Now I turn you again to those portions of God’s Word which are the basis of our consideration in this country. In the letter to the Hebrews, Hebrews 3, we have:
Holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling.
We are become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end.
We spent quite a lot of our time this morning with one word. It is the word which is here translated “partakers.” This word is translated by a number of different words in our language. In some places in this letter it is “partakers”; in another place in the New Testament it is “partner.”
But we spent our time showing that the best translation of the word is “companions.” So we translate:
Holy brethren, companions of the heavenly calling.
We are become companions of Christ.
We said that the New Testament gathers itself around that word. That word can really be taken as the key to the whole of this letter to the Hebrews: companions of Christ, and of a heavenly calling.
We are going on from where we left off this morning. I am very sorry for all those friends who were not with us, because we cannot tell you all that we said in more than an hour this morning.
We are coming to this letter to the Hebrews. That is its true title. In the oldest manuscripts, it just has this title: To the Hebrews. Of course, it was written to Hebrew Christians.
Now we want to understand the setting of this letter before we can understand its message. You will probably know that, in New Testament times, there was a great conflict between the Jews and the Christians—a very great battle raging between these two.
The Apostle Paul, who himself was a great Hebrew, had a very large heart for his own people. You remember what he said. If you look at his letter to the Romans, Romans 9:3:
I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
He was prepared to let everything go if only his people, Israel, would accept the Lord Jesus. But he fought a losing battle for Israel.
If you look at the last chapter of the book of Acts, you will see Paul’s surrender of that hope. Acts 28:28:
Be it known therefore unto you, that this salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles: they will also hear.
He said, in effect, “Seeing that Israel will not hear, I give up my great hope for them, and I turn to those who will hear. I turn to the Gentiles, and they will also hear.”
Then you come to this letter to the Hebrews, and at the end of this letter you have the result of this refusal. Hebrews 12:25 says:
See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh.
For if they escaped not when they refused Him that warned them on earth, much more shall not we escape who turn away from Him that warneth from heaven.
Then:
Yet once more signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain.
These words contain the final judgment upon the Hebrews who rejected Christ. The shaking referred to the destruction which was coming upon Israel in the year 70 A.D. When that happened, Israel would be left without a country, without a temple, and without a government. Everything was shaken until it completely disappeared. That was the result of refusing to hear Him that speaks from heaven.
It is in that setting that we have this letter to the Hebrews. On the one side, it is an appeal—a final appeal—to the Hebrew Christians not to go back from Jesus Christ into the Levitical system. On the other side, the letter is a great warning as to what will happen if they do.
You have to put this letter right into that setting. It is a letter set in a great crisis of spiritual life, and, of course, it contains an abiding message for all times.
Let us look for a minute at the three features which made up that great conflict and which led to that final division.
The first feature was Christ Himself: Christ as the Messiah, Jesus as the Christ.
The Jews believed in a Christ. Christ is only the Greek word for the Hebrew Messiah. The Hebrews believed in a Messiah, but the trouble was that they would not have Jesus as the Messiah.
As was prophesied, Jesus became the stone upon which they stumbled and were broken to pieces. It was a matter of the place that they gave to Jesus—or rather, the place that they would not give to Jesus.
Jesus, God’s anointed Son, the Christ, was the rock upon which they were broken. That was the first great factor in the conflict and in the ultimate division.
We must always remember, dear friends, that the test of everyone and everything is the place which is given to Jesus Christ.
If anybody ever comes to you and wants you to accept some system of teaching, they will have wonderful arguments. They will use a lot of the Bible. You may not even be able to answer their scriptures. But there is one thing that will always go to the heart of the matter: What place do you give to the Lord Jesus?
Do you give Him the place of God’s eternal Son? Everything stands or falls on this. You can try that, and you will find that most false teachers begin to wriggle on that point.
“Oh, we believe in Jesus as a great man, the greatest teacher that ever lived,” or something like that. But if you want us to believe that Jesus is God, then they say, “We just cannot go that far.”
It is the place that is given to the Lord Jesus that is the test of everyone and everything. That is the first factor in this great conflict in the letter to the Hebrews. You will see why the writer uses the whole of the first part of the letter to magnify the Lord Jesus.
The second feature is what the writer here calls the heavenly calling. You have got to put all the emphasis upon that word heavenly.
You see, the Hebrews wanted an earthly calling. All who are like them, even if they are called Christians, want a Christianity that belongs to this earth and this world—something down here.
We are going to enlarge upon that later on. But there is a tremendous significance in this little phrase: the heavenly calling.
