peter, if this is written by Paul, it is therefore authoritative.
They are the apostles of the Lord. Their word is God's word, and if they wrote it, and they have written this down, then this is inspired scripture. The evidence from the early church is that in the earliest days, that's exactly how they viewed revelation.
Yes, Bryce? Okay, oh, good question. So we obviously have more than just two letters written to the Corinthian church, right? We have two lost epistles, or epistles that have not been preserved by the providence of God for us today.
So we have two epistles that we know that Paul wrote to the Corinthian church. Were they non-authoritative writings? Paul wrote them as instruction to the Corinthians. Would they have been authoritative?
Okay, so we go back to our doctrine of inspiration. Do we have in our possession everything ever said by an apostle or a prophet? We don't. Does that mean that everything else they said was non-authoritative and non-inherent?
It just means that it has not been preserved for us. So because we don't have them does not mean that they were not authoritative writings, and whether the Corinthians accepted them or embraced them as authoritative in scripture or not is irrelevant.
What we're talking about here is what has been preserved for us. What has been preserved for us is the two epistles that we have to the Corinthian church, but it doesn't mean that what Paul wrote to them previously was not itself inspired or that it was not authoritative.
It just means that it has not been preserved for us. Exactly true, yeah, we really cannot, that's a good point. We cannot make judgments upon what we don't have, right? Because all we can talk about is what we have preserved for us, what is kept for us.
We could have been a shopping list that we didn't need. If we needed it, if we needed it, our doctrine of inspiration and preservation says that God would have preserved it for us if we needed it. If he intended that for his whole church, we would have it, but we don't have it.
And I would not assume that we have every letter that Peter ever wrote or everything that John ever wrote or everything that Paul ever wrote. I think they probably wrote all kinds of things. Paul, over his 30, 25 years of ministry, I might have think that he only wrote 13 letters in the 25 years of dealing with churches.
No, it doesn't mean that at all, but God has providentially preserved what we have and what we have preserved is canonical and recognized as authoritative. Peter, do you have a question? No, we will address that, yeah, yep.
Okay, so letter B, is that where we're at? Canonicity, okay. Yeah, it's your letter A. Within the first century, there is evidence that first, Christians were careful to only give authority to that which they knew was authentic.
All right, we shouldn't buy the idea or think that Christians back then, that any book that they had that came across their desk that they thought was from an apostle or that claimed to be from an apostle that they widely accepted or that any book that mentioned Jesus, they would have just accepted it as canonical.
That's not how, that's not their standard. Their standard was what, is it apostolic? And if it's apostolic, it's authoritative. And if it's authoritative, it comes from God. If it comes from God, it's inspired and infallible.
So the standard was apostolic writings, not just any book that mentioned Jesus. So, 2 Thessalonians 2, verse two, Paul mentions a letter that was circulated and it claimed to have come from him, that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.
There seems to have been a letter circulating that claimed to have been from Paul that the Thessalonians, that had caused the Thessalonians some concern that they had missed the day of the Lord, that the rapture had come and they had missed it.
And Paul said that there's this letter out there as if from us, don't be swayed by that. And then at the end of 2 Thessalonians 3, 17, Paul writes, I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand and this is a distinguishing mark in every letter.
This is the way I write. There was some signature or some mark that Paul wrote on his books which gave it some sort of a seal of authenticity. And the apostle Paul there is affirming that this was a genuine letter that came from him and he is pointing to his signature, whatever he put at the end of it, which was a distinguishing mark of all the letters that he writes.
Because it was a concern in the early church that only what the apostles wrote was accepted as authoritative and inspired and inerrant. Because you had, even in the first century, heretical people, heretics and false teachers, wolves in sheep's clothing, who were claiming to have authority.
This is what plagued the church at Corinth. Men who were supposedly apostles, who claimed apostolic powers, who claimed apostolic authority. And Paul is careful to distinguish his letters from anything else that might have circulated that might have claimed to be from him but genuinely wasn't.
Okay, so we have evidence that Christians were careful only to give authority to that which they knew was authentic.
So where is the apostolic authority conferred? You have, I would say that it is conferred in the Gospel of John where Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would bring to their mind all things that he said to them.
There was the expectation that they were going to, I mean the Great Commission certainly is part of that, go into the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. You have it in the book of Acts. You see the 12 of them, the 12 disciples gathered together with Matthias present.
Those 12 men gathered together praying and then they received the gift of the Holy Spirit and stand up and preach. The church is founded. They baptize new believers. That kind of authority as the messengers of Jesus was something that Jesus conferred upon them but also something that they would have assumed from what Jesus would have taught them even after the resurrection.
Unique to them, yeah. The term apostle was not something they just threw around. I should distinguish the term apostle in terms of capital A Apostle and small a Apostle because the word apostle just means sent one, one commissioned or sent.
So if I send my son to the grocery store to do something or send him on my behalf with power of attorney to go do something on my behalf, he becomes my apostle in that sense, a sent one. But in the New Testament, we recognize the distinction between Barnabas who was also called an apostle but he was just a messenger of the church and those who were messengers of the risen Christ given authority that was unique to them by virtue of the fact that they were taught by the Lord, which Paul was for three years in Damascus, and by virtue of the fact that they had personally seen the risen Christ.
And that's how Paul got his apostolic authority. And of course, that was one of the criteria for selecting Matthias as an apostle.
Yes?
Sorry?
Luke was not an apostle with a capital A Apostle, but he did right, yes, he did right. So when we talk about, we were gonna get to this a little bit later on today, but we're gonna get to this probably next week.
When we talk about apostolic origins or the apostolic authority, there are books in our New Testament that are not written by apostles. Luke is one, Acts is another. Mark was not written by an apostle, and neither was Hebrews, likely.
But the question is not whether they were written by apostles, but also whether they contained apostolic doctrine, apostolic content, whether they comported with apostolic teaching, and whether there were people closely associated with apostles.
So Luke was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul, and most people regard Luke's gospel basically as Paul's gospel. And the same would be said by the book of Acts. Book of Acts written under the auspices or in conjunction with the apostle Paul basically is Luke is his traveling companion.
Mark is regarded as Peter's gospel because it has the earmarks of Peter's authenticity and authority all over it. So those books, and then you have the book of Hebrews is the one that we would question.
What about the book of Hebrews? We don't even know who wrote the book of Hebrews. Could have been a guy named Joey Bagidonis. Well, Joey Bagidonis had to have been closely associated with the apostles, and the early church recognized the apostolic doctrine and the close association of whoever it was that wrote the book of Hebrews gives evidence to being personally associated with the apostles.
So it's not just, it had to be written by an apostle, but it had to have apostolic doctrine, it had to be authentically apostolic in its content, and it had to have been embraced as somebody who at least wrote under the auspices or with an apostle and had apostolic authority by virtue of its content, not just its specific authorship.
So, yeah, Bryce.
Yep.
Yeah, it would apply to the book of James as well.
Nathel.
Would the fact that they quoted the Old Testament add to its veracity? Not necessarily, because a lot of writings back then would have quoted and could have quoted from the Old Testament. Yes, Cornell.
Yeah.
