Imperatives are based on Indicatives | Clip from Hebrews III: The Offering of the Body of Jesus

I think that, you know, what you've been covering here, you've been dealing with the great object of truths of Christianity. So as you mentioned, none of this has actually even introduced your responsiveness to it.

You know, he hasn't mentioned your faith, or repentance, or, you know, earnest love, or, you know, or tenderness, or anything. So he's hammering away at this great marble foundation, this unshakable, unalterable, immutable hope of the believer.

Indicatives Before Imperatives in Hebrews and Romans

But he doesn't end there. If we had time, we could go on, you know, through especially chapters 12 and 13, where he's beginning to bring to bear, like, because of these facts, live this way. We could think of another portion of Scripture that deals like this, where in Romans 3, 4, and 5, halfway through Romans 3, Paul gives the good news that it's never by rule-keeping, but by, not by your rule-keeping, but by the rule-keeping of Jesus Christ, who became your perpetuatory sacrifice, satisfying the wrath of God, lifting up His honor and His law's honor, at the same time as providing mercy.

Chapter 3, chapter 4, that is embraced by faith, because faith, chapter 5, unites you to a new mediator, Jesus. All that doctrine, and it's not until chapter 6, verse 11, that we meet the very first time in the book of Romans that Paul gives a command.

Yeah. Yeah. So, reckon yourselves. Yeah. Live on these realities, calculate them honestly, biblically, and then present. Yeah. So, same thing, object of truth, then experiential or applied truth. Sometimes we get questions, I don't know, you know, in the church where you're pastoring, because of a heavy emphasis on the application of truth.

The Tightrope Between Doctrine and Experience

Yeah. You can, I mean, there's always, I feel it as a pastor, there's always the concern, I don't want to lean one way too far the other. Yeah. And I remember a young lady coming to me in college and saying, my church is not quite as experiential in their emphasis as you are, and so which one's right, and how do I live the Christian life?

Because sometimes I think, I don't want to focus too much on doctrine and forget experience, then the other side. And so, I said to her, imagine that you're walking a tightrope, and you have this long pole, and on one side, on the far left side is objective truth, on the far right side is experienced truth.

Now, if you think the Christian life is the tightrope, and the way you keep from falling off is constantly shuffling it back and forth, too much experience, too much objective, too much head, too much heart, then you're gonna, that's not the way to do it, and you would wear yourself out.

It's order. First, the great facts that you just reviewed, then the great devotion of the heart flows in obedience. Yeah, amen.

You know, the theological way to say that is the imperatives are built on the indicatives.

The Indicatives and Imperatives in the Epistles

The first half of all the epistles... You didn't like my tightrope illustration, did you? I was... I loved it. For those of you that are not in the third grade, this is how we say it.

The first half of all the epistles are the indicatives. Yeah, it's what God has done for us in Christ. The second half, obviously, there's perforated lines, you know, there's some imperatives in the first and indicatives in the second, but it's basically that setup.

It's what God has done for us in Christ, indicatives, now therefore do imperatives, but you mentioned how Romans has its first exhortation. I just taught it Sunday in chapter 6 on the reckoned. So five and a half chapters of no exhortation.

Right. Just breathtaking. Can I dare to believe this is true? And then he'll tell you what to do. Hebrews is actually the same way and it's actually in this chapter. The setup of Hebrews in two parts is chapter 1 through 10 18.

10 19 through the end. The first part, and this is the last, we're touching the last pinnacle of the first part in 10 1 to 14, but in verse 19, same chapter, therefore brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, guess what?

No Old Testament high priest ever would have said to a million and a half people, ten and a half Israelites. Come on, the holy of holies. I can't explain it. Let's just all come in and take a peek. Jesus is saying, well, we're being told in the first ten and a half chapters, he is such a redeemer.

And then in verse 19, he turns around and says to everybody in the whole camp, come on in to the holy of holies. And so there are exhortations, you know, these aren't just spiritual ideas to keep in our head.

But if we don't have the indicatives, the work of God for us in Christ, I do think our tightrope illustration, we probably default to do, I think we're works based more by nature than we are grace based by nature.

Grace, Humility, and the Natural Resistance to Grace

Yeah, so well, it's really humbling to us to be freely loved. For God to say there's nothing lovely in you, but I have loved you infinitely. You think about, you know, if you went home and said to Tracy, your wife, honey, all the way home, I just thought how much I love you.

But really, you know, the truth is there's nothing about you this lovely. But I'm just a great kind of guy, you know? Yeah. So that the natural man really doesn't love grace. Yeah. Thank you for watching the clip.

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