Hebrews 2:1-4 Pay Attention or Drift

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. Good morning folks. My name is Jason Fetema. We have some breaking Recast news.

David?

I'm David. Under or beside or perhaps on top of your chair this morning, you found a worship folder. Inside that, you'll be able to view upcoming events and inside that as well, you'll see a connection card and an offering envelope.

You can use those to fill them out or to give your tithe to Recast. Now over to Don Filsack, our Elder Analyst.

Don? Hey Recast, it's Pastor Don.

Just wanted to let you know, give you an update about the Board of Elders here. We welcomed three guys in December and now this month we're going to be giving an opportunity for Zach Lloyd to join the Board.

He is going to be going through that same exact nomination process and so we'll get a chance here in just a moment to hear his testimony. He would put our board back up to full strength at seven guys and that's exactly what we're kind of shooting for.

And so God has provided godly men and we're just encouraging you as much as possible to give feedback on that, especially those of you that are members, we would love to see.

Your vote.

So you have two weeks from today to get those in and then hopefully we'll see where we go.

From there.

So I'm just encouraged again that God provides us with godly guys to step up and lead at this time. We're looking forward to what God has in the future for us.

Thanks.

Hey Recast, I'm Zach Lloyd, husband of Lee, father of Grace, Bryce, Reese, and Jace. And given an opportunity to share how I came to know Jesus Christ as my Savior, I would start by saying I was raised in a Catholic church until the age of 11.

There I understood and was taught that I was a sinner, totally depraved, and needed to atone for my sin in some way through a series of works. And it wasn't until the age of 11 at the Baptist church, hearing the good news of Jesus Christ, that he died for my sins and that I could receive that as a free gift, and finally made that decision at the age of 13.

So while I'll identify that decision on that day at the age of 13 as the day I became a Christian, my behavior has not always been consistent with that, made numerous poor choices throughout my life and reaped the consequence of that.

But at the age of 44 now, I can look back and say unequivocally how God has kept me and that his irresistible grace that I received at the age of 13 has been true in my life and through all my various experiences with him.

He is faithful and it's just a privilege and an honor to glorify him and what he's done for me through no works of my own, through nothing that I've done. So I just glorify him today and give him thanks.

We now send you to David with some important youth retreat news.

David.

Thank you, Jason. I'm out here in the field, although literally it's a forest, to report on the Barry Kell.

Retreat.

It is for middle schoolers and high schoolers and it is still on. It's going to happen, we hope. We're keeping an eye on it, but for all intents and purposes, so far as far as we know, it is happening.

So please make sure that if you want your student to go or if they want to go, that you sign them up on our form online. Payments will be due this week as the retreat is from the 15th to the 17th. That's all.

Back to you, Jason.

We now send you to the tech booth with some important information.

Jason.

Thank you, Jason. We're live here in the tech booth and on January 24th, two weeks from this Sunday, right after service, there's going to be a training session here for anyone that's interested in anything tech related for the service.

With COVID now, we have a lot of new stuff here, so we would love the help up here if anyone's interested. Lunch will be provided for that, and if you have any questions or anything or you want to sign up for that, contact the guy right there, Spencer.

Back to you guys. And that's all we have going on here at Recast News. If you're interested for more information, go to recastchurch .com.

If you're watching online, click the bell for notifications and subscribe. We'll see you next week.

Hebrews 2:1-4 and the Call to Pay Attention

Oh, boy. Good morning, everyone. I'm Pastor Spencer. If there's any sound problems this morning, it's probably because I sat there and messed with the board this week, and I have no idea what I'm doing, so it's not Mike's fault.

It would be my fault, but we're glad you're here and have joined us this morning. We are going to jump back into the book of Hebrews. It's kind of neat. I've preached three or four times since I've got here almost a year ago, but every one of them has been online when we weren't meeting in person.

So I'm excited to actually do this live and in person with you this morning. So we're going to jump into Hebrews chapter 2 this morning. Hebrews chapter 2. If you have a Bible, why don't you go ahead and turn there with me.

