Colleen and Nikki continue their discussion through the book of Hebrews. They discuss the priesthood of Jesus and how it differs from Adventist teachings. Podcast was published May 19, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: Today we are discussing Hebrews chapter 5, a really amazing, surprising chapter in the Bible that explains why Jesus is qualified to be our high priest. And why is this important? Well, it’s as we said at the beginning of our study on chapter 2, if we don’t understand the depth and nature and truth of who Jesus is, of His true qualifications to be our substitute, our Savior, our high priest, our intercessor, if we don’t understand all of that, we can be so easily deceived, down trails of subtle false doctrine that take us far astray, so we’re studying the New Covenant through the lens of Hebrews so that we will be firmly anchored in who Jesus is and what happened to the law. But before we go further, if you want to write to us, if you have suggestions or comments, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can subscribe to Proclamation! magazine or to our weekly emails at proclamationmagazine.com. And if you want to donate to Life Assurance Ministries to help keep the podcast going, the emails, the magazine, you can also do that online at proclamationmagazine.com. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please like us and write a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, we’re going to dive into Hebrews 5. So, Nikki, before we do, do you have any off-the-cuff reactions to your ideas as an Adventist of who Jesus was as a high priest and why He was one?
Nikki: Well, when I thought of Jesus as a high priest in Adventism, I immediately had pictures, literally pictures, in my mind, pictures from the books, all the children’s books. I’d think of Him by the ark, I’d think of Him around rising smoke [laughter] –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and that was kind of it when I was young. As I got older, it was always connected to the Book of Life.
Colleen: Oh.
Nikki: I pictured Him standing at the Book of Life – and I probably had that wrong. I think maybe they teach that it’s angels who are at the Book of Life, but I pictured Jesus by the Book of Life, and every time I confessed a sin He would find it written in there, and He would cover it with His blood. And if I didn’t confess, then He would leave it without His blood on it, and at the end of this judgment if there were any sins that were not covered by His blood, then I was not going to be saved, and that was kind of my picture of Him there. That was scary. I think I taught myself how to ignore that part of it, but that was kind of my picture of Him as a high priest. I didn’t really care much for that part of this story.
Colleen: No, I didn’t either. In fact, I would have to say that as an Adventist I didn’t really understand what it meant that Jesus was our high priest. I accepted the fact that He was, and I also heard that business of Him being up in heaven conducting the investigative judgment and applying His blood to every confessed sin of people who professed to be believers. I was never sure if I could really believe that because I just didn’t see a clear illustration in the Bible for that concept, and the way Adventists taught me that idea was from the book of Leviticus, where they talked about the high priest taking the Day of Atonement sacrifice into the sanctuary and splattering the blood on the veil and taking it into the Most Holy Place, and I actually believed, because Ellen White taught it, that when those high priests in Israel took the blood into the sanctuary and splattered it on the veil and took it into the Most Holy Place, that they were transferring Israel’s sins into the tabernacle, that they were taking the blood of animals that was supposed to cover the sins of Israel’s sin and taking that into the sanctuary, and because it was atoning for sin it was moving the sin from Israel into the sanctuary in the presence of God. Well, you know, I didn’t realize until long after I left Adventism that that idea was just heresy because even in ancient Israel blood cleansed. Blood never transferred sin. Blood always covered sin. So even that was wrong. But that belief and that teaching is was Adventists use to support the idea that Jesus’ blood was up in heaven transferring sins from believers to heaven, and then if people confessed those sins, then He’d blot them out. What a crock, I can only say.
Nikki: So His blood was defiling heaven.
Colleen: In essence, yes. His blood was defiling heaven because it was transferring sin from us to heaven.
Nikki: According to Adventism.
Colleen: According to Adventism. So here in Hebrews 5 we begin to get a picture of Jesus the high priest that’s so different from what we learned as Adventists, and maybe that’s why both of us, Nikki, as we’ve been talking about this and studying it, have just found ourselves poring over the individual verses and saying, “My goodness, the Jesus this reveals is so different from what we had thought.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So why don’t we just start by reading the first four verses. The first four verses explain, from a historical perspective looking back on the law, what a high priest in Israel was supposed to do, what qualified him, what he did. Let’s read those first four verses. Do you want to do that, Nikki?
Nikki: “For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness. Because of this, he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the people. And no one takes this honor for himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was.”
Colleen: So verse 1 in chapter 5, what does it tell us the two essential things are that a high priest had to be? He had to be –
Nikki: Well, he had to be chosen from among men, so he had to be human and he had to be a man. He’s appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God.
