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FUNDAMENTAL
ONENESS OF THE DISPENSATIONS.
Hebrews 3:1 - Hebrews 4:13
(R.V.).
"Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of a
heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High-priest of our confession, even
Jesus; who was faithful to Him that appointed Him as also was Moses in all his house. For He hath been counted worthy of more glory
than Moses, by so much as he that built the house hath more honour than the
house. For every house is builded by some one; but He that built all things is
God. And Moses indeed was faithful in all his house as a servant, for a
testimony of those things which were afterward to be spoken; but Christ as a
Son, over His house; Whose house are we, if we hold
fast our boldness and the glorying of our hope firm unto the end. Wherefore,
even as the Holy Ghost saith,
To-day if ye shall hear His voice, Harden not your hearts,
as in the provocation, Like as in the day of the
temptation in the wilderness, Wherewith your fathers tempted Me by proving Me,
And saw My works forty years. Wherefore I was displeased with this generation,
And said, They do always err in their heart: But they did not know My ways; As
I sware in My wrath, They shall not enter into My rest.
Take heed, brethren, lest haply there shall be in any
one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God: but
exhort one another day by day, so long as it is called today; lest any one of
you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin: for we are become partakers of
Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end:
while it is said,
To-day if ye shall hear His voice, Harden not your
hearts, as in the provocation.
For who, when they heard, did provoke? nay, did not all they that came out of Egypt by Moses? And with whom was He displeased forty years? was
it not with them that sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness? And to whom sware He that they should not enter into His rest, but
to them that were disobedient? And we see that they were not able to
enter in because of unbelief.
Let us fear therefore, lest haply, a promise being
left of entering into His rest, any one of you should seem to have come short
of it. For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also they:
but the word of hearing did not profit them, because they were not united by
faith with them that heard. For we which have believed do enter into that rest;
even as He hath said,
As I sware in My wrath, They
shall not enter into My rest: although the works were finished from the
foundation of the world.
For He hath said somewhere of the seventh day on this
wise,
And God rested on the seventh day from all His works;
and in this place again,
They shall not enter into My
rest.
Seeing therefore it remaineth that some should enter
thereinto, and they to whom the good tidings were before preached failed to
enter in because of disobedience, He again defineth a certain day, saying in
David, after so long a time, To-day, as it hath been before said,
To-day if ye shall hear His voice, Harden not your
hearts.
For if Joshua had given them rest,
he would not have spoken afterward of another day. There remaineth
therefore a sabbath rest for the people of God. For he
that is entered into his rest hath himself also rested from his works, as God
did from His. Let us therefore give diligence to enter into that rest, that no man fall after the same example of disobedience. For the
word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and
piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow,
and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no
creature that is not manifest in His sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to
do."
The broad foundation of Christianity has now been laid in
the person of the Son, God-Man. In the subsequent chapters of the Epistle this
doctrine is made to throw light on the mutual relations of the two
dispensations.
The first deduction is that the Mosaic dispensation was
itself created by Christ; that the threats and promises of the Old Testament
live on into the New; that the central idea of the Hebrew religion, the idea of
the Sabbath rest, is realised in its inmost meaning in Christ only; that the
word of God is ever full of living energy. Hereafter the Apostle will not be
slow to expose the wide difference between the two dispensations. But it is
equally true and not less important that the old covenant was the vesture of
truths which remain when the garment has been changed.
At the outset the writer's tone is influenced by this
doctrine. He turns his treatise unconsciously into an epistle. He addresses his
readers as brethren, holy indeed, but not holy after the pattern of their
former exclusiveness; for their holiness is inseparably linked with their
common brotherhood. They are partakers with the Gentile Churches in a heavenly
call. Startling words! Hebrews holy in virtue of their
sharing with Greeks and barbarians, bond and free, in a common call from high
Heaven, which sees all earth as a level plain beneath! The middle wall of
partition has been broken down to the ground. Yet soothing words,
and full of encouragement! The Apostle and his leaders were standing near the
end of the Apostolic age, when the Hebrew Christians
were despondent, weak, and despised, both by reason of national calamities and
because of their inferiority to their sister Churches among the Gentiles. The
Apostle does not bluntly assure them of their equality, but gently addresses
them as partakers of a heavenly call. His words are the reverse of St. Paul's language to the Ephesians, who are reminded
that the Gentiles are partakers in the privileges of Israel. Those who sometimes were
far off have been made nigh; the strangers and sojourners are henceforth fellow-citizens
with the saints and of the household of God. Here, on the contrary, Hebrew
Christians are encouraged with the assurance that they partake in the
privileges of all believers. If the wild olive tree has been grafted in among
the branches and made partaker of the root, the branches, broken off that the
wild olive might be grafted in, are themselves in consequence grafted into
their own olive tree. Through God's mercy to the Gentiles, Israel also has
obtained mercy.
