Lord, we do now adjust ourselves to the deepest truth: that only Thou Thyself canst make us understand Thine own things.
It is not possible for the natural man to understand the things of the Spirit of God. Only the Spirit of God can give that understanding.
And unless Thou, here in this very gathering, dost do that with every one of us, we have come in vain. Lord, do Thou the speaking. Beyond all human instrumentality, may we begin to hear the Lord speaking in our hearts. That will be fruitful.
We pray that it may be so, in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Will you turn again to that letter from which we have already read, the Letter to the Hebrews, in Chapter 2?
Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them.
For if the word spoken through angels proved stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward;
how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation? which having at the first been spoken through the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard;
God also bearing witness with them, both by signs and wonders, and by manifold powers, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will.
Turn to the end of the letter, Chapter 12 and Verse 25.
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:
Whose voice then shook the earth: but now He hath promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven.
And this word, 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.
Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us have grace, whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God, with reverence and awe:
for our God is a consuming fire.
Those words, of course, sound very terrible. They are almost like holding a threat over people. And you might feel that they are not too encouraging a beginning for a time like this.
I have read them with one object, and I think they constitute a very good starting point for such a consideration as is before us at this time.
No one will question the solemnity of those words. There is something almost terrible about them.
When you hear, “You cannot; you dare not,” you recognize that we are in the presence of something very serious. There is something very serious on hand when such words have to be spoken.
We are not in the presence of some just light, superficial matter of interest. We are evidently in the presence of something momentous—something which, if on the one side, can be put into such language of fear, fear, a solemn and terrible warning, the possibility of something awful happening—
If, on the one side, it is like that, you do not at all like that about anything unless it is something tremendous, something of very glorious possibility and consequence. To miss that something is said to be the most terrible thing that could happen. That is what it must be: something tremendously important.
Now, I am not exaggerating. I am not making that up. There you are: I started at the beginning of the letter, “Let us fear,” and I have gone right over to near the end of the letter, and the same words, or similar words, occur again as summing up.
And in between, at beginning and end, you just have any number of these earnest entreaties, these solemn warnings, examples taken out of the life of others who did not give heed and go through, and what happened in their case. You have all these exhortations, entreaties, warnings, beseechings; and we shall come on to those in particular, probably before we are at the end of these gatherings.
What is it all about?
Now therefore, friends, I suggest to you that this letter must be a very vital letter. If that is the nature of it, that is the portent: something tremendous in view for Christians. That is what it is all about.
This afternoon will occupy my time mainly in talking about the letter. Later, we will get into the letter itself, probably, but first we will talk about it.
Now, you see, when you have language like this, when someone is speaking in this way and it is put on record—and turns out to be, allow me to put it in this way, not man writing or speaking, but God—you surely must be in the presence of a crisis.
It must be a crisis that is on hand; that is, a terminal point on which a tremendous issue is at stake, one way or another. When you hear that something has got to happen, it is the ultimate that is brought to bear upon this moment, this situation.
Now, we know, of course, that this letter itself took its rise from a crisis. But it is impressive to realize that not only was it related to a historic crisis, but the Holy Spirit took hold of that and introduced the ultimate crisis, built upon that—the ultimate issue.
The historic crisis was this: this letter was written probably about two years before that awful scattering, for the whole of this age, of the Jewish people—the destruction of Jerusalem—which the Lord Jesus had foretold.
You notice in our reading, “which having at the first been spoken through the Lord.” Give the more earnest heed. And some of the things which were spoken by Him related to this crisis.
He said, “The day is coming when they will cast up around you their siege; they will leave not one stone upon another.” That whole terrible twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, spoken by the Lord, bore upon the thing that was now within a year or two of actual fulfilment.
When the Roman legions besieged Jerusalem, they brought it to starvation and destroyed its temple, so that literally, according to a Jewish historian, they did not leave one stone upon another.
It is on record that, as they went about their work, they literally levelled the whole thing to the ground—the temple, the city, all the temple worship finished, priesthood finished, the sacrifices finished, the people scattered to the ends of the earth.
Never to be recovered again in the dispensation. It has been like that, according to the Lord’s word: “Your house is left unto you desolate.” It has been like that these two thousand years.
That is the historic crisis that is here: the shaking of the things of the earth that can be shaken.
Now the Holy Spirit takes hold of the historic and superimposes upon that something bigger: the shaking of the heavens also, the heavenly things. This is Jewish Christianity. Now Christianity as a whole will be shaken at the end. This is an end of one; another of these is coming.