Colleen: And so who appointed the high priest?
Nikki: Well, God did.
Colleen: And that actually is validated and explained further in verse 4. So it says in verse 1 he was appointed or taken from among men. He had to be human. He was appointed to intercede in things concerning God, to intercede between man and God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. And then in the second verse, what did it say about the Levitical high priests? What else did they have to be able to do?
Nikki: Well, verse 2 says that the Levitical high priest can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is also beset with weakness.
Colleen: Isn’t that an interesting thought? When I learned about the high priestly system and the Levitical priests in Adventism, I never thought of them as dealing gently with the wayward in Israel. That was never my understanding. I just thought of them presiding over the Day of Atonement, presiding over sins and offering and sacrifices, and being the pooh-bah that was kind of like next to Moses. This is interesting because it actually says a high priest was intended to deal gently with ignorant and misguided people. So there’s a shepherding element there. There’s a teaching element that I didn’t understand was intentional for a high priest. And then the third verse explains a further thing. Because he can deal gently with the sinners, because he himself is weak – what does that mean, by the way: He himself is beset with weakness?
Nikki: Well, he was also a sinner.
Colleen: He had sinful flesh, and he had temptations just like the people he dealt with, and he did sin. And because of that, in verse 3, what was he obligated to do?
Nikki: He had to offer sacrifices for his own sins.
Colleen: He couldn’t just offer sacrifices for the people. He had to offer for himself and then also for the people. To even be effective as a high priest, he had to be appointed – he had to be human, he had to be appointed by God, but he had to offer sacrifices for his own sins so that he himself would be reconciled to God as he interceded for the people. When you think about it, the Levitical high priests had a very difficult and responsible job that God asked them to do, one that, you know, frankly, I don’t know if I would have wanted to do.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: Fortunately, as a woman and a non-Jew, I wouldn’t have had to but – [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – it’s a hard job. And then verse 4. What does verse 4 tell us about the high priests?
Nikki: Well, it says that no one takes this honor for himself, and I find it interesting that they would view it as an honor. Of course, it was, it was an important role –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – but, oh, a difficult one, I would imagine.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So it says that no one takes this honor for himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was.
Colleen: God appointed Aaron to be the high priest when He established the law, set up Israel as a nation, and gave the law to Moses. Aaron was appointed to be the high priest, and it was from his line, a very specific son, that from Aaron’s line would come all the high priests of Israel. But then we come to verse 5 and 6, and suddenly the writer of Hebrews is applying these things that we know about the high priests from the Old Testament to the Lord Jesus and showing both how He is similar and different from them. Do you mind reading 5 and 6?
Nikki: “So also Christ did not exalt Himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by Him who said to Him, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you;’ as He says also in another place, ‘You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.'”
Colleen: So the first thing he does in applying this understanding of the high priests to Jesus is what? What does he say Christ did not do?
Nikki: Well, it says that He did not exalt Himself to be made a high priest. He was appointed.
Colleen: How many times have you known somebody who decided – I’m thinking of a specific person – who decided they wanted an administrative job at an organization, and they started out in a position that was not administrative, even remotely, but over the years they pulled strings, they made alliances, they perhaps even compromised themselves in certain ways so that ultimately they ended up in an administrative position? I mean, you’ve seen that; right?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Jesus did not do that to become a high priest. He didn’t qualify to be a high priest by being an excellent human, a perfect law keeper, or making sure everybody knew He was qualified to do this. What does it say was the reason and the way He became a high priest?
Nikki: He was appointed by the Father. He was appointed by Him who said, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.”
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting?
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Now, that’s from Psalm 2, where David, the father of Jesus, in a sense, the forerunner of Christ, prophetically spoke of the Lord Jesus a thousand years before Jesus was born, and he said, and we’ve quoted this Psalm before in the Book of Hebrews, “You are my Son.” This is God speaking: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you,” and then he compares it also to a passage in Psalm 110:4. What’s the second quote he uses?
Nikki: “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”
Colleen: So here we have two verses that the author of Hebrews is lifting out of the Psalms, Psalms written by the forerunner of Jesus, David, who was under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit prophesying about Jesus. And he’s saying Jesus is not like those high priests. First of all, He’s a Son of God, and secondly, His priesthood is different. How’s it different?
Nikki: It’s in the order of Melchizedek. This is not the Levitical priesthood.