We're going to look at verses 1 through 4 this morning in the book of Hebrews. If you don't have a Bible, don't worry. We're going to have the words up here on the screen, and you can follow along as I read.

So Hebrews chapter 2. Therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?

It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witnesses by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.

Let's pray. Lord, we come before you this morning humbled at your word, and Lord, I pray that as we seek your face this morning, that your spirit will work in our hearts and our lives and that he will enlighten us to what you have for us.

Lord, we are so thankful that Jesus came and that he died and that he offered the perfect sacrifice, accomplishing a great salvation for us. And Lord, I pray that your spirit will just be at work in our lives this morning.

May we be sensitive to how he speaks through your word. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right.

Well, if you remember, the last couple of times we've talked about Hebrews, we've done two messages in Hebrews so far, but Hebrews 1 was really just nothing but a declaration of who Christ is and what he has done.

You know, there weren't any commands in chapter 1, there weren't any exhortations, there weren't any instructions. It simply talked about the superiority of Jesus. In the first four verses, there were seven affirmations exhorting us as to who Jesus was.

And they came together to really demonstrate that Jesus is superior to everyone and to.

Everything.

You might remember we learned that he is the heir of all things. He's the creator. He is the sustainer. He is God in the flesh. He's the redeemer. He's the ascended king. And finally, we talked about how he is God's final revelation.

Hebrews 1, 2, which our passage leans pretty heavily into this morning, revealed that truth. When it said, in these last days he has spoken to us by his son. Then the second half of chapter 1, verses 5 to 14, the author really had a very simple point, and that is that Jesus is superior to the angels.

So when we get to chapter 2 here, we're going to see the author turn and make a shift. He's going to move from explaining the glories of Christ there in chapter 1 to now applying them to his audience in chapter 2.

This application comes right at the beginning of verse 1 here, and it comes in the form of a command. The command and the verses that follow it are commonly called one of the warning passages of Hebrews.

There's five of these throughout the book, and this is the first warning text. If you notice here at the beginning of verse 1, there's a connection between chapter 2 and chapter 1. He uses the phrase, for this reason.

Your text might say, therefore. What that's really doing is hinting us to the fact that what he's about to say is related to chapter 1. If you think about both those sections that we just kind of overviewed from chapter 1, there's really just one main point in chapter 1.

That is that Christ is superior, and in these last days God has spoken through him. Our text this morning is really kind of the so what of that truth. If that's true, then what are we supposed to do about it?

We've been given all this information, right, about the majesty and the glory and the superiority of Christ whom God has spoken through, but what are we supposed to do with that? Well, the author gives us a command.

He says we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard. You see, because Christ is superior to all things, even superior to the angels, and because he is himself God, we must listen to the message that he has brought.

We must listen to God's word in Christ. It's not an option. This is a command. Notice the phrase here, more careful. It literally means exceedingly necessary. It is exceedingly necessary to pay attention to Christ.

This is an idea that's echoed throughout the book of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 3, verse 1 says, Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus. Consider Jesus. What's consider mean?

It means to think carefully about. We have to pay attention to. We have to listen to. We have to think about Christ and his message. Hebrews 12, 1, similar idea. This is a super famous passage. You probably got it memorized.

It says, Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. Some translations say keep your eyes fixed on Jesus. The author has a burden that we might be constantly looking to.

We might be constantly considering. We might be constantly paying attention to Christ and his message. This is a timely command and exhortation for us in our culture today, I think. Unlike any other time in history, we are bombarded with messages that vie for our attention.

From the moment you woke up this morning, you have been probably getting messages. If you think just a hundred years ago, that wasn't reality. A hundred years ago, people primarily got their messages maybe through word of mouth, through talking to their neighbors.

They might have had a radio, maybe they had a newspaper, but they weren't constantly inundated with things. It wasn't even until after World War II in the late 1940s that people had TVs in their home where they started to get messages through the television.

But now, you wake up to a notification on your phone. You go to bed to a notification on your phone. Social media bombards you with the news and the opinions of people that you haven't talked to in 10 years.