“Oh, that is something very much more difficult. That is far away. That is up in the clouds. That is not down to earth. That is not practical.” But everything is in that word heavenly, and we shall see that as we go on.
Then there was this third feature. These Hebrews were prepared to be Christians, but it must be a Christianity after their own minds.
It must be a Christianity that allows all the Old Testament system to continue. It must allow Moses to continue. It must allow all the law of Moses to continue. It must allow the temple to continue. It must allow all the Old Testament priests to continue. It must allow all the sacrifices to continue.
They were saying, “We are prepared to be Christians if you will let us bring over our Old Testament into Christianity.” But if you say that all that is finished, and that a heavenly system has taken its place, then they say, “We cannot have that.”
That is a Jewish system brought into Christianity—a Christianity of ritual and form.
Now do you see the force of this phrase, companions of the heavenly calling? Companions of Christ are those who are constituted anew on a heavenly and spiritual basis. They are the ones who are responding to a heavenly calling.
We have come to the point of transition from the natural and earthly Israel to the new spiritual and heavenly Israel. In the divine sequence, the one ought to have given way to the other, to have made full place for the new.
Israel ought to have died, been buried, and been raised again in Christ. Natural Israel ought to have been set aside and become the heavenly Israel—the companions of Jesus Christ. But they refused to have it like that, and because they refused, they were set aside.
God is just moving on with His purpose concerning His Son. Although many were called, few were chosen. There were a few of Israel who were chosen as the companions, while the many who were called refused. So they were set aside, and God moved on in this transition toward His new heavenly Israel.
They positively refused to move onto heavenly ground. They refused to move onto the ground of the heavenly Messiah. As a result, they went the way of Adam.
Now here is a very interesting and instructive thing. Adam was named by God. Adam was chosen by God. Adam was called by God into relation to His purpose concerning His Son.
Adam was made, but he was not perfect. He was innocent, but he was not perfect. You know the difference between being innocent and being perfect.
A little baby child is innocent. Would you say it is perfect? No, it is not perfect. It has got to grow up. It will only grow up and become perfect as it goes through all sorts of difficulties and troubles. We call them growing pains, but that is the way of becoming perfect—from an innocent child to a full-grown man.
Adam was innocent, like a little child—very beautiful, with no sin in him. But he had not come to spiritual perfection. He still had to be made like God’s Son. That is what he was created for.
Now God put him on test; He allowed him to be tested. Oh, what a wonderful thing would have happened if Adam had gone through his testing triumphantly. From the innocence of a little child, he would have become a spiritually full-grown man like the Lord Jesus.
And we, the children of Adam, would have been very different people. But he failed in his test. He did not go the way that God had called him to go.
God put him aside and put a curse upon him, saying, in effect, “That kind of being can never satisfy Me. He has refused to go the way of My Son.”
That is exactly what happened to Israel. God named Israel. God chose Israel. God called Israel, all with His Son in view. But Israel refused to go God’s way.
Israel was tested as to Jesus Christ. The four Gospels are full of Israel being tested concerning Jesus Christ. They all close with Israel saying “No” to God’s way concerning His Son. So God did with Israel what He did with Adam: He put a curse upon the nation.
For these many centuries, that curse has rested upon Israel. We will not dwell upon that longer, for it comes out again and again in our meditations.
Now, in this matter, you have that possibility presented to the Hebrew Christians. God is saying by this letter, “Do not refuse Him that speaketh from heaven.”
But here is the other side to the story. If men positively refuse God’s heavenly calling, just at that point God’s eternal plan is revealed.
That plan is a heavenly people with a spiritual nature, occupying a place in God’s creation. That is what God eternally intended. He intended that before He called Israel, and He called Israel to be a people like that: a heavenly people with a spiritual nature.
I do not know how that breaks upon you as I say it. There is so much that I despair of ever being able to tell you about it. I do not know what to say and what not to say, because I have only got ten days in which to say it.
But the point is this: when Israel refuses, God presents His eternal plan. This heavenly people of a spiritual nature is the subject of the whole New Testament. The whole New Testament is the body of truth which relates to this eternal will of God.
Let us look at that very hurriedly. We will take the four Gospels. We are not going to study the four Gospels; we are just going to look at them.
If you take up the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—you get some general idea of what they contain. Then, if you stand back from them, you are able to see two lines of movement right through the four Gospels: two movements running alongside each other.
On the one side, there is the Jewish idea of the Messiah, the Jewish idea of the kingdom of God, and the whole Jewish system.