Colleen: This is something God is doing. This does not come through inheritance, through physical inheritance. This is appointment, divine appointment by God the Father. It’s just an interesting fulcrum in the argument. He starts by explaining the characteristics of the Levitical high priest, and right here he shows how David foretold there was going to be a new kind of priest one day. He meets all the qualifications that the initial priests had to meet, had to be human, had to be appointed by God, but He’s not going to be a Levitical priest. And then we go on, and he develops more how Jesus lived and how He became the high priest. Did you have a thought about that, Nikki?
Nikki: I just don’t know how I missed this as an Adventist. [Laughter.]
Colleen: As an Adventist, I did not understand what to do with all these quotes from David. I didn’t understand exactly how we could be sure that all of these things could apply to Jesus and how they – you know, I didn’t see how they all fit together. And I completely missed the importance of Jesus’ priesthood.
Nikki: I think that when I came across things like this, because I do remember reading about the order of Melchizedek, when I came across things like this, it was confusing to me, and it was one of those things where I just figured brighter minds than mine have this figured out, and I’m in the right church, and as long as I have faith like a child, which to me was a total pass on understanding sound doctrine, I would be fine. I didn’t have to know it, and I’d breeze past it until I found something in Hebrews that I could apply to myself. It was kind of narcissistic, really.
Colleen: Wow. Well, actually I did the same thing.
Nikki: But yeah, I just would glaze over and felt like it was okay because I was being looked after by all of the leaders of my remnant church.
Colleen: Yeah. I did glaze over. I did not internalize these words. They were confusing to me.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, the next verse, verse 7, brings up something we’ve talked a little bit about before, but we’re going to go into a little different depth on it today. Do you mind reading 7 – actually, let’s read 7 through 10 because they function as a unit, and then we’ll kind of look at them sequentially to see what it’s saying.
Nikki: “In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to Him who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered. And being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.”
Colleen: There’s so much in here that I never saw in the past. First of all, in verse 7, what does it mean, “in the days of His flesh?”
Nikki: Well, this is – you know, Hebrews 1 made it clear that He was the eternal Son of God, and this is referring to the incarnation. This is when He was here.
Colleen: And so what does it say that He did in the days of His flesh that God honored and heard Him.
Nikki: He offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears.
Colleen: We all know He prayed to the Father, but how is the Father described in this verse? He offered them to the one who what?
Nikki: Who was able to save Him from death.
Colleen: And God heard Him because of what?
Nikki: Because of His reverence.
Colleen: And the NASB says “piety.” So you think “reverence” and “piety” and you get the same – they both represent the same underlying Greek word. Because Jesus was truly pious, because He was truly reverent, because He truly, truly trusted His Father, God heard His prayers and supplications and answered His prayers. What is it referring to when it talks about “His prayers and supplications, with crying and tears,” His great agony? What is it talking about?
Nikki: Well, we know for sure that we can think of the Garden of Gethsemane, and we know there were other times during His ministry where He went away to pray.
Colleen: And during Gethsemane, during the prayers at Gethsemane, that was the time when He begged God to do what, if it was possible?
Nikki: To let this cup pass from Him.
Colleen: The cup was – as an Adventist I thought of that just as His death, like who wouldn’t plead to avoid being nailed to a cross? But in the context of what it’s saying about His high priesthood and from our knowing what Jesus actually came to do, what’s the fuller picture that He was begging God to escape, if it was possible?
Nikki: Being the propitiation, taking on the sins of the world.
Colleen: Yeah. Can you imagine being Jesus the man who was about to suffer in a very physical way for human sin, but knowing also that because He was God the Son He was going to suffer not just in a representative way, but for the sin of the entire human race, and He was going to bear the actual weight of the sin of all those who would believe. I can’t even imagine becoming the object that God would turn away from because of His wrath toward sin. He pleaded with God, and yet He said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” I remember – we’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again – the sermon when Gary Inrig pointed out that this particular moment, as far as we know from Scripture, was the only time that we’re aware of when Jesus’ personal human will was out of harmony with the Father’s, and yet He chose to submit and trust the Father.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He chose to let the Father have His will done. And then it says that because of His piety He was delivered. How was He delivered from death? He did die on the cross. How was He delivered?
Nikki: His resurrection.
Colleen: Yeah. It said in Psalms again that God would not leave His soul in hell, His flesh would not see corruption, and because of His willingness to obey and trust His father and fulfill His purpose, for which the Father had sent Him, God resurrected Him. His sacrifice was sufficient. Talk to me, Nikki, about verse 8, “Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.”