The Apostle addresses them with affection. But his behest
is sharp and urgent: "Consider the Apostle and High-priest of our
profession, Jesus." Consider intently, or, to borrow a modern word that
has sometimes been abused, Realise Jesus. Dwell not with abstractions and theories.
Fear not imaginary dangers. Make Jesus Christ a reality before the eyes of your
mind. To do this well will be more convincing than external evidences. To
behold the glory of the temple, linger not to admire the strong buttresses
without, but enter. Realisation of Christ may be said to be the gist of the
whole Epistle.
This spiritual vision is not ecstasy. We realise Christ as
Apostle and as High-priest. We behold Him when His words are a message to us
from God, and when He carries our supplications to God. Revelation and prayer
are the two opposite poles of communion with the Father. The dispensation of
Moses rested on these two pillars,--apostleship and priesthood. But the
fundamental conceptions of the Old Testament centre in Jesus. Though our author
has distinguished between God's revelation in the prophets and His revelation
in a Son, he teaches also that even the prophets received their message through
the Son. Though he contrasts in what follows of the Epistle
the high-priesthood of Aaron with Christ's, still he regards Aaron's office as
utterly meaningless apart from Christ. The words "Apostle and
High-priest" pave the way, therefore, to the most prominent truth in this
section of the Epistle: that whatever is best in the Old Testament has been
assimilated and inspired with new energy by the Gospel.
1. To begin, we must understand the actual position of the
founders of the two dispensations. Neither Moses nor Christ set about
originating, designing, constructing, from his own impulse and for his own
purposes. Both acted for God, and were consciously under His directing eye.[38] "It is required in stewards that a man be found
faithful."[39] They have but to obey, and leave the unity and harmony of
the plan to another. To use an illustration, every house is built by some one
or other.[40] The design has been conceived in the
brain of the architect. He is the real builder, though he employs masons and
joiners to put the materials together according to his plan. This applies to
the subject in hand; for God is the Architect of all things. He realises His
own ideas as well through the seeming originality of thinkers as through the
willing obedience of workers. Now, the dispensation of the old covenant was one
part of God's design. To build this portion of the house He found a faithful
servant in Moses. The dispensation of the new covenant is but another, though
more excellent, part of the same design; and Jesus was not less faithful to
finish the structure. The unity of the design was in the mind of God.
Moses was faithful when he refused the treasures of Egypt, and
chose affliction with the people of God and the reproach of His Christ. He was
faithful when he chid the people in the wilderness for their unbelief, and when
he interceded for them again with God. Christ also was faithful to His God when
He despised the shame and endured the Cross.
Yet we must acknowledge a difference. God has accounted
Jesus worthy of greater honour than Moses, inasmuch as Moses was part of the
house, and that part the pre-existent Christ erected. Moses was
"made" all that he became by Christ, but Christ was
"made"[41] all that He became--God-Man--by
God. Moreover, though Moses was greater than all the other servants of God
before Christ, because they were placed in subordinate positions, while he was
faithful in the whole house, yet even he was but a servant, whereas Christ was
Son. Moses was in the house, it is true; but the Son was placed over the house.
The work which Moses had to do was to uphold the authority of the Son, to witness,
that is, to the things which would afterwards be spoken unto us by God in His
Son, Jesus Christ.[42]
The Apostle seems to delight in his illustration of the
house, and continues to use it with a fresh meaning. This house, or, if you
please, this household, are we Christians. We are the house in which Moses
showed the utmost faithfulness as servant. We are the circumcision, we the true
Israel of God. If, then, we turn away from Christ to Moses, that faithful
servant himself will have none of us. That we may be God's house,
we must lay fast hold of our Christian confidence and the boasting of our hope
out-and-out to the end.