Alongside of it, and over against it, there is something different. There is God’s idea and heaven’s idea of the Messiah, and that is very different from the Jewish idea. It is always in complete conflict with Jewish ideas.
There is God’s idea and heaven’s idea of the kingdom of God, and it is very different from the Jewish ideas. There is the Jewish idea of the King—what kind of a king they wanted and what kind of a king they were going to have.
Alongside of it, and over against it, is God’s idea and heaven’s idea of a King:
Behold, thy King cometh unto thee,
Meek, and riding upon an ass.
That is not the Jewish idea of a king. How can a man riding on an ass overthrow a mighty Roman Empire? They said, “That is not our idea of a king. We will not have this man to reign over us.”
You see the two lines running through the Gospels: the Hebrew idea and the heavenly idea. That is the very meaning of the four Gospels.
When you get to the end of the four Gospels, you have the Jewish idea rejected fully and finally by God. On the other side, you have God’s idea introduced and established forever.
Two thousand years have proved that. The one idea of an earthly system is gone. There has been nothing of it for two thousand years. On the other side, there is God’s idea of His kingdom. That was introduced when Israel was rejected, and God has been going on with that for two thousand years.
We are here tonight because that is true. We are in God’s kingdom. We are under God’s government. That is what the four Gospels say to us.
That is not all, but it is the general conclusion of the four Gospels. Later on, we are going to see the details in the Gospels—or at least in one of the Gospels—which show how true that was.
You move from the Gospels to the book of Acts. In that book, you have two features. First of all, you have the transition from the old to the new.
With God, the transition is complete. But with His people, it is made slow because they are not ready to accept it. The transition was slower than it ought to have been.
James, the head of the church in Jerusalem, still wanted to retain something of the old order. Even Peter was very reluctant to abandon Israel and go right out for the Gentiles. Even dear old Barnabas was caught in that snare.
Those who were attached to their traditions were very slow to give up their traditions. But God is going on. If you are not coming on, He is going on. If you are not going on, He will leave you behind and find others.
Because they were so slow, He brought in Paul. Paul got things going. The transition was complete with Paul, and he was God’s instrument of completing the transition.
The letter to the Galatians is the instrument by which that transition was completed. We shall come to that letter later.
You pass from Acts and come into the letters—what are called the Epistles. What have you there? You have the full body of teaching concerning the heavenly and spiritual nature of the people of God.
It is applied to a whole variety of conditions. There was one state of things in Corinth, another state of things in Galatia, another in Ephesus, and so on. But applied to all these different conditions is this one thing: it is God’s intention to have a heavenly and spiritual people.
All the letters were applied to different situations with that one object in view. Every letter in the New Testament has something to say about this heavenly nature of the people of God.
Now, as I must close in about four minutes, we just arrive at the letter to the Hebrews. This letter takes a very, very important place in this whole question.
The letter to the Hebrews is a summary of the whole New Testament. The whole meaning of the New Testament is gathered up in this letter to the Hebrews.
Into this letter flow many tributaries, making this letter the meeting place of all the revelations of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ.
So we close where we began:
Holy brethren, companions of a heavenly calling.
We are become companions of Christ.
Who are the companions of Christ? They are those who have fully left the old earthly system and are joined to the heavenly Lord. They are those who have answered to the heavenly calling.
Paul cried when he was on trial before King Agrippa:
I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.
Paul was a great companion of Jesus Christ because he had completely finished with everything but Jesus Christ. As he said:
I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.
He was a man who was wholly on the ground of Jesus Christ and wholly on the ground of God’s heavenly purpose. These are the companions of Jesus Christ.
Now later we will go further with this and deal with many of the details which we have only mentioned in general.
But I thought I must say this as I close this evening. There are many young Christians here, and perhaps you do not know your Bible as well as some older Christians do. You do not know all the Bible background of what I have been saying.
I hope this will make you want to know your Bible better. Perhaps there is quite a lot that I have said that you do not understand.
Now this is the one thing that I do want you to understand. You will come to understand all the other things as you go on. If you really do commit yourself to the Lord Jesus, you will come to understand.
But what I want you to realize is that you have a very much greater Christ than ever you have imagined. The Christ to whom you have given yourselves is a very great Christ.
The call of the Lord which you have answered in accepting the Lord Jesus is a much bigger calling than you have any knowledge of.
I just want you to go away with the impression: I have come into something, and this is big enough to fill my whole life.
So do not worry about what you do not understand. Do realize how great a Lord is your Lord, and what a great thing is the heavenly calling.