Nikki: I love one of the sentences in the ESV notes about this verse. It says that He came to know firsthand what it cost to maintain obedience in the midst of suffering. He maintained obedience through the whole process of suffering. And you know, I was thinking about it before we started this recording, before He came as a man, He was in perfect harmony with the Father, and He decided that He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but He humbled Himself, taking on the form of man. He made Himself a little lower than the angels for a while.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Through that process and through experiencing humanity, what it is to be a human and to live perfectly obedient to God’s will, He experienced that in a way that He just hadn’t before the incarnation.
Colleen: Jesus came, it says, to fulfill the law. And as the sacrifice for human sin, He was fulfilling the law. It’s so interesting, when you think about it, the law, it says in both Romans and Galatians, was given to increase sin, to make sin visible to humanity, things that they didn’t even necessarily know consciously were sins, the law made people aware of what sin was. It also said that anybody who was a sinner – well, that’s everyone – was worthy of death and would die. So to fulfill that law, Jesus the righteous; Jesus, eternally God; Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, Son of Man, came fully spiritually alive with no sin in Him, and He came and fulfilled that law by becoming, without ever sinning, by becoming sin for us, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21. By becoming sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God, He took all the guilt, all the weight, all the horror of our personal sin on Himself and suffered separation from the Father, the wrath of God, for everyone who would believe. He didn’t die a representative death. He was obedient in suffering the full weight of personal sin for everyone who would believe Him.
Nikki: That was a concept that I really had to spend time unpacking because when you’re taught that Jesus came in sinful flesh and that He was just like us and that He could have failed and then you read something like this, that He learned obedience through what He suffered, then the picture, at least in my head, was that He wasn’t necessarily just by default obedient. He had to learn how to become obedient just like every little child had to learn to come when they’re called, and He wasn’t rebellious because, you know, He did it right, but He had to learn how to do these things. I don’t even know if I have the words to try to flesh out the difference between what I understood about Him before and what I’ve come to understand now. For God to have to be obedient would be a different reality from what He experienced before He was incarnate. And so it wasn’t that He was by default disobedient and had to learn how to become obedient. God is perfect. There was absolutely no chance He was going to fail. He was set apart for this. This was His purpose. Through that, He learned human experience in a way that He hadn’t before, as the God-man.
Colleen: That’s so true. And ultimately the obedience He had to learn was to submit to the Father’s will, and the Father’s will for Him was to be the perfect sacrifice for sin. None of us is ever asked to do that. We’re not asked to mimic or imitate Jesus. We’re asked to worship and honor and trust Him. This is the way in which He is considered the second Adam. The first Adam had one command: Don’t eat the fruit or you will die. Adam failed to do what God had asked Him to do. Jesus came, and He did what God asked Him to do. This comparison and distinction is fleshed out in Romans 5. But Jesus was “perfected,” or the underlying Greek word actually means “completed.” His humanity was completed by His obedience to the Father’s will. He did, He became sin. Jesus fulfilled the law. On the one hand, He illustrated what all the shadows of the law were pointing to: Himself, the Son of God, the Son of Man, the perfect sacrifice. And on the other hand, He fulfilled what the law pointed out about humanity. Humanity deserves death because of sin. Jesus did both of those. He revealed Himself to be the Son of God, to be the perfect sacrifice. He revealed that death for sin had to happen. He took the death. And because He was the perfect sacrifice, He was delivered from death by resurrection. When you look at verse 9, Nikki, what do you think?
Nikki: I see another place where I had to work through it, kind of like the “learning obedience,” the “being made perfect.” I had to process that when I first encountered these verses.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And I talked a little bit about that in one of our previous podcasts, thinking, well, if He had to be made perfect, then He didn’t start perfect. But that’s not what I believe this is saying now. I believe this is saying His purpose was made complete.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So in being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him. It was through that propitiation, that work on the cross, it was through that completion of what He came to do that He becomes the source of eternal salvation to all who believe in Him. It’s because of His propitiation.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Because of His obedience to the Father as a man, doing what no other man could do, taking the burden of sin and dying the death that our sin deserved, that was what revealed Him to be the source of our eternal salvation. He was perfect. He is able to save. His death was something only He could do, and that death, followed by His resurrection, is what revealed Him to be the source of eternal salvation. And I just want to say, that eternal salvation is very specific in this verse. Who receives it? Only those who obey Him. It doesn’t say obey the law. It says obey Jesus. So salvation, according to this verse, belongs to those who believe and obey Jesus. He fulfilled the law. His obedience was finished when He took the weight of sin and took the death the law demanded.