2. Again, the threatenings of the Old Testament for
disobedience to God apply with full force to apostasy from Christ. They are the
authoritative voice of the Holy Spirit. The Apostle is reminded by the words
which he has just used, "We are God's house," of the Psalmist's
joyful exclamation, "He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture,
and the sheep of His hand."[43] Then follows in the Psalm a warning, which
the Apostle considers it equally necessary to address to the Hebrew Christians:
"To-day, if indeed you still hear His voice (for it is possible He may no
longer speak), harden not your hearts, as you did in Meribah, rightly
called,--the place of contention. Your fathers, far from trusting Me when I put them to the test, turned upon Me and put Me to
the test, and that although they saw My works during forty years." Forty
years,--ominous number! The readers would at once call to mind that forty years
within a little had now passed since their Lord had gone through the heavens to
the right hand of the Father. What if, after all, the old belief proves true
that He returns to judgment after waiting for precisely the same period for
which He had patiently endured their fathers' unbelief in the wilderness! God
is still living, and He is the same God. He Who sware
in His wrath that the fathers should not enter into the rest of Canaan is the same in His anger, the same in His mercy.
Exhort one another. In the wilderness God dealt with individuals. He does so
still. See that there be no evil heart, which is unbelief, in any one of you at
any time while the call, "To-day!" is
sounded in your ears. For sin weakens the sense of individual guilt, and thus
deceives men by hardening their hearts.[44] All that came out of Egypt provoked
God to anger. But they provoked Him, not in the mass, but one by one, and one
by one, with palsied limbs,[45] they fell in the
wilderness, as men fall exhausted on the march. Thus, for their persistent
unbelief, God sware they should not enter into His rest--"His," for
He kept the key still in His own hand. But persistent unbelief made them
incapable of entering. If God were still willing to cut off for them the waters
of Jordan,
they could not[46] enter in because of unbelief.
3. Similarly, the promises of God are still in force.
Indeed, the steadfastness of the threatenings involves the continuance of the
promises, and the rejection of the promises ensures the fulfilment of every
threatening. As much as this is expressed in the opening words of Hebrews 4:
"A promise being left to us, let us therefore
fear."
To prove the identity of the promises under the two
dispensations, the Apostle singles out one promise, which may be considered
most significant of the national no less than the religious life of Israel. The
Greek mind was ever on the alert for something new. Its character was movement.
But the ideal of the Old Testament is rest. Christ came into touch with the
people at once when He began His public ministry with an invitation to the
weary and heavy-laden to come unto Him, and with the promise that He would give
them rest. Near the close of His ministry He explained and fulfilled the
promise by giving to His disciples peace. The object
of our author, in the difficult chapter now under consideration, is to show
that the idea most characteristic of the old covenant finds its true and
highest realisation in Christ. After the manner of St. Paul,
who, in more than one passage, teaches that through the fall of Israel salvation is come unto the Gentiles, the
writer of this Epistle also argues that the promise of rest still remains,
because it was not fulfilled under the Old Testament in consequence of Israel's
unbelief. The word of promise was a gospel[47] to
them, as it is to us. But it did not profit them, because they did not assimilate[48] the promise by faith. Their history from the
beginning consists of continued renewals of the promise on the part of God and
persistent rejections on the part of Israel, ending in the hardening of
their hearts. Every time the promise is renewed, it is presented in a higher
and more spiritual form. Every rejection inevitably leads to grosser views and
more hopeless unbelief. So entirely false is the fable of the Sibyl! God does
not burn some of the leaves when His promises have been rejected, and come back
with fewer offers at a higher price. His method is to offer more and better on
the same conditions. But it is the nature of unbelief to cause the heart to wax
gross, to blind the spiritual vision, until in the end the rich, spiritual
promises of God and the earthly, dark unbelief of the sinner stand in extremest
contrast.
At first the promise is presented in the negative form of
rest from labour. Even the Creator condescended thus to rest. But what such
rest can be to God it were vain for man to try to
conceive. We know that, as soon as the foundations of the world were laid and
the work of creation was ended, God ceased from this form of activity. But when
this negative rest had been attained, it was far from realising God's idea of
rest either for Himself or for man. For, though these works of God, the
material universe, were finished from the laying of the world's foundations to the
crowning of the edifice,[49] God still speaks of
another rest, and threatens to shut some men out for their unbelief. Our Lord
told the Pharisees, whose notion of the Sabbath was the negative one, that He desired His Sabbath rest to be like that of His
Father, Who "worketh hitherto." The Jewish Sabbath, it appears,
therefore, is the most crude and elementary form of God's promised rest.
The promise is next presented as the rest of Canaan.[50] This is a stage in advance in the development of the
idea. It is not mere abstention from secular labour, and the consecration of
inactivity. The rest now consists in the enjoyment of material prosperity, the
proud consciousness of national power, the growth of a peculiar civilization,
the rise of great men and eminent saints, and all this won by Israel under the
leadership of their Jesus, who was in this respect a type of ours. But even in
this second garden of Eden Israel did not attain unto God's
rest. Worldliness became their snare.