Right, yeah, right.
That's a very good point. I thought there was another question.
Was there another one? Rick, did you have a question?
Can I define apostolic? I would say that it relates to the apostles. That would be the 11 people who were left after Judas committed suicide. So the 11 disciples, they were the apostles. They added Matthias, whom I personally believe is a genuine apostle of the early church, and then you had the apostle Paul added to that as one untimely born, he describes.
So when we talk about apostolic, in this context, I'm talking about capital A apostles, those personally commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ, not just any joblo sent out as a messenger to the churches.
Barnabas would have been an apostle in the lowercase a, apostle sense. But he wasn't a capital A apostle. He wasn't one who had seen the risen Lord who was commissioned by Christ as a mouthpiece and an authority with apostolic authority in the early church.
Okay?
Any other questions?
Okay, letter B.
We have evidence that churches, or no, yeah, letter B in your notes. We have evidence that the churches gave attention to the public reading of scripture in their services, and that would include apostolic writings.
Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5, 27, I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brethren. Colossians 4, 16, when this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans, and you, for your part, read my letter that is coming from Laodicea.
The Laodicean letter may be the book of Ephesians. Some people suspect that it is. It may have been another letter that Paul wrote. But regardless, the apostle Paul expected and asked that his letters be read in the public gathering amongst the church when they gathered together.
That is something that was reserved for scripture. So again, we're just making the case that in the first century, there was evidence that they expected revelation and viewed the writings of the apostles as authoritative and inspired scripture.
Third, there's evidence that apostolic books were collected and circulated. Revelation 1, 11, write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches. So we know that the book of Revelation was circulated amongst at least seven churches.
James 1, 1, to the 12 tribes who were dispersed abroad, greetings. And we might assume that the book of James, from that is written to a large dispersed group of people, that multiple copies were made very quickly and distributed to all the people that James had addressed his letter to.
First Peter 1, 1, to those who reside as aliens scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who are chosen. Peter would have expected his letter, addressed to all those various people groups and people scattered into those regions, to be very quickly copied and circulated amongst them because the letter was not just sent to an individual person or to an individual church, but to churches scattered throughout these regions.
So apostolic books were collected and they were circulated, or we could even say that they were copied and circulated. And then letter D, are we there yet? Yes, letter D, Peter possessed, or at least knew of a collection of Paul's letters and he regarded them as scripture.
Second Peter 3, 15 to 16, just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you as also in all his letters speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand.
If you think some of Paul's writings are hard to understand, so did the apostle Peter, which the untaught and unstable distort as they do also the rest of the scriptures to their own destruction. Peter is affirming that Paul is an inspired writer.
Now Peter gives credence to Luke as an inspired writer in 1 Timothy chapter five, where he quotes something that Jesus says in Luke's gospel and he quotes that as scripture. Paul was aware of a gospel that Luke had written and he quotes that, the words of the Lord Jesus, and he calls Luke's gospel scripture.
So a question was asked last week, what do you say to somebody who wants to disregard all of Paul's writings and say Paul's writings are not scripture, only the other stuff is scripture, when you take books out of the Bible?
It was a question that was asked last week. Well, who are you going to then affirm, who are you going to affirm as an authority in that case? Would you recognize Peter as authoritative? Well, you would have to, wouldn't you?
Well, Peter confessed that Paul's writings were scripture. And if Paul's writings are scripture, and that means he had authority to write scripture, and if Paul's writings are scripture, then when Paul calls Luke an inspired writer, that gives us Luke and Acts as well.
So now you're back to all of Paul's writings with Luke and Acts on the basis of rejecting them to affirm that Peter is actually an authority. That make sense? All right, so thus, we have evidence from the first century in the writings of the New Testament itself that New Testament books were verified, remember they accepted them only as authoritative, Paul said don't accept anything that doesn't come from me, doesn't bear this mark, that they expected those writings to be verified as genuinely apostolic, they read them, they copied them, they circulated them, and collected them even inside of the first century.
So even before the end of the New Testament was written, Christians had already began to discern which books were authoritative, to regard them as such, to treat them as such, to circulate them and preserve them as authoritative, and began to distribute them amongst the churches.
So that's within the first century, now we're gonna turn and look at canonicity after the apostles, did the early church fathers recognize a canon? Now in one sense, we're doing something that's a bit anachronistic, you know what anachronism is?
Again, anachronism is when you see something that doesn't belong in the time period in which it is sort of set, right? You're watching an Old Western, you see somebody wearing an Apple Watch, and you think that's a bit of anachronism, they didn't have Apple Watches in the Old West.
Okay, so when I talk about canonicity in the first century, or canonicity in the second century and third century, it's somewhat of an anachronism, because we're taking a concept that we recognize today, and we're kind of reading that back a little bit into that time period, but all we're doing is asking, did they recognize a corpus, a group, a body, of inspired and authoritative writings?
That's what we're asking. So we talk about, did the early church fathers of the first century recognize a canon? I'm using a word that we might date to later to really capture a concept that we're asking, did they recognize these authorities in the first century?
And then shortly after the first century, in the time of the post-apostolic early church fathers, which would be the years, say, 100 to the year 300 or 350. So those early church fathers, and we refer to them as the early church fathers, the post-apostolic fathers, they quoted from the New Testament books, the 27 New Testament books, over 86 ,000 times.
Now I said some months ago when we were back talking about the transmission of the New Testament text and the documents that if you were to take all of the manuscripts of the New Testament and all the codices that we've gathered throughout history and you were to burn all of them, that you could still reconstruct almost the entire New Testament just from the writings of the early church fathers from the years 100 to the year 300.
Because the early church fathers quoted so prolifically from the New Testament text that you can, I think it was one quote that I gave you, you could reconstruct the entire New Testament except for 11 verses in the book of Revelation, just from the quotations of the early church fathers.
All right, so these men referred to the writings which we have in our New Testament, they referred to them as authoritative and as scripture. And my early church fathers were talking about Ignatius, who was a leader in the church in Antioch in AD 112, Polycarp of Smyrna, who lived from 70 to 155 AD, and he actually, Polycarp actually sat under and was discipled by the apostle John.
Clement of Rome, who lived in around 100 AD, Origen, who wrote from Alexandria around 230 AD, there's Clement of Alexandria, who was Origen's teacher. So the question is, those early church fathers between the years 100 and 300, did they recognize a corpus, a body of inspired documents, and did they refer to them as scripture?
And all of this is intended, by the way, to counter the notion that we didn't even know what books belonged in the Bible until the year 400, when some council met and said, these are the 27, and that it was some stooge of Constantine or some disciple of Constantine or some pope who conferred that authority on the books.
We're going through all of this to show that no, from the very early stages within the first century itself, as soon as these writings were written and circulated, they were recognized as scripture. The only question is, did everybody recognize them all at once?
And the answer to that is no, because those books were written, and it might take a long time before those books even began to be circulated and recognized as authoritative, simply because people, not that people didn't believe them to be authoritative or apostolic, but people didn't even know sometimes that those books existed.
So the writings of the early church fathers. Yeah, so we're under number six in your notes, and I'm just gonna give you some information. You don't have to, there's nothing to fill in there unless you wanna just jot down some of these details.