Nikki: And I just want to say too, when we talk about Jesus being made perfect, He was the lamb that was slain before the foundation of the earth. He was, you might say, prequalified to be our propitiation because it was a done deal before we were ever even created. I just think it’s really important to continuously exchange the deceptive teaching that Jesus was like us, that He was fully man and never – you know, not God, that He could have sinned. All of that needs to constantly be replaced with the full teaching of Scripture, and we bump into these little texts that are like proof texts. We need to back up and remember Scripture says other things that are also true about Him. That helps us in our interpretation of these ones.
Colleen: That’s a really good point. Let’s finish the sentence begun in verse 9, Nikki, by just talking through verse 10, and here is where we get a second reference to this new priesthood.
Nikki: “Being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.” So here again we have that He was appointed by God.
Colleen: Right, to a different kind of priesthood, a priesthood that no Levite could ever accomplish because Levites were sinful and had to offer sacrifices for their own sins. Jesus was made perfect, was made complete, through His perfect obedience to the Father’s will for Him. He took our sin in obedience, He suffered the wrath of God in obedience, and He rose from death, breaking that curse of sin for us. It’s kind of overwhelming when I think about it. Before we look at these last four verses, I’d just like to do a little – just reflect a little bit on the comparisons that I’ve had in my own head as I’ve read this chapter, between my idea of Jesus as the high priest from my Adventist perspective and Jesus the high priest from the perspective of Hebrews.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The Adventist high priest, we learned, was not seated. He’s standing up in the sanctuary in heaven applying His blood every time someone confesses His sin. But this Jesus completed the atonement. His high priestly work is the consequence of His having been God’s appointed, sufficient sacrifice. The Adventist Jesus had a sinlessness that was exonerated by the law and which exonerated the law. The Adventist Jesus served as our example of how to keep the law. But this Jesus, His sinless obedience was in submission to the Father in fulfilling the law. He wasn’t showing us how to keep it. He fulfilled every curse, every shadow of the law on our behalf. He was the atonement. He completed the atonement in one act of righteousness, and that’s also explained further in Romans 5. Jesus’ sacrifice, His death, His resurrection fulfilled. It did not continue the law. And Jesus is the high priest because He offered the perfect, sufficient sacrifice and became the atonement for us. He’s also our high priest because God appointed Him. Jesus is our high priest because He was human, He took the weight and the curse of human sin. He suffered the consequence of human sin and the wrath of God, and He was the perfect atonement for that sin, and He was able to do this because God appointed Him. He offered Himself on the cross, as we said earlier, as our new high priest in a different order, and He paid the price of the law and of sin and rose from death and broke the power of the law and of sin for those of us who believe. In short, Jesus is not applying His blood in heaven somewhere.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And He’s not waiting for us to vindicate Him. He is vindicated. [Laughter.]
Nikki: And He’s not wearing a Urim and Thummim. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Oh, thank you! [Laughter.] Oh, my. That is so true. Well, now as we finish, let’s read those last four verses, Nikki.
Nikki: “About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Colleen: You had some amazing insights when we talked earlier, Nikki. Do you want to talk through some of the things you thought when you read these verses?
Nikki: Well, it’s interesting. I have noticed at the end of each of the chapters that we’ve reviewed in Hebrews, the last few verses seem to kind of thrust us into the next chapter. One of the things that I noticed is where we’re moving into a section of Scripture where it can get kind of complicated to wade through this, I think it’s important for us to remember that Hebrews was written to a congregation, and in any given congregation you have various levels of faith, you might say.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: You have those who –
Colleen: Maturity.
Nikki: Yeah. Well, and even belief or unbelief. And so we’re going to see the writer of Hebrews, as we move along, warning people against falling away, but if you read the full counsel of God in the New Testament we see there is security for the believer. They can know that they have eternal life, and that is kept by God. As we move into this, we start to see the importance of doctrine, the importance of knowing what God’s word teaches in all parts of God’s word, and that, again, just like we were just saying, it helps us interpret what we’re looking at. So this is going to kind of launch into that, and he starts this by saying that these people have become dull of hearing, and they’re unwilling to really take in solid food, they still need to be given milk. In his definition of the mature, he says that it’s those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil, and we actually see commands all over Scripture for us to do this. I’ve heard people say, “Well, I don’t really have the gift of discernment.” Well, you know what? That’s good to know because I do know believers who aren’t always great at discerning, and so it’s good to be aware of that, and it’s good to seek counsel from the body of Christ, but the fact is that Scripture calls all of us to be discerning. It’s a command, for us to be able to test the spirits. We’re told in 1 John 4:1 to test the spirits because not all of them are from God, and we’re told in 1 Timothy 4:1 that there will be deceiving spirits and things taught by demons as we move into the last days. Not there might be or there could be, there will be.
