Colleen and Nikki begin Chapter 12 of Hebrews, discussing discipline that comes because you are in God’s family. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And we’re going to be starting today the first half of Hebrews 12. We’re not going to do the whole chapter. There’s just so much richness in this chapter, we decided to take our time and break it up. So we’re only going to do verses 1 through 17. Next week we’ll continue with 18 through 29. But before we start, I just want to remind everybody that you can write to us if you have questions or comments at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can sign up for our weekly emails or see Proclamation! magazine online by going to proclamationmagazine.com. You may also donate there to Life Assurance Ministries, which will help us continue expanding our ministry and the reach of our podcast and our magazine at proclamationmagazine.com. There are places there where you can donate online. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and write a review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’re so glad that you’re sticking with us through this walk through Hebrews, which has been an amazing experience for me. Even though I’ve studied Hebrews before, this time through has been different for me.
Nikki: Um-hmm, me too.
Colleen: It’s been such a privilege to do this with you, Nikki, and I’m so thankful that there are so many people who are actually listening with us. We’re just praying that the Lord will continue to teach us as we continue through this book. So, Nikki, is there anything, as you looked at Hebrews 12, that stood out as maybe the primary thing that was impacting to you, that you might not have noticed before or that you noticed in a new way, or anything that contradicted your understandings from Adventism?
Nikki: You know, the first time I read this, there were several different things that stood out to me, but I didn’t see any of it as clearly as I do now, going through this again with you. But I do remember one of the things that was very helpful to me in understanding the nature of man was verse 9, where it says that we should be subject to the Father of spirits. That was just a small little piece out of this incredible chapter that helped me understand that I have a spirit, and when we’re born again He is the Father of our spirits.
Colleen: I agree. That was a standout for me as well. We really do have body and spirit, and that verse – we’ll talk about it as we come to it, but that verse is so clear, that our new birth is not about making a decision. Our new birth is an act of God, and we’re born of God, and He’s the Father of our spirits. Ha! Who knew?
Nikki: And then this section also was – I had a little bit of approach avoidance with it, the idea of God disciplining and the way that I understood the God of Adventism, what it was like to be under that God. This was something that I really had to trust all of Scripture and what all of Scripture says about God in order to understand this in its context.
Colleen: Oh, I understand that. As we were taught discipline in Adventism, it was more like punishment. So it was related with falling in and out of salvation when we sinned, at least in my head.
Nikki: Yeah, mine too.
Colleen: Why don’t we launch into this part of this book, and Nikki, why don’t we start by you reading the first two verses? I know these have been really rich for you. You’ve talked to me about some of the things you’ve thought. So let’s just read those and talk about the things that we see here.
Nikki: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Colleen: You had some profound insights as you read this verse, and I’d like you to talk a little about that.
Nikki: There’s so much in just these two verses, you could get really lost in this. It’s rich, it’s wonderful. So it’s hard to know where to start.
Colleen: Talk about the witnesses.
Nikki: The witnesses, yeah. So, we know a lot of people will use this verse to say that our loved ones are in heaven watching over us. Looking at this and reading other commentators and teachers and considering the context of Hebrews 11, it becomes very clear that what they are are lives that evidenced the faithfulness and truthfulness of God and who He is and what He says about Himself, and on the basis of that, they work to build our faith and to encourage us, looking at their life. I mean, essentially where do we learn about them? We learn about them in Scripture, and faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. They give us that additional assurance and faith.
Colleen: Their lives are witnesses of God’s faithfulness.
Nikki: The word there is not “spectator.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: It’s “witness.” And so we can’t use this verse to say, “Aunt Suzie is up in heaven looking down on us now.” That’s not biblical.
Colleen: So all of these people that we read about in chapter 11 are alive with the Lord because they believed God and trusted Him and acted on His word. So we know that they’re not just gone, like we thought in Adventism. And now we learn that their memory, their legacy, their stories in the living word of God are witnesses to us of God’s faithfulness. They are witnesses that give us courage to keep running this race.
Nikki: I remember the first time it occurred to me that the Old Testament saints were alive and with the Lord. We were in a Sunday school classroom having our Friday night FAF Bible study lessons, and Abbie was just a baby, I think I’d only been saved about a month. And I was pacing the back of the room while you were teaching, holding her, trying to get her to sleep, and I was reading the names that the Sunday school teachers had put up on the wall for the kids. It had Esther and David and others. And it was like I had hit a wall, like it was just sudden shock, “Oh! These people are alive right now!”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: “These people are with the Lord.” These are things we don’t ever consider as Adventists, you know, because we knew better.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: Right? But it’s such a wonderful thing to know, that all of these people who have gone before us are with Him.
Colleen: And we will know them one day.
Nikki: Um-hmm. [Laughter.]
Colleen: It’s very cool. [Laughter.] So we keep looking at verse 1, and the next thing it says, since we have this cloud of witnesses surrounding us, reminding us of God’s faithfulness, that gives us the ability to lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us so we can run with endurance the race set before us. There’s a lotin there.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I just want to say that our friend Steven Ger, who writes a commentary on Hebrews, the believing Jew, had an interesting insight into that sin in the context of Hebrews. He said that the author is writing to believing Jews who were tempted to go back to the temple system in Jerusalem because of facing persecution and probably intimidation by people they knew. And he said that in the context this is very easy to understand, that part of the sin that he was guarding against was not to go back to the law. And I thought, that is such an interesting insight, especially for those of us who came out of Adventism who feel like the law has to come walking with us through the rest of life. No, Jesus is who we listen to now. So, Nikki, what were you thinking when you saw this passage.