The writings of the early church fathers. Tertullian, he wrote in 220 AD, and here's what he said, quote, in the Lord's apostles, we possess our authority, for even they did not of themselves choose to introduce anything, but faithfully delivered to the nations the doctrine which they had received from Christ,.
Close quote.
So there's Tertullian, writing 200 years after the apostles, and what did he say? Actually, 150 years after the lifetime of the apostles, and he said it was in the apostles that we have our authority.
So he's recognizing something there, that the apostles were the mouthpiece of God, and that if it was apostolic in its authorship, or if it was apostolic in its acceptance within the church, because it had apostolic doctrine, it was authentically an apostolic book, and it had apostolic authority, that that is then the authority that we recognize, and not because it's a spiritual book, but because it is apostolic in its origin.
Polycarp, now remember, Polycarp was a disciple of John, the author of the Gospel of John, and the author of 1 John, 2 John, 3 John. Polycarp, who lived 70 to 155 AD, he wrote to the church at Philippi, and he quoted 50 times from 16 New Testament books, including Matthew, Luke, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Hebrews.
Now he quoted 50 times from 16 New Testament books. Now should we, are we to assume that because Polycarp, who was a disciple of the apostle John, only quoted from 16 books, that he therefore only recognized 16 books as the authoritative?
Should we assume that? There's no reason we should assume that, right? You know how long it's been since I quoted the book of Philemon? A long time. But the fact that I don't quote from it frequently doesn't mean that I don't recognize it as canonical or authoritative.
It just might mean that Polycarp didn't have occasion to quote from the other books, or it might mean that he didn't even know some of those other books existed at the time. Clement of Rome, in 100 AD, he was a leader in the church of Rome, he wrote to the church at Corinth.
He quoted Psalm 118, verse 18, and Hebrews 12, verse 6, referring to both as the holy word. So there we have, around the year 100, the book of Hebrews being recognized as scripture by Clement of Rome.
He quoted it as the holy word. In the same letter, he refers to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, because he had a copy with him. He also shows an awareness of one of the gospels, Hebrews, Romans, Acts, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 Timothy, Titus, 1 Peter, and the book of James.
Irenaeus of Lyon, who lived in 125 to 200 AD, he was a student of Polycarp. Now, Polycarp was a student of whom?
John, okay?
Irenaeus of Lyon was a student of Polycarp. He wrote five books, called Against Heresies, in 81 AD. He quoted from every New Testament book, except Philemon, 3rd John, James, 2nd Peter, and Hebrews. Now, ought we to assume that because he didn't quote from those books, that he didn't recognize them as authoritative?
We can't assume that, can we? He only accepted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as inspired testaments to the life of Christ. He accepted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, coincidentally, those were our four gospels, as the only inspired testaments to the life of Christ.
Now, Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp was a disciple of whom?
John.
Okay, so we're talking about very early recognition amongst those who knew the apostles, very early recognition of apostolic divine authority. Irenaeus had a canon of New Testament books which was almost identical to ours, around 180 AD.
Now, Tertullian, he lived in North Africa around AD 220, he attacked Marcion, remember we talked about Marcion a couple weeks ago, the one who rejected all of the Old Testament, anything Jewish, and just loved Paul's writings?
He attacked Marcion, and he defended all the letters of Paul, he referred to all the New Testament books except James, 2nd and 3rd John, and 2nd Peter. He rejected the Shepherd of Hermes as non-canonical.
So even then, they were recognizing around 200 which books were authoritative and which books were not authoritative, and he actually named some non-authoritative books. So when somebody says, well, the Shepherd of Hermes is one of those lost books of the Bible, the assumption behind that objection is that at some point, the Shepherd of Hermes was accepted widely by the church, and then it was somehow lost out of the Bible and then discovered in the basement of a brothel in Philadelphia or something, and this was one of the lost books that suddenly we have to accept now.
There's horrible assumptions that go into this whole lost books of the Bible type of nonsense. By the way, Irenaeus, or Tertullian, who referred to all the New Testament books except James, 2nd, 3rd John, and 2nd Peter, ought we to assume that because he didn't reference James, 2nd, 3rd John, and 2nd Peter, that he didn't regard them as authoritative?
Should we assume that? Didn't recognize them as canonical? We can't make that assumption. You see, people on the other side, well, they will look at these exceptions where they say, well, that church father, he didn't recognize these books.
He didn't recognize those books or he didn't quote from those books that we can find. There's a difference between those two things, and we have to view church history that way. Origen, who lived in 230 AD, he listed all 27 books, but he admitted that some people had doubts about some of them.
Some people had doubts about some of them. Doubts existed about Hebrews, James, 2nd John, 3rd John, Jude, and 2nd Peter, but Origen himself did not share those doubts. So Origen just recognizes around 230, he lists all 27 books, but he says some of these books, there are some people who have doubts about some of these books.
Now again, they're Hebrews, James, 2nd John, 3rd John, Jude, and 2nd Peter. Why would somebody have doubts about Hebrews, do you think? Right, could have been Joey Bagadonis who wrote the book of Hebrews.
We don't know. They didn't know who wrote the book of Hebrews. There are other early church fathers who believed it to be apostolic, and some early church fathers who viewed it as one of Paul's epistles.
I don't think that Paul wrote it, but I do believe it was apostolic. I think one of the best theories about who wrote it is that it was a message preached by one of the apostles written down by somebody else who heard that message or transcribed by somebody who heard that message.
The book of Hebrews bears all the marks of a given oratory address, a verbal defense of something. And somebody, maybe Apollos, maybe some traveling companion of one of the apostles wrote that down and thought that's a great message to circulate, and so it would bear the marks of an apostle, or maybe it was preached by somebody close to an apostle.
That's another possibility. Why would doubts exist about James? Bryce mentioned this just a few minutes ago. James was not one of the apostles, but he was a leader in the early church and worked alongside John and Peter in the early church in Jerusalem.
How about 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and 2 Peter? The reason there were doubts about those books by some is due to the fact that the authorship of those books was questioned by a few. They were probably not as widely circulated as other books, namely Paul's epistles, and so there might have been doubts by some who were waiting to see can we verify that these books are authoritative, written by an apostle, or commissioned by an apostle.
Eusebius, who was the first church historian, and he was a leader in Caesarea beginning in 313 AD, he became an advisor to Constantine after Constantine was converted, the emperor of Constantine was converted in 312 AD.
He claimed to have inquired into the attitude of all the churches as to their quote-unquote writings, and he made three categorizations of books. This is around the year 300. Eusebius claimed that there were recognized books, disputed books, and rejected books.
The recognized books included the four gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John, and Revelation. Those were recognized books, and thus, 22 books of our 27 books the church has accepted by the year 300 without any question, 22 of the 27.
Then there was another category that Eusebius refers to, and those are the disputed books. He says that these books were generally accepted. In other words, they were widely accepted, though even in around 300, there were some questions about some of these books.
Those disputed books included James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 John, and 3 John, and again, for the same reasons that we've already mentioned. The question about authorship, needed it to be verified. And third, there were rejected books, and Eusebius included in that heretical and pseudepigraphal writings.