Colleen: I think most of us who are listening to this podcast understand that because we were plucked out by God’s own doing from doctrines of demons –
Nikki: Yes!
Colleen: – in a false religion.
Nikki: And those of us who were plucked out and placed firmly in Christianity, in the body of Christ, it happened through studying right doctrine.
Colleen: This ability to discern good and evil, he says, is because of practice, and we have our senses trained to discern good and evil, and that only comes from being immersed in God’s word. And we know that because these last four verses are a call to this church that he’s writing to, to grow beyond just rehashing the basic principles of Christianity. Now, I never want to suggest that we have to have Christ plus other things. The gospel is always the core and the most important thing we believe. But the doctrines that accompany that are those things that are revealed about Jesus, about Jesus’ ministry, about our walk of faith, about trusting Him, and the rest of the Book of Hebrews is going to go deeply into the person of Jesus, the work of Jesus, His high priestly ministry, what makes Him different, and this is the meat he’s asking these people to read, ingest, and believe, and that’s true for us. Romans 12:2 asks us to have our minds renewed by the word of God. There’s only one way to have this discernment, and it’s by being willing to know the deep things of God that are revealed in Scripture, not by searching after a word from the Lord outside of the Book that He has given us.
Nikki: When it says in that passage in Romans 12:2 that in having your mind transformed that you’re able to test and discern what is the will of God, and I hear a lot of people say – you know, people can get kind of ‘wooey” about this, and they can get to thinking that they’re able to discern what is right and what is wrong and what God wants them to do and what He’s saying and what He’s saying to other people through some internal experiential kind of, I don’t know, thing. And we see over and over again in Scripture that discernment is linked to accumulating knowledge in God’s word. It’s all over the place. I found several texts that talk about growing in your knowledge so that you can discern, and being rooted in the word. For those who say that discernment isn’t necessarily their gift, James 1:5 says that if you lack wisdom, ask God, who gives it generously.
Colleen: And 1 Corinthians 2 makes it clear that that wisdom comes from being born again, having God’s Spirit in us, that God gives us the mind of Christ and that wisdom from God is different from the wisdom of this age. It’s a two-pronged thing. When we trust Jesus and are born again, we have His Spirit, and His Spirit makes His word come alive. And I recently watched a movie about the really tragic story of David Koresh and Waco, and for most of those who are listening to this podcast, we all know – the movie didn’t say it, but we know that David Koresh had been an Adventist, and his entire worldview had originally been built up by Ellen White’s view of eschatology. What I didn’t know before watching this movie was that David Koresh actually memorized, as he claimed, the whole Bible. He could quote texts for every situation. But quoting the Bible without being born again is kind of like Ellen White.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We don’t get the full truth, and if we’re born again, our duty before the Lord is to be willing to submit our minds to Him.
Nikki: This reminds me of Colossians 2:8. “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” So much of what Hebrews does for us as former Adventists is it undoes all of that. Colossians 2 also talks about not being enslaved to these shadows, where the substance is Christ, and Hebrews is really what unpacks all of this for us, and it shows us how all of these shadows really are just pointing to the substance, who is Christ. And when we get the right Christ, when we know the right Christ, and Hebrews tells us who that is, it prevents us from being taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit and human tradition because we know what’s real. And when we know what’s real, we can see the counterfeit, and we’re not captive by them.
Colleen: That’s so true. So as we conclude this chapter, I just want us all to remember that Jesus, our high priest, represents a different priesthood than the Old Testament had. He is human, He is God, and He was called by God to be an eternal high priest on our behalf. He represents completed atonement. He represents God to us and us to God, and we are completely secure, hidden with Christ in God, when we place our faith and trust in Him. And if you haven’t done that, we urge you to do it. There is no security, there is no peace, there is no rest apart from trusting Jesus alone. The law was fulfilled in Him. He alone stands before us. Listen to Him. If you want to write to us, you can do that at formeradventist@gmail.com. Don’t forget to leave a comment to like us wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Facebook, and you can go to proclamationmagazine.com to donate, to support Life Assurance, to support this podcast, or to subscribe to our weekly email. So thanks again for sticking with us through another chapter of Hebrews as we discover the depth of our amazing Savior, Jesus.
Nikki: See you next time.
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