You are constantly being fed messages, right? Everybody, that's reality. Everybody knows that. And so, as we think about that, it's vitally important for us to also consider who we are listening to, right?

Who do you listen to? We're going to take a minute and think about that. Who do we listen to? What do we listen to? I would think we all make time to listen to messages that are important to us, right?

Some people are music people. I'm not a music person. You know, I'm the kind of person who when David says, hey, why don't you guys go ahead and clap and sing, I'm kind of like, I can't do that. Music is not my thing.

But if you're a music person, you know, you've probably got Spotify and Pandora and Apple Music on your phone and you plug it in. You listen to it in the car, right? You got your smart speaker at home.

Or maybe you're like me. I'm kind of an infotainment person. You guys know the word infotainment? Getting a lot of blank stares. Infotainment, it's like, you know, you're kind of an information junkie.

You like learning stuff. I like entertainment with some substance to it, right? So I listen to a lot of podcasts. When I get into the car, I plug in an Apple podcast. And that's what I listen to, right?

But we're all constantly getting messages some way or another. The neat thing about technology, though, is that it will tell you who you're listening to. Pull out your phone. I want you to do this with me.

You know, your phone probably has a screen time feature on it, right? You know, on Apple, you pick it up, you swipe to the left there, and it's got a screen time feature. And it will tell you how much time you spend on your phone.

And then it gives you categories as to what you're doing on your phone. You know, you might spend hours a day on social media or hours a day on entertainment. That, it will reveal to you who you are listening to.

And it's kind of a neat thing, but at the same time, it's kind of scary to how much time. Because when you look at that and you think about that in relation to how much time we're probably listening to Christ, I would wager to bet that these numbers are far higher than the amount of time any of us spend listening to Christ and his message.

And so we've got to take this exhortation to heart here, that it's exceedingly necessary to pay attention to Christ. And we've got to take it to heart because there's a very real danger if we don't. The rest of these four verses give us three reasons why it's important to pay attention to what we have heard from Christ.

The Danger of Spiritual Drift

The first reason comes here in the second half of verse 1. Look at it with me. It says, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard so that we will not drift away. The danger of not paying attention to what we've heard from Christ is that we will drift away.

It's just kind of a unique word. The word drift away has a nautical meaning. It pictures a boat that just kind of gradually slips away from the dock because it wasn't tied down. You know, the wind blows and the waves kick up, and they just kind of slowly roll out, carrying the boat out to sea further and further away from where it was tied and where it is intended to go.

It's a subtle drift. It's almost undetectable because it's so slow and it's so gradual. You know, if there were people on this boat, they probably wouldn't even know that the boat was drifting further and further out to sea.

What the author is trying to do with this phrase is give us a picture of spiritual drift. And it's a startling picture because he's really only putting two options out here in front of us. All of us are gonna go in one of two directions, he says.

We're either paying attention to Christ or we are drifting away. There is no middle ground. There is no standing still. The sea is always moving. If you're not listening to Christ, if you're not anchored to him, if you're not fixing your eyes upon him, then you are drifting away.

And unfortunately, I think this is a common reality here in America. There are tons of people who would call themselves Christians and yet are drifting away from Christ and from his gospel.

We've all seen this, right?

You've known people who were active in church. They served other people. They seemed to love Jesus. Then one day, it just kind of all falls apart.

They just quit.

There's no longer an enthusiasm for Christ. There's no sense of mission. There's no excitement. There's nothing but apathy. And to us, sometimes this change seems like it came out of left field someplace.

But in reality, in the person's heart, it's usually a slow, subtle drift. And I think that's the scary thing about spiritual drift is that it's often imperceptible when it starts. The people on the boat don't even know it's happening until they're too far away.

A person might quit reading the Bible as regularly. They might allow busyness to choke out their prayer life. They might withdraw from Christian community because of work and other obligations. And meanwhile, at the same time, they're hearing messages from the world that are contrary to the message of Christ.