Now Eusebius himself accepted all, but James, 2 Peter, and Jude. He accepted all of the books except James, 2 Peter, and Jude, though he admitted that they were widely used among the churches. So even the books where Eusebius said, I have questions about these, except all of them without reservation, except for these, he recognized that these were widely used among all the churches, even though he himself had personal reservation.
Now why might Eusebius have had personal reservation about those books? He obviously knew that they existed. It's possible that Eusebius didn't have a copy of some of them, it's possible that Eusebius didn't have time to study some of them, or be able to verify the authenticity of it.
And again, Eusebius is just one person from the early church who's saying, look, there were some questions about some of these books. Though widely accepted by most Christians, a few people are kind of a bit skeptical of these.
Yeah, Dave?
Yeah, very good. Another question that comes up with the book of James is his statement that a man is justified by faith, or sorry, by works, right? In James chapter two, when he's talking about the relationship between faith and works.
That statement by James was misunderstood by many people, and thus they saw him as countering the apostle Paul's authority. Well, if Paul is a verified, authorized apostle, and Paul writes that we're justified by faith, and along comes James, who's not an apostle, and he says what appears to be the opposite is not the opposite, they're perfectly harmonious, when you understand them in their context.
James says what appears to be the opposite, that would hold James in suspicion for a little bit. Yeah, very good point. Thanks for reminding me of that.
Yeah, Martin Luther was uncomfortable with the book of James.
Yeah, yep.
All right?
And then lastly, Athanasius of Alexandria. He stood against the heretic Arius in 367 A .D. He listed all the New Testament, just as we have it, only he put Hebrews before 1 Timothy, indicating that he believed Paul to be the author of Hebrews.
He included in his list the following statement, quote, these are the fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone the teaching of godliness is proclaimed.
Let no one add to these, let nothing be taken away from them. That was the middle of the third century. And all of this culminated at the Synod of Hippo. It was the first church council to list all 27 books of the New Testament in 393 A .D., and the list was affirmed in 397 at the third council of Carthage.
So from the time of the New Testament writing, books were recognized as inspired scripture. They were copied, collected, protected, preserved, and widely circulated as authoritative revelation. So by the end of the fourth century, we have an affirmation, not a sudden conferring of canonicity upon a list of books.
That's not what those councils did. They didn't confer canonicity upon them. What did they do? They simply recognized that by 300 years after the death of the apostles, these are the books which have been recognized by the church as authoritative.
These are apostolic books that we have verified. We know that they're apostolic in their content and in their doctrine, and these are the books that the churches have used. So when somebody says to you, nobody even knew what books belonged in the Bible till the year 400, almost three centuries after the apostles, is that a true or false statement?
False statement. The early church knew exactly which books were authoritative. The only question was, as those books were copied and circulated amongst people, it took some time for people to verify that these were apostolic books and that they belonged as part of the rule of life and faith and practice in the church.
That was the question. So today, by the year 400, those councils affirmed what Christians for hundreds of years had affirmed, that these books are divinely authoritative, inspired, inerrant, and infallible, and belong in the canon, that these are the rule of faith and practice.
Any questions about that before we move on? Our time is up. It's good questions, though. Let me give you a preview of next week. Under number seven there, I have written criteria for canonicity. I'm changing how I'm presenting this just a little bit from the way that I did 12 years ago because I've come to understand canonicity and the issue of canonicity a little bit differently, thanks in large part to the writings and work of Michael Kruger on this issue who I recommended a couple of weeks ago.
So we're not gonna call that, what do I call it, criteria for canonicity, but instead the qualities of canonicity. There are certain things that all canonical books have in common. Remember, last week we talked about, we don't say that a book is canonical because it meets a set of criteria because then the question is what?
Who determined what that criteria is? What's the authority by which we determine what the criteria is going to be? We say, well, the criteria that we have determined that by is drawn from scripture. Well, how do we know that scripture is authoritative to give us the criteria for canonicity?
We're in this circle. Instead, we say that canonicity is determined by God. When he writes the document, it is inspired. And it, right at that moment, has authority. Whether anybody recognizes it or not or knows about it or not, it is an inspired authoritative document.
So then the question just becomes how does the church recognize or affirm those? We discover it. We don't confer it. We discover what books are canonical. We don't determine what books are canonical. So we're gonna talk about the qualities of canonicity.
There are certain things that all canonical books have in common. And these are the things that all of our New Testament books have in common. And then we'll answer some common objections to that. So we are done.
Are there any questions before I close in prayer? Or comments?
Okay, then I'll do it.
Let's pray. Father, thank you for this time that we have had and for what we have covered and for our fellowship around these things. You use the truth of history and the truth of your word to confirm in our hearts who you are and what you have done for us in Christ.
And we thank you that you've worked in history providentially through your apostles, through the prophets, through the early church, through the church fathers, and through all of the time in between to give to us a preserved and inerrant word from you.
And we thank you that we can have confidence that as we read scripture that it is authoritative and that it is still a living book. And when we read scripture, we find that we're not just reading it, it is reading us and it knows our hearts.
It is a living word. And we thank you for that. And we thank you for the clarity that you've given to us in our thinking and regarding these truths. And we pray your blessing upon our worship service, our fellowship, and our meal that is to come afterwards in Christ's name.
Welcome to Kootenai Church on this fine last Sunday in January. If you would stand and join us. Our blessed Redeemer gave to his holy name.
Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome this morning. Just one announcement. Immediately following our service is our annual potluck and business meeting. So right after the service is over, we're gonna be picking up these chairs and putting down tables and putting chairs around tables.
So if you are not involved in helping out with that, we would ask you to move out into the foyer or one of the other classrooms and try and keep the kids out in the foyer so that we can get that set up as quickly as possible for our business meeting, which is to follow.
And if you're here and you had no idea that there was a potluck and no idea that there was a business meeting to follow, you are welcome to join us for that. If you didn't bring any food, that's okay.
There's usually plenty of food. You just need to make sure you get to the front of the line and not toward the end of the line, and you'll have something to eat. Turn your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 10, please.
Hebrews 10, I'm gonna read together, beginning at verse 19. I'm gonna read through the end of this chapter. Hebrews 10, beginning at verse 19. Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he inaugurated for us through the veil that is his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.
Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the son of God and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and has insulted the spirit of grace?
For we know him who said, vengeance is mine, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge his people. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But remember the former days when after being enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a spectacle, public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated.
For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward, for you have need of endurance so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
For yet in a little while, he who is coming will come and will not delay. But my righteous one shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.
Will you stand with me as we pray? Let's bow our heads. Our Father, you are our great, omnipotent and merciful God. We thank you that there is justice and that there is eternal justice so that the wrongs which are done in this life by the impenitent and the unbelieving will not go without your just and swift reward for them, without justice.
We thank you that you are a just God, that you are righteous, and that the foundation of your throne is truth and righteousness and justice. And for that reason, we know that you, because of your justice, that we will not suffer eternal damnation because our justice has been borne by your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
For in him we have a sacrifice that has perfected forever, those who are sanctified. In Christ we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. We have righteousness, which he has merited on our behalf.