But God still called to them by the mouth of the Psalmist,
long after they had entered on the possession of Canaan.
This only proves that the true rest was still unattained, and God's promise not
yet fulfilled. The form which the rest of God now assumed is not expressly
stated in our passage. But we have not far to go in search of it. The first
Psalm, which is the introduction to all the Psalms, declares the blessedness of
contemplation. The Sabbath is seldom mentioned by the Psalmist. Its place is
taken by the sanctuary, in which rest of soul is found in meditating on God's
law and beholding the Lord's beauty.[51] The call is
at last urgent. "To-day!" It is the last
invitation. It lingers in the ears in ever fainter voice of prophet after
prophet, until the prophet's face turns towards the east to announce the break
of dawn and the coming of the perfect rest in Jesus Christ. God's promise was
never fulfilled to Israel,
because of their unbelief. But shall their unbelief make the faithfulness of
God of none effect? God forbid. The gifts and calling of God are without
repentance. The promise that has failed of fulfilment in the lower form must
find its accomplishment in the higher. Even a prayer is the more heard for
every delay. God's mill grinds slowly, but for that reason grinds small. What
is the inference? Surely it is that the Sabbath rest still remains for the true
people of God. This Sabbath rest St. Paul prayed
that the true Israel,
who glory, not in their circumcision, but in the Cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ, might receive: "Peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel
of God."[52]
The faithfulness of God to fulfil His promise in its
higher form is proved by His having accomplished it in its more elementary
forms to every one that believed. "For he that entered into God's rest did
actually rest from his works"[53]--that is to say, received the blessings
of the Sabbath--as truly as God rested from the work of creation. The Apostle's
practical inference is couched in language almost paradoxical: "Let us
strive to enter into God's rest"--not indeed into the rest of the Old
Testament, but into the better rest which God now offers in His Son.
The oneness of the dispensations has been proved. They are
one in their design, in their threatenings, in their promises. If we seek the
fundamental ground of this threefold unity, we shall find it in the fact that
both dispensations are parts of a Divine revelation. God has spoken, and the
word of God does not pass away. "Think not," said our Lord,
"that I came to destroy the Law or the prophets; I came not to destroy,
but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven
and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the
Law till all things be accomplished."[54] On another occasion He says,
"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words
shall not pass away."[55] These passages teach us that the words of God
through Moses and in the Son are equally immutable. Many features of the old
covenant may be transient; but, if it is a word of God, it abides in its
essential nature through all changes. For "the word of God is
living,"[56] because He Who speaks the word is
the living God. It acts with mighty energy,[57] like
the silent laws of nature, which destroy or save alive according as men obey or
disobey them. It cuts like a sword whetted on each side of the blade, piercing
through to the place where the natural life of the soul divides[58]
from, or passes into, the supernatural life of the spirit. For it is revelation
that has made known to man his possession of the spiritual faculty.
The word "spirit" is used by heathen writers. But in their books it
means only the air we breathe. The very conception of the spiritual is
enshrined in the bosom of God's word. Revelation has separated between the life
of heathenism and the life of the Church, between the natural man and the
spiritual, between the darkness that comprehended it not and the children of
the light who received it and thus became children of God. Further, the word of
God pierces to the joints that connect the natural and the supernatural.[59] It does not ignore the former. On the contrary, it
addresses itself to man's reason and conscience, in order to erect the
supernatural upon nature. Where reason stops short, the word of God appeals to
the supernatural faculty of faith; and when conscience grows blunt, the word
makes conscience, like itself, sharper than any two-edged sword. Once more, the
word of God pierces to the marrow.[60] It reveals to
man the innermost meaning of his own nature and of the supernatural planted
within him. The truest morality and the highest spirituality are both the
direct product of God's revelation.
But all this is true in its practical application to every
man individually. The power of the word of God to create distinct dispensations
and yet maintain their fundamental unity, to distinguish between masses of men
and yet cause all the separate threads of human history to converge and at last
meet, is the same power which judges the inmost thoughts and inmost purposes of
the heart. These it surveys with critical judgment.[61]
If its eye is keen, its range of vision is also wide. No created thing but is seen
and manifest. The surface is bared, and the depth within is opened up before
it. As the upturned neck of the sacrificial beast lay bare to the eye of God,[62] so are we exposed to the eye of Him to Whom we have to
give our account.[63]
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