And those messages are starting to affect how they think. And then before too long, without even realizing that this drifting has been occurring, they find themselves far from Christ.

It's a scary reality.

But luckily, there's an antidote to this problem. And it isn't all that complicated, as a matter of fact. It's really pretty simple. This verse gives us two, what we're gonna call, ores that help us combat the problem of spiritual drift.

The first, we're gonna call orthodoxy. And orthodoxy is just a word that simply refers to the teaching that has been historically accepted by the Christian faith. It's biblical theology, in other words.

If you remember verse one, it started with the phrase, for this reason. And the author's trying to urge us to action on the basis of the theology that he presented about Christ in chapter one, that the glory and the majesty and the superiority of Christ should motivate us to listen to him.

You see, the purpose of theology is not just to inflate your head. It's not just for you to know things. It's for you to do something with it. You don't wanna be what a buddy of mine calls T-Rex Christians, right?

People with big heads and little hands. These are people, they know a whole lot about God, they know a whole lot about the Bible, and yet they don't do anything with that knowledge, right? Their feet don't move, their hands don't work at all.

So you don't wanna be that guy. But on the flip side, you don't wanna be the person who can't live according to God's will because you don't know what he has said to us through his word. So here at Recast, what we wanna do is really balance those two things, right?

We wanna give people opportunities to serve and to be grounded in God's truth. And one of the tools that we do the second part of that equation with is Recast Bible Institute. You know, this week on Wednesday, we're kicking off a new series of those classes.

And the one on Wednesday night is gonna be about systematic theology. We're gonna learn what the Bible as a whole teaches about particular topics. And some of you might think systematic theology, that sounds like the most boring, bland thing in the world.

I'd rather watch paint dry. You know, raise your hand, be honest. Some of you, that's your God. Hey, we got an honest person in the back, right? I mean, sometimes that's how we respond to these type of things.

But this text demonstrates to us that sometimes it is incredibly important to swallow that pill and to learn what God has revealed to us through his word. You know, I think there's a tremendous amount of value to systematic theology because what it allows you to do is to have a biblical worldview.

It creates a grid through which you can filter your life experiences and listen to Christ as you go throughout your day and face different types of challenges and difficulties. It's a great tool in the battle against the current of spiritual drift.

And if you've never dug deep into the Bible, if you've never taken a class on theology or read much theology, I would encourage you to come out to that class on Wednesday night. We're gonna make it as approachable as possible, but you're also going to be challenged.

And so I would encourage you guys, pray about that over the next couple days. Think about it. We would love to see you on Wednesday night to be equipped with the truth of God's word. The second or that the author gives us here to row against the current of spiritual drift is obedience.

We get this idea from a simple phrase here in verse one that would be easy to look over, but he says, pay much closer attention to what we have heard. That word for pay attention is an interesting one.

It also has a nautical meaning. It means to moor a ship, to tie it up to the dock. It's an active word. It's not a passive word. Biblical hearing, which is what he's talking about here, involves more than just audibly perceiving something.

Jesus, for example, in Matthew 13, 13 says, looking they do not see, and hearing they do not listen or understand. And it's a rebuke because he expects hearing to involve other elements. It involves believing.

It involves obeying. It involves submitting to what is heard. It's not just a function of the head. One author says it's more a function of the heart than a function of the head. And so when we hear the word of Christ, if we're truly paying attention to it, we should be responding with obedience.

So we've got those two ORs, orthodoxy and obedience, theology and practice, and we've got to use those to try to row against this current of spiritual drift and help us pay attention to Christ. We move on to verses two and three.

We're gonna see another reason here why we should pay attention to Christ and his message. And that is because judgment is certain.

Judgment is certain.

Read with me, beginning in verse two. He says, for if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

So there's a lot going on in this sentence, and so I kind of want to go through and we're gonna break it down phrase by phrase, and I want to try to explain it to you as best I can. When the author talks here about a word that is spoken through angels, he's likely referring to the Mosaic Covenant.

We talked about this a little bit back in chapter one, but the Jews believed essentially that the angels were the mediators of the Mosaic Covenant. And there are a few texts throughout the Bible that indicate that.