We have the complete taking away of all of our sin and iniquity, and we have been saved from the wrath that is to come. And so we pray that you would work in our hearts today to give you thanks and adoration and praise for this great work of salvation, which you have accomplished for the good of your people and for the glory of your great name.
We owe all of our salvation and all that we have to you. We have nothing of which to boast of before you. We are not worthy of any of your grace. We are not worthy of any of your mercy. We deserve judgment and justice.
We deserve to fall into the hands of the living God and to suffer eternal wrath. But we thank you that by your grace you have delivered us from that. And we thank you for your love, which has moved you to do so, your love for us.
And we pray that you would fill our hearts with joy and affection today as we sing to the praise of our great God and our King, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.
It says in Romans 5, 8, and 9, but God demonstrates his own love toward us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more than having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him.
You will need to be open in your copy of God's word to Hebrews chapter 10. We're gonna read together verse 11 through verse 18. It's kind of a good reminder and summary of what we have covered here in recent weeks.
Hebrews chapter 10, beginning at verse 11. Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. But he, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time onward until his enemies be made a footstool for his feet.
For by one offering, he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with him, after those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws upon their heart and on their mind, I will write them.
He then says, and their sins and their lawless deeds, I will remember no more. Now, where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin. Let's pray together before we begin.
Our Lord, we do ask your blessing upon our time of study in your word. We pray that you would help us to see the consequent of all that we have affirmed and studied thus far in the book of Hebrews. Help us to see the intention of the author, both the human and the divine in the pages of this book.
And help us to see how this applies to our lives and what you are intending to strengthen us for in the days and the weeks ahead. We pray that you would be honored and glorified through this time, that you would give us clarity of thought and understanding in your word, and that you would be glorified through all that is said here, and through the meditation of our hearts, we ask in Christ's name, amen.
The Bible always is careful to connect orthodoxy with orthopraxy. Orthodoxy is proper belief, proper doctrine. It refers to the truth, those things which are objectively true that we affirm. Orthopraxy is proper practice, it's proper doing.
It is how we live in response to that, how we comport ourselves. If you are living in a way that is not orthodox, then you're not living in orthopraxy. You're not having a right approach in life that is in accordance with sound doctrine or sound teaching.
And the Bible always connects these two, these two things. So that orthopraxy, what we practice, is always grounded upon and rests upon a solid foundation of what is doctrinally true and biblical and right.
And so we always have to keep these two things in our minds as well, what we affirm to be true and how we live in conjunction with what we affirm to be true. It is in knowing the truth and understanding the truth, even the deep truths of scripture, that we are enabled and equipped by the spirit of God to live in a way that is honoring and glorifying to him.
It is a right and proper lifestyle and a right and proper response to truth and our obedience to truth always rests upon a good, solid understanding of deep doctrinal truths. And if all we ever hear is the dos of the gospel and never the doctrine of the gospel, if all we ever get is the commands, the exhortations, do this, live this way, behave this way, here's what you should be doing, follow this example, avoid this example, don't do this, don't go there.
If all we get is the dos of the gospel and we never are exposed to and taught the doctrine of the gospel, the truth that underlies all of that behavior, then all we're getting is Christian legalism, moralism, self-help philosophy.
Really, it's nothing more than pagan legalism that is baptized in Christian lingo. And it's quite fashionable in modern churches today. In fact, that is what is mostly fed from most pulpits across our land.
It is very difficult to find teaching where the doctrine of Scripture is taught in all of its profundity and the implications of that are brought in and tied into that doctrine. Mostly what we get is just the therapeutic, self-help, due moralism, Christian moralism, and Christian legalism that is sometimes attached to the gospel.
It's very fashionable amongst skinny-jean-wearing, soul-patch-toting, tattooed, pierced pastors who are desperate to be applauded by the world to give us nothing but the self-help morality that is attached to Scripture rather than the foundational truths that undergird all of that.
Oprah Winfrey can offer you as much. You don't need to go to the local silly center to get that kind of nonsense. Oprah Winfrey will give it to you for free without any obligation if you just tune into her on your average day of the week.
Just moralism baptized in Christian lingo. Well, we don't want that. We want a practice, a behavior, a lifestyle. We want obedience to Scripture that comes out of sound, solid, biblical, deep, doctrinal truths.
That's what we should long for. Now, the Bible does not shy away from the exhortations that we find in Scripture. It doesn't shy away from do this, don't do this, avoid this, pursue this. Scripture is full of those.
But those things are always connected to truth. You don't just read a book of here are all the do's and things you need to do now that you're a Christian. We don't get that in Scripture. Instead, we get explanations of doctrine and then connected to the explanations of doctrines are therefore here are the implications of that.
Here's how you live in light of that truth. Inform the mind and the heart will follow. The mind is the engine that pulls the train. The heart and the emotion, the affections, the obedience is the caboose.
That's what's being pulled by it. And if we inform properly the minds that we understand what is biblically and doctrinally true, then our hearts will naturally follow after that as we let our minds inform our behavior and we allow our behavior to be shaped by doctrinal truth.
This is the pattern that we see in the book in many epistles in the New Testament. For instance, the book of Romans, chapters one through 11 is doctrine. It's the doctrine of the gospel, the sinfulness of man, what it means to be justified, all the ways you can't be justified, what doesn't justify us, imputed righteousness.
And in light of that, we present our bodies, chapter six. And chapter seven is the struggle that exists with the new man and the old man and the implications of that. Chapter eight, the victory we have in Christ.
And then that gospel is worked out in terms of the covenant that God made with the nation of Israel in chapters nine through 11. And you get to the end of chapter 11 and the beginning of chapter 12 begins with, therefore, present your bodies as living sacrifices.
Here are all the implications of it. Doctrine in chapters one through 11, the implications of that, the application in chapters 12 through 16. You see it in the book of Ephesians. The first three chapters are the implications of the gospel.
God has given us all things in Christ. He has ordained and predestined us to adoption of sons. He's given us redemption. He has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world. We are seated with him in heavenly places.
As a result of what Christ has done, there's no longer Jew and Gentile. Now there is just one church, the new man, the church of God in Jesus Christ. And as a result of that, then we have chapters four through six, right?
The first three chapters of Ephesians are doctrine. How does chapter four begin? Therefore, walk in a manner that is worthy of the great calling with which you have been called. Now it's not that the first three chapters are without any application, but it's that the apostle Paul wants us to understand what the gospel is and all the spiritual blessings that we have been given in Jesus Christ.
And once we grasp the truth of that, then we can begin to work out and live out the implications of it. Therefore, because of all of these things that we have been given in Christ, therefore we are to walk in a manner that is worthy of the great high calling with which we have been called.
Well, we have the same thing, the same pattern in the book of Hebrews. The first 10 chapters of the book of Hebrews, the first 10 and a half chapters actually, are heavily theological. It's the heavily theological section of the book.
Now that's not to say that in the first 10 chapters that there are no applications, there are. There are lots of exhortations, right? And lots of warnings. Remember the warning passage in chapter two?