When everything in Christianity will be shaken, shaken to its foundation, this tremendous twofold crisis is the occasion of this letter.
Why did the Lord cause this person, whoever he was—we will not debate who he was—to write this letter at that time? And this is where it comes to us with just as much force as it ought to have come to the Jews at that time.
The time will come—it is fixed in the counsels of God—when everything in this creation and in this universe is going to be subject to a tremendous shaking. It is going to happen, going to happen.
Peter speaks about it in terms of the atomic age, as you know: “Seeing that all these things”—and these are the elements—“are on fire.” It is coming.
Now the issue is this: when that comes, if that comes, what that we have will abide the shaking? What will go through it all and survive, unshaken?
What have we got that, let the greatest shaking in this universe come, can never be hurt, will never go, and will come out all right? A kingdom which cannot be shaken—what have you got?
Now this letter was written to these Hebrew Christians. It was a great effort of the Lord to get their feet established upon ground that could never be shaken.
You see, they were wavering. They were wavering. They were already being shaken. They were being moved from their steadfastness. Some of them were thinking of going back to the old associations, the old Jewish system, and so on.
The Lord inspired this letter with the one object of getting them established—so established that, when this terrific storm, these winds, were let loose and carried away so many and so much, they would be that which would stand the storm.
And, as I have said, He used the historic as the occasion for bringing in the eternal. He leads on to this for all Christians.
Now, dear friends, there are two things about that which are important for our notice. One is this: you cannot, you cannot settle that matter when the storm breaks.
If you have ever been in a storm, a real good storm, you know very well that that is not the time to get things settled. If you had not got them settled before then, you are just going to be all at sea indeed.
The forces will be too much for you. You will just be thrown all over the place. An emergency is not the time to quietly get down to your foundations. You are caught up in things too much.
If it is not all settled beforehand, if you do not know where you are beforehand, when this thing breaks you are not able to see to it then. That is important to recognize.
Therefore, this letter would say, in the light of our testings which will come, in view of that which is bound to break upon us sometime, now is the time. Now is the time to make sure that our position is on absolutely sound ground, absolutely true.
There is nothing doubtful about our position at all, no question about it. We know where we are. We are not at the mercy of other people’s judgments and ideas and whatnot. We know the Lord. We know the Lord for ourselves. We know where we are.
Let everything go to pieces: we know where we are with the Lord. Now, that is a thing that has got to be settled, and it cannot be settled when everything is going to pieces.
But the other thing that is important—sound very serious, do I not? But it is very important—is that we should recognize that it may not be necessary for the great ultimate upheaval and chaos and cataclysm to take place in order to bring that issue out.
Is not this the heart of every trial that comes into the Christian life? Any day, any day, a temptation or an adversity, some suffering, something that is calculated to throw you all over the place.
Now, in any such experience, a question arises: What have I got of the Lord that is going to get me through this? What have I really got now of the Lord that will stand instead in this crisis?
It may be something in any department: a family matter, a business matter, a church matter, a personal matter—something that is most testing, unsettling, upsetting.
It comes like a shot or a blow, could knock you to pieces. What have you got of the Lord that is going to see you through, that will not go with the wind, will not be carried away in this hour of trial, but will stand, will remain?
Now that is the issue of this book, you see: whether it is a historic crisis in the life of Israel or Jewry, or the ultimate experience of the church. And it is coming, and it has already come to multitudes of the Lord’s people in the earth. That is the position today in large parts of this world.
The question for many today in the East is: What have we got that will see us through this terrible time? But it is the ever-present question.
And that is the message of this book. So it has to be solemn. It has to be serious. It has to use words like these: “We ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them.”
Now, that is a poor way of interpreting the original language. It so often fails to give us the real sense of the words which were originally used.
Here it is: “lest haply we drift away from them.” And the picture there in the original language is the picture of a ship—a ship in rough water, with strong torrents and heavy winds.
And that ship is having a very difficult time. It is trying to make calm water. There are moorings there in the harbour. Moorings there—only if she can make those moorings and lay hold on those moorings and get moored up, she is all right.
But here she comes, and those responsible are a bit careless about it. And just as she comes up on the moorings, they are too careless to grasp, to lay hold of them, and to fasten. And she drifts past and onto the rocks.
You see? That is actually the picture behind the Greek words here: “We ought to give the more earnest heed, lest, in this time of adverse currents, these conditions of trial, through not being—”