We're gonna throw them on your screen here so we can get an idea of what he probably is referencing. In Acts chapter seven, verse 53, it says, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.

Deuteronomy 33, verse two. He said, the Lord came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us. He shone forth from Mount Paran. He came from the 10 ,000s of holy ones. That's a reference to angels as well.

With flaming fire at his right hand. Galatians three, verse 19. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary.

So when he says the word spoken through angels, what he's referring to is the Mosaic Covenant. We commonly refer to that as the law. So essentially, you could take this first phrase here and rephrase it in a way that makes more sense to us and say, for if the law proved unalterable and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty.

Does that make more sense? You tracking for that? That's a concept that we're familiar with, right? We're familiar with the idea that in the Old Testament, every sin regardless of its nature, which I think is what he's trying to emphasize when he uses the two different words for sin here, transgression and disobedience, but he's suggesting that regardless of nature, sin deserves punishment.

So that's kind of the first half of the sentence. Before we move on to the second half of the sentence, I wanna explain to you a little bit about what he's doing here. He's implementing what is commonly called kind of a lesser to greater than argument.

He's putting forth something that's true about angels and the Old Covenant in order to prove something that's true about Jesus and the New Covenant. And so he puts forth this reality that sin deserves punishment in order to say that something is true about the New Covenant.

Well, what's he say?

Look with me at the rest of the verse. He says, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? So essentially the idea here is that if the Old Covenant that came from God but was delivered by mere angels, if that demanded retribution, how much more will God judge those who neglect salvation that was delivered by his own son?

There's a certainty of judgment here for people that neglect salvation, and that ought to be a motivation for us to listen to Christ. There's two more phrases here that I wanna briefly explain so that we understand really the seriousness of what he's trying to communicate.

The first is how will we escape? This is obviously a question, right? And in Greek, it's worded in such a way that it expects a negative response. And because a negative response is expected in certain places, you'll see it translated as by no means or it's impossible.

So how will you escape salvation if you neglect it? You won't, it's impossible. If those under the Old Covenant were punished for violation, then certainly those who neglect salvation will not escape punishment.

The next phrase that you'll commonly have a question about, if certainly I did, was the phrase neglect. What's neglect mean? Interestingly, this is a word that means the exact opposite of the word used earlier for pay attention.

The word means not to care, ignore, disregard, or pay no attention to, pay no attention to. You see, there's a connection here between verse one and verse three. In verse one, the author's trying to urge the audience to pay attention to the message of Christ, to pay attention to the gospel, to salvation, so that they don't drift from it.

And here in verse three, he's warning about the punishment for those who do not pay attention to salvation. Now obviously, there's a warning here for the person who's never believed the gospel. If you've never come to a place where in your heart you believe that Christ died on the cross and rose from the dead to pay for your sins, and if you've never confessed him as Lord, then you will not escape the punishment of hell.

But there's also a warning here because of that connection for the person who is drifting away. The person who's drifting away is not paying attention to Christ and his message according to verse one.

And this verse tells us that the person who will not escape is the one who is neglecting, or by the very definition of the word, not paying attention to salvation. The real danger of spiritual drift is not that we might miss out on the blessings of God or our spiritually abundant life.

The true danger of spiritual drift is that we might abandon the gospel itself and find ourselves under the eternal judgment of God. You might say, Pastor Spencer, are you suggesting that people can lose their salvation?

No, I am not suggesting that people can lose their salvation. The Bible's abundantly clear that if God has chosen you, you will believe and be abundantly saved. But what I am suggesting to you is that there is a category of people, and I think in many churches today, it's a large category of people who believe themselves to be saved.

Maybe because they prayed some prayer 20 years ago, or they made some declaration of faith, or they have some semblance of spirituality, and yet they will not enter into the kingdom of God. These are Matthew 7 type of people, right?