How will you escape if you neglect so great a salvation? Remember the warning chapter in chapter four? Hold fast to your confidence, firm in the faith, and do not be like the children of Israel who came out of the land of Egypt and into the wilderness and then began to disobey and didn't believe God and didn't have faith.
Remember the warning passage in chapter six?
Remember that?
Addressed to those carnal believers who were thinking about going back. Lots of warnings, lots of exhortations, lots of application in the first 10 chapters. But as we get to the end or the middle here of chapter 10, the heavily theological argument of the book has really come to an end.
Now that's not to say that in the rest of the book there's not theology, there is. But it is to say that he has completed or concluded his argument. And what is his argument? Jesus is better. He is better than the angels.
He is better than the Sabbath. He's better than Joshua. He's better than Moses. He's better than Melchizedek. His sacrifice is better. His blood is better. He has inaugurated a better covenant based upon better promises that gives us better things.
His work in the tabernacle is better. His intercession is better. His representation as a priest is better. Everything we have in Jesus is better than all we had under the Old Testament. And by now you probably are more than familiar with all of the things that we've talked about as we've gone through these first 10 1⁄2 chapters.
Of Hebrews.
Now you probably think, I know more about the new covenant and animal sacrifices and the tabernacle and the priesthood and the Sabbath and Melchizedek than I had ever thought that I ever needed to know, right?
By the time we get to that, it would be okay if you were to admit that several times in the first very heavy section of this book of Hebrews that you might have dozed off once or twice. I would admit that and I was preaching it.
I've dozed off a couple of times going through the first 10 chapters of Hebrews and I was preaching the book. It's some heavy theological stuff. And what we have learned is that Jesus Christ is better than everything contained in the Old Covenant by far.
He's not equal to anything. He is better than everything. And he is inferior to nothing. Everything we have in him is better. That's the whole point. 10 1⁄2 chapters to get us to that point. He has compared Jesus to every form, every feature, every fixture that was familiar to the Jews from the Old Covenant.
Everything that they were familiar with. He has held Jesus up alongside of all of that to show us that in every way, he is better. Point by point, he is better. What we have in him is better. Why would you go back to that?
Remember, that's one of the whole points of the book of Hebrews. Why would you go back to what you had when you have something that is far better than anything provided under the Old Covenant? So now, having reached the end of the theological portion of Hebrews, 10 verse 18, I should say the theological argument of Hebrews because there's more theology to come.
Lots more.
Good stuff. But we've reached the end of the theological argument of Hebrews. We now come to chapter 10 verse 19. Therefore, therefore, since we have this. You can tell that the author is turning a page, as it were.
Now, he is going to answer the question, what are we gonna do with this information? We've seen that Jesus is greater than all of these things, that that Old Covenant has passed away, that old priesthood has done away, that our relationship to the law has changed.
He has inaugurated a new covenant, and so the Old Covenant has grown obsolete, and it has passed away. We're no longer under that at all. Instead, what we have in Jesus is all of these things that he has provided.
He has perfected forever those who are sanctified. Everyone for whom he has died has been perfected and sanctified and set apart. Our salvation has been purchased. There's nothing else to do. It is entirely finished.
And so now the question becomes, how do I live in light of that? So what? What do I do with that? How does this affect my life? How does this affect how I live and how I think and what I do? What am I to do with all of this information that I've received in the first 10 1⁄2 chapters?
That's the question now. And the author is going to answer that, and the rest of the book of Hebrews is, while not avoiding doctrine, is really the application of all the doctrine that we have studied thus far.
And so now we get to a section of Hebrews where the author begins to warn us against certain things and encourage us toward other things. Now we get to the part of the book of Hebrews where he says, in light of this, do this and don't do this.
Avoid this and cherish this. Pursue this, go after this, but stay away from these things. In light of this truth, here is how you ought to live. Here are the things that you ought to do. That's the section of Hebrews that we're now beginning.
So at this point, I think it would be beneficial if we were to get kind of an overview, a bird's-eye view, as it were, of the next several chapters of the book of Hebrews so you can see how the author is going to work out the implications of this theology.
What is the main point that he's going to be driving at for the next several chapters, all the way to the end of this book? We wanna make sure that we don't miss that. So that's what we're gonna do here for the next few minutes is give you sort of a brief overview of the road ahead.
So beginning at chapter nine, verse 18, sorry, verse 19, we're gonna be looking forward, and you'll be able to flip through the pages of your Bible as we move forward. I'm gonna give you some passages.
We're gonna read some verses together. I'm gonna be highlighting some things so that you can see how this main theme is traced all the way through the following chapters. And here is the main theme. The central exhortation for the rest of the book of Hebrews is this, stand strong.
That's the central exhortation for the rest of the book of Hebrews. Stand strong. In light of what is true, stand. Stand in a world that is hostile to the truth. Stand in a world that hates the truth.
Stand in a world that is built on lies. Stand in a world that does nothing but preach lies. Stand and stand strong. Don't deviate from the truth. Don't waver in unbelief. Don't question your faith. Hold fast to what is true.
Hold fast to what Scripture says. Hold fast to Christ. Do not leave. Do not back away. Do not back down. Do not apostatize from the truth. The central exhortation of the next several chapters is that, and the author is going to come at that from every conceivable angle.
That is what he wants his readers to do, is to hold fast and to stand strong. Now, there are two responses to the truth, and we're gonna begin now to go through these next few chapters. There are two responses to the truth that somebody could have.
After reading through everything we have all the way up to chapter 10, verse 18, there is the response of the believer, and then there is the response of the almost believer, or the response of the believer and the response of the make-believer or the unbeliever.
We could call it the make-believer, the almost-believer, or the unbeliever. They're anything but a believer. So we have believers, and we have unbelievers. The response of the believer is given in verses 19 to 25.
Read it with me. Therefore, brethren, this is believers, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he inaugurated for us through the veil that is his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful, and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
That's the response of a believer. Since these things are true, we have access to God, and we have a great high priest in heaven, let us draw near, let us hold fast, and let us encourage others to do the same.
That's the application of it. But then, that is how a believer should respond to that truth. A believer should respond to it and say, wait a second, I have access to God, and I have a high priest in heaven?
If I have access to God, I'm gonna draw near to him. And so the believer would do that, draw near to God, and hold fast to that truth, because those are precious truths. And then the believer would encourage other people to do the exact same thing, draw near to God, and hold fast to what is true.
That's the response of a believer, verses 19 to 25. Then there is the response, or the warning, against responding to it as an unbeliever would, beginning at verse 26. For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment, and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.
He is warning there against somebody who would listen to everything in the first 10 and a half chapters of Hebrews,.
And say, nah, not for me. I don't think so.
I like the animal sacrifices better. You go to worship on a Saturday, and that smell of freshly shed blood, that just takes me right back to my childhood. The incense, the bells, the priests, all the prayers, that smoke, that smell of burning flesh, man, that's just, that's the smell of worship.
And I come to church with you Christians on a Sunday morning, and what do I get? No smells, no bells, no incense, no candles, no freshly shed blood, and you're pointing back to something that happened 30 years ago, and telling me that's where my hope is?
I wanna go back to my childhood. But if you do that, if you turn from this truth, you can expect nothing except for the fiery judgment that will be poured out upon God's adversaries, and will consume them.
Verse 28, anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severe punishment do you think he will deserve, who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and is regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the spirit of grace?
We know him who said, vengeance is mine, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge his people. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. That is a warning against responding, as an unbeliever would respond to that message.
It's a warning against falling away, or not drawing near, holding fast, and encouraging others to do the same. So there, right after this theological section that ends with verse 18, we have these two responses.
The response of a believer, draw near, hold fast, and encourage others to do the same. The response of an unbeliever, turn away from that, and face the fiery judgment that will consume God's adversaries, and he will have vengeance upon those who are not his.
You turn away from this truth, rather than embracing this truth, and you will experience nothing but God's judgment, and deservedly so. Then for the remainder of chapter 10, he expresses to them his confidence that those who are actually believers here have not responded the way an unbeliever would.
They're not those who are falling away to judgment. He says in verse 32, remember the former days when after being enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a public spectacle through the reproaches and tribulations, and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated.
For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward, for you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
For yet in a little while, he who is coming will come and will not delay, but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.
Now all the way through chapter, the remainder of chapter 10 there, there have been three of these expressions of your need for endurance and to hold fast. Remember I told you the central exhortation of the last part of the book of Hebrews is the exhortation to stand strong and hold fast.
Look at chapter 10, verse 23. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. Look at verse 35. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has great reward.
You have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. Verse 39, but we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.
What is he saying? Hold fast, stay strong, don't throw away your confidence. Hold on to your confidence that you have. You have access to God, and you have a high priest in heaven, therefore hold on to that.
Draw near, hold fast, and encourage others to do the same. That's the response of a believer. That's what he's getting at.
Now you might say,.
Are there examples of perseverance like that throughout history? Are there examples of people who saw the truth, understood the truth, and held fast to that truth, even in the face of hostility and opposition?
Are there such examples? Yeah, as a matter of fact, there are. That's what Hebrews chapter 11 is all about. One example after another in the great faith chapter of people who held fast in a world that was hostile to the truth.
And so we have in chapter 11, that statement in verse one, now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. By it, men of old gained approval. Now he's gonna give us a list of examples.
And so we have Cain. He obtained a testimony, and he made a sacrifice to God through faith. By faith, verse five, Enoch was taken up. You see in verse six, verse seven, that Noah is held out as another example.
And then in verse eight, Abraham. He was called, and he obeyed by faith. He lived in an alien land. And after him, Sarah was given a promise, and she considered God faithful, and she believed God. She exercised that faith.
Well, verse 13 says, all of these died in faith without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.
For those who say such things, make it clear that they are seeking not a country of their own. And indeed, if they had been thinking of that country of which they went out, they would have an opportunity to return.
Then he gives down in verse 17, Abraham is an example, and Isaac, and Jacob, and then Joseph, verse 22 is Joseph. After him, Moses. By faith, Moses, when he was born,.
Was hidden three months.
His parents exercised that faith. Moses himself exercised that faith when he considered the treasures of God better than the treasures of Egypt. And he left Egypt, verse 27. Then you have Joshua and the children of Israel, verse 30, by faith, the walls of Jericho fell down.
By faith, Rahab, the harlot, she did not perish along with those who were disobedient after she had welcomed the spies in peace. Verse 32, he's giving all these examples of people who held fast, who held strong, who stayed strong and firm.
Resolute, by faith, believing that their obedience to these truths and their obedience to these things would bring them a reward. Verse 32, and what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel, and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.
Say, well, these are great promises, Jim. If I respond by faith, I can expect to put foreign armies to flight. I can expect walls to fall down. I can move mountains. I can silence evil men. I can shut the mouths of lions, right?
Is that the lesson?
Verse 35, women received back their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, uh-oh, not accepting their release so that they might obtain a better resurrection. Others experienced mockings, what, scourgings?
Yes, also chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated.
What kind of promise is that of faith? That was going so well. We started off so well. Kingdoms, silencing evil men, shutting the mouths of lions, putting foreign armies to flight. That all started with, those are good promises, and all of a sudden, it just went off a cliff.
Men of whom the world is not worthy. Verse 38, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised because God has promised something better for us so that apart from us, they would not be made perfect.
What a list of great examples. Chapter 11, people who stood strong, held fast to their faith, even in the midst of a hostile world. We have even yet another example. Chapter 12, verse one. We have this great cloud of witnesses surrounding us.
Let us also lay aside every encumbrance with the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance to the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus. And here's another example, not an example of faith, but an example of endurance.
Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. You can add him to that list of great men who held fast and endured all the way through to receive the final reward.
That's the message of chapter 12. Verse three, consider him who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Again, what does the author want us to do?
Don't grow weary, don't lose heart. You are going to live by faith in a world filled with people who hate you, a government who hates you, people in power who hate you, people in education that hate you, and entertainment who hate you.
You're gonna live in a culture that is filled with unbelievers who are hostile to the truth, who hate the truth and hate righteousness and hate Jesus Christ, and you are gonna suffer the same things that all the men of faith of old and the women of faith of old suffered.
You're going to face a hostile culture and a hostile environment, and people who would rather see you dead than see you at all. What are you gonna do in the midst of that? You're gonna stand firm because you have access to God and a great high priest in heaven, and since you have these things, you draw near, you hold fast, and you encourage others to do the same.
Chapter 11 is the examples of that type of faith. Chapter 12 is an example of that kind of endurance, and this opposition that we are going to face, friends, that is all part of the disciplining process of God, which is what chapter 12 is about.
If you face this hostility, this opposition, this affliction from sinners, don't think that some strange thing has come upon you. In fact, you are to embrace it, James says, and welcome it.
Why?
Because Hebrews 12 verse four says that this is part of the disciplining process. This is God's children go through this. If you go through this, if you go through the things that we listed there at the end of chapter 11, the scourgings, the mockings, being stoned, sawn in two, killed with a sword, being destitute, having your property seized, you endure those things.
It's not proof that God does not love you. It is not proof that your faith is in vain. It is actually proof that you are a child of God. If the world hates you, you know that it hated him before it hated you.
What would you expect? They crucified him for living a righteous and godly life. Would you expect to live a righteous and godly life in this world and not face the same hostility? Well, if you do, chapter 12 verse four, it's all part of the disciplining process of God by which he makes us pure and produces in us the peaceable fruits of righteousness.
Chapter 12 verse four. You've not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood and you're striving against sin. You've forgotten the exhortation, which is addressed to you as sons. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by him.
For those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines and encourages every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you endure. Remember, endurance. That's the central exhortation of the last part of Hebrews.
Endurance. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you're without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.
Furthermore, we have earthly fathers to discipline us and rather be subject to the Father of Spirits and we respect them, shall we not much more be subject to the Father of Spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good so that we may share his holiness.
All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful, yet for those who have been trained by it afterwards, it yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness. That type of affliction that you are gonna face in this hostile world, it is for your discipline, it is for your good.