Many, Jesus himself says this, many people will say to me, Lord, Lord, and will not enter into the kingdom of heaven because they do not do the will of the Father. These people are apathetic, they go through the motions, but there's no real love for the Lord, there's no desire to serve him, there's no desire to pay attention to him, to fix their eyes upon him, to consider him.

The scary thing about this is I think almost anywhere you go, and probably even in this church this morning, there are people like that. And if that's you, you owe yourself the opportunity to think about that reality, because this warning is for you.

You should do what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians chapter 13, verse five, and examine yourself to see whether you are in the faith. If you aren't fixing your eyes on Christ, if you aren't paying attention to him, if you are drifting away from him, there is a good chance that you are drifting toward a Christless reality because you have never truly known him.

And you deserve to think about that. We all owe it to ourselves to seriously consider that. And that's a pretty heavy reality, is it not? This isn't a real feel-good text this morning. The author's essentially using the certainty of judgment as negative motivation for us to pay attention to the gospel and to Christ.

But he doesn't leave us there. In the last section here, he turns and he starts to put forth a positive reason as motivation to listen to Christ and his message. And the final reason is that the gospel is trustworthy.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospel

The gospel is trustworthy. Let's read this last section again, beginning with the second half of verse three. It says, it was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

These verses, the author really gives four reasons why the gospel is superior to the message brought by angels and therefore trustworthy. First, he indicates that it was declared by the Lord. This ought to remind you of Hebrews chapter one, verse two, that declared that God has now spoken to us through his son.

The message of salvation originated with Jesus, God in the flesh, and because it did, it can be trusted. The second reason why it's trustworthy is because it was confirmed to us by those who heard him.

Gospel's trustworthy not just because it was declared by Christ, but because it was passed down to us through the eyewitness accounts of the apostles and other credible people. The apostles testified to what Jesus taught.

They saw him die on the cross. They saw his resurrected body. They witnessed his ascension, and all of that testifies to the truthfulness and the trustworthiness of the gospel. Third, the gospel's trustworthy because God himself testified to the authenticity of the gospel, and he did that through signs, wonders, and various miracles.

We learned a little bit about the nature of miracles in this text. Miracles did not exist for their own sake. Rather, they attest to and they confirm God's major works in redemptive history. If you think about the scope of the Bible, miracles really exist in three locations.

The ministry of Moses, the ministries of Elisha and Elijah, and then the ministry of Christ and the apostles. And in those New Testament occurrences, we see that these miracles primarily attest to and validate the truth about the identity and the work of Christ.

In other words, they prove the trustworthiness of the gospel. I think there's one more reason given here as to why the gospel is trustworthy, and I think this one's particularly interesting. And that's because the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which have been distributed according to God's will, also testify to the true trustworthiness of the gospel.

Well, how do they do that? It's kind of neat. Once again, here we learn a little bit about the nature, I think, and the purpose of spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts, just like miracles, are not an end to themselves.

They're not for personal or private enjoyment. Rather, they were given to edify the church and to testify that Jesus is Lord. Turn with me to Ephesians chapter four, and I wanna point this out to you.

In Ephesians chapter four, we get a little bit more detail about spiritual gifts. We're gonna begin with verse seven. It's up here on the screen for you. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.

Therefore, it says, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captive, and he gave gifts to men. Jump down to verse 11. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.

It's kind of a neat reality. It's easy to look over, but here we see that when Christ ascended into heaven, when he ascended into heaven as the risen Lord who has conquered death and paid the penalty for sins, he gave each of us a measure of grace as a gift.

That's a spiritual gift. And so if you think about that reality in the relationship to what we're talking about here in Hebrews chapter two, what we see is that spiritual gifts are a testimony to the truthfulness of the gospel because Christ gave them when he ascended into heaven.

They're proof that he is the ascended king, the one who sits at the right hand of the majesty on high, having conquered sin and death. So we've got four reasons here why the gospel is trustworthy, ultimately pointing us back to this reason as to why we should listen to Christ.

You know, the danger of drifting away is a very real thing. And it has real consequences because the gospel is true. And the gospel truly is good news, but it's only good news when it's accepted in the place of bad news.