God allows it because he loves you. It's not proof that you're not a believer, it's proof that you are a believer and it's proof that the love of the Father rests upon you because he disciplines those whom he loves and it produces, verse 11, the peaceable fruits of righteousness.
Therefore, chapter 12, the rest of it is filled with exhortations, things that we are to do in light of those great truths. Therefore, we strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble.
We make straight paths for your feet so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather healed. We pursue peace with all men. We pursue holiness without which no one can see the Lord.
Understanding that, verse 17, for you know that even afterwards when he desired to inherit a blessing, he was rejected, this is Esau. He found no place for faith or repentance even though he sought for it with tears.
And in contrast, we who have come to a mountain which cannot be touched into a blazing fire, the darkness and gloom and the whirlwind, we receive a kingdom. Chapter 12, verse 28. Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude by which way we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
Don't let verse 29 scare you if you're a believer. You see, that's, verse 29, that is a terror to those who hate believers. That is a terror to those who go after us. That is a terror to the unbeliever.
The one who responds to the truth is an unbeliever. Our God is a consuming fire. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And because God is a consuming fire and he will deal with his adversaries, you and I can persevere in faith and hold fast and stand strong and not waver in unbelief.
The central exhortation of the rest of the book of Hebrews is to hold fast and to stand strong. Then we get into chapter 13. It's filled with some closing exhortations. The author talks to us about how we are to treat prisoners and how we are to honor marriage and how we are to deal with our own character, love of money and greed and selfishness, et cetera.
And all of those closing exhortations of chapter 13, all of them revolve around this realization that the Lord Jesus Christ has promised to never leave us or forsake us. So he waits to the end of chapter 13 to remind us of that after telling us hold fast, hold to the truth, don't waver, endure all the way to the end, just as the saints of old, just as Jesus did.
And understand at the end of all this, the Lord himself has promised that he will never leave you or forsake you. And if you know that, then you can endure, right? You can endure anything if you know that.
If you believe that and rest upon that, let that sink down into your heart and your mind, then there is nothing that you cannot endure in faith. If you know that the Lord himself has promised, I will never leave you and I will never forsake you, then you can endure all the way to the end and receive the kingdom.
Because the assurance of chapter 13 is that our Lord, who has promised to never leave us or forsake us, he is the same yesterday, today and forever. Therefore, the kingdom is yours, Christian. And therefore, the fiery judgment of God will fall upon his adversaries in due time and you will receive the kingdom.
Therefore, hold fast to your faith, firm until the very end, endure all the way to the end, in spite of the hostility, in spite of the hatred, in spite of the opposition that the world throws at you. Endure to the end and you will receive the promise.
The central exhortation for the rest of the book of Hebrews is to stand fast. So go back to chapter 10, verse 19. The warning passage begins in verses 26 through 31. The author wants us to endure, to draw near, to hold fast and encourage others to do the same.
And I want you to notice here in verses 19 through 25, I'm giving you an overview of the whole last part of the book of Hebrews. Now I wanna zero in a little bit, focus in a bit on chapter 10, verses 19 to 25, and I want you to see a very clear structure in verses 19 through 25.
There are two things that he reminds us that are true, beginning in verse 19, therefore brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he inaugurated for us through the veil that is his flesh, notice the word since, therefore brethren, since this is true, we have confidence to enter into the holy place, since that is true, we have access to God.
Number two, since, verse 21, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, those two things are true, now all those two things are summary statements of all of the doctrine in chapters 10 through 19.
You say, Jim, if you could have just read verses 19 to 21, you would have saved us three years and two months of going through the first 10 and a half chapters of the book of Hebrews. If you could, if this was a summation, why didn't you just begin there and tell us we have access to God and we have confidence, or we have a great high priest in heaven?
You could have saved us 10 and a half chapters. I could have, but then what would I have done for the last three and a half years to bring us to today? So those two statements that we have access to God and we have a great high priest over the house of God, those two things are the two things that summarize basically the main points of all that he has said about the priesthood of Jesus, the intercession of Jesus, and what Christ in his work has accomplished for us.
He has granted us access to heaven itself, and there our high priest sits, enthroned, at the right hand of the Father, waiting until all of his enemies be made a footstool for his feet. Now since that is true, I want you to notice the author gives three direct therefores as a result of that.
Verse 22, 23, and 24, all of them begin with that phrase, those words, let us. Verse 22, let us draw near with a sincere heart and full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
We are to draw near. Verse 23, let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering. He who promised is faithful. He's reminding us that. Remember, you get to the end of chapter 13, what is it?
He will never leave you or forsake you. Hold fast, why? Because he who promised is faithful. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. What he begins in verse 24, he's gonna come back to at the end of chapter 13 when he reminds us that our Christ is faithful, the one who has promised, will himself fulfill his every promise to us.
Verse 24 is the last of the let us, and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
So since it is true that you have access to heaven, and since it is true, and it is, that you have a priest, a great priest who sits over the house of God at the Father's right hand, waiting for his enemies to be made a footstool for his feet, since those things are true, let us, let us draw near to him, hold fast to him, and encourage others to do the same.
Because the world hates you, with the white-hot hatred of a thousand sons. And it only hates you because it hated him first. And if you suffer, it is only because they have not wrung enough suffering out of him that now they wanna bring it to you.
I think it's quite providential that we have reached this point in Hebrews at this point in history. Because I think, I think we're gonna learn a lot of good stuff about suffering in the weeks ahead and about God's purposes in it, in the weeks ahead.
Draw near, hold fast, and encourage others to do the same, all the more as you see the day drawing near. Do you see the day drawing near? Oh man, I hope so.
Well, we'll get to that, I guess, soon enough.
I have about 40 more minutes worth of stuff to go through verses 19 to 21, because all of that was really just introductory stuff. I could preach for another 40 minutes, but with the smell of the food, and you know it's back there, and a potluck that is coming up, I know what you would say.
You would say, Jim, we'll be here next week, you'll be here next week, it'll all be here next week, but the food won't be. So better to end early than late on a potluck Sunday. So with that overview of Hebrews, we'll just consider that an introduction, and we'll start up at verse 19 next week.
Let's pray. Father, everything that is necessary for life and godliness you have provided for us, and our eyes are able to see that in the pages of Scripture, all that you've given and all that you have done.
You are the one who has called us to yourself. You have secured our salvation everlastingly in the death of Christ. You have brought it to bear upon us, and you have made us to respond to the gracious offer of the gospel because of what you have done through the work of your Son.
So we are grateful that you have accomplished this, and we are grateful that we partake in it, and we pray that you would help us to stand strong and to rest upon Christ, to hold fast and firm our confidence all the way to the end.
Give us the endurance that is necessary. Give us the grace and the strength to look to Christ who endured all of that, the Old Testament saints who endured hostility and opposition from an unbelieving world, and help us to rest in your purposes and in your grace, in your sovereignty and your providence.
We love you and we thank you in the name of Christ our Lord, amen.
Please stand.
Have a great week.
Don't leave. We have a business meeting in Potluck. If you're here to help set up the tables and chairs, stay inside. Otherwise, you can go congregate in the hallway. That will help expedite the process.
Thank you.