Nikki: Well, the passage gives – as we read on, it gives a clear picture of a runner racing, and it’s a very intentional race. It’s purposeful, it has a goal. This isn’t meaningless running. And so this picture of laying aside every weight, I read some commentators who talked about runners back then in the races that they had, the Olympics, in the Greek culture. They didn’t wear very much when they ran. They literally cast off every weight they could so that they could run faster, and they were saying that this could mean not just sins. This first part, the weight, or the burden, some translations say, the word means “bulk, excess,” and so there are things that can weigh us down and prevent us from running the race, focusing on what Christ has given us to do with endurance, and so this verse has actually played out in my life very personally as I have had to evaluate things that were profoundly meaningful to me but that prevented me from being able to do the work that God called me to do. So setting that aside, laying that aside, that’s not a passive thing. That’s an active, it’s an imperative.
Colleen: Yes. Mentioning the imperative word is important because one of the things that I did not understand about Scripture as an Adventist, and particularly about the New Testament, is that the gospel, the gospel message, changes us, and when we have been born again, we have become alive and transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son, and this is a real change, and there’s a word that we can use to talk about our position in Christ, the reality of our new birth. It’s kind of a technical word, but we call it the indicative. If you remember your English grammar, there are different kinds of sentences, and an indicative sentence is a sentence that tells you something that is. For example, if you say, “The walls are yellow,” which they are in my office here, that’s an indicative statement of a fact. So in Scripture we have indicative statements that say who we are, and in this case, this author is writing to believers, and he’s saying, we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses reminding us of the faithfulness of God because God’s word tells us the story about them, and we know they’re with the Lord. So the indicative in this context is we, as believers, are running the race. Not might be running, not will run if we do the right thing. We are running because we have been saved. That’s the indicative. After we recognize the indicative, we can understand the imperative. Do you remember imperative sentences from English? What are imperatives?
Nikki: Commands. Things you have to do.
Colleen: Right. Like if I say to you, “Shut the door,” that’s an imperative sentence, that’s a command. So in Scripture we have these things where the writers tell us how to live, like “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” That’s an imperative. But the imperative only makes sense if we understand the indicative first. And I used to think that the New Testament was full of commands, imperatives, for how to live in order to be worthy of salvation. That was wrong. The imperatives are for people who are already saved.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So when we read this verse, for example, the indicative is, we’re standing here, believers, with witnesses to the faithfulness of God, that God has given us so we can know our true standing, and knowing that, we have the imperative of running the race. We can be as certain of running the race well as they were because we trust God, because we believe, and because we’ve been born again.
Nikki: This is our privilege in the New Covenant. I love what one commentator by the name of Ironside said. He said, “Here we see the ‘let us’ of grace versus the ‘thou shalt’ of law.” So we have the “let us” because of the indicatives. Because these things are true, now let us go on to do these things.
Colleen: That’s awesome. So it’s helpful just to remember that as we read through the rest of Hebrews and study other books in the New Testament as we go on, that the indicatives of what it means to be alive in Christ precede the imperatives. It’s not the other way around.
Nikki: And the other thing I saw here related to the New Covenant is the fact that he could even tell us to set aside the sin which clings so closely. Under the New Covenant we’re not helpless to lay aside sin. We now – because of the indwelling Holy Spirit, we now have the ability to obey that imperative, and it also describes sin as clinging closely, so even though we’re in the New Covenant, we’re not free from the clingy nature of sin, but we are free to lay it aside.
Colleen: And Romans 7 confirms that. We still have a law of sin in the flesh, but now that we’re born again – the indicative – we have the ability to trust God when sin tempts us. Before we were born again, we had no ability at all to remove sin. All we could do was try really, really hard and practice lots of self-control and willpower, and that never worked for me. It might help me resist one piece of pie, but maybe not the next day. This is something that we can do because we have, as you said, the power of the Holy Spirit. So then in verse 2 we learn more about the imperative. We can run the race by doing what?
Nikki: Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. He’s the one who shows us how to run.
Colleen: He doesn’t show us how to be saved, like we thought as Adventists. He’s not our example to show us how to live a life worthy. The way in which Jesus is an example is by showing a born-again person, standing firmly in the indicative of the new life in Christ, He shows us how to live as a live, saved person. So we look to Him, keeping our eyes on Him as we run, which is interesting because generally when you run, where do you put your eyes?
Nikki: On the terrain.
Colleen: Yeah. And this is saying, “No, don’t put your eyes on this terrain where you’re running,” and we run through rough terrain in this life.
Nikki: We do. And we don’t get to choose it. It was set before us.
Colleen: Great point. And it’s not the terrain, it’s not the circumstances that we fix our eyes on. We fix our eyes above that, on Jesus. And we can fix our eyes on Jesus because – and I just love this next part – “He is both the author and the perfecter,” or some versions will say “finisher,” the completer, “of our faith.” So what does that mean, that He’s the author of our faith?
Nikki: Well, He’s the one who gave us faith to begin with, and we saw in Hebrews chapter 11 verse 1 that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. Those things are things that God reveals to us. He initiates, He starts it, and then our faith is how we respond to it.
Colleen: And I love this because this says that He is with us at the beginning not only of our faith, really, but He’s with us at the beginning of our life, even before that. But specifically when it talks about our coming to faith, He’s the author of that faith. We don’t generate faith. We don’t decide to have faith. He gives it to us because He shows us Himself. So He’s with us at the beginning, and He is with us every step of this race until He completes us when we’re glorified with Him. He’s with us when we leave our bodies and go to be with Him. He’s with us even while we’re with Him in death, and He’s with us when He completes us in our glorified bodies at His return. It’s a complete picture. We’re never without Him once we’re born again.
Nikki: It makes me think of Him as our great, merciful high priest. He’s running with us.
Colleen: It’s an amazing picture, one I never had as an Adventist. So what else do we understand about why we keep our eyes on Him? What is it that we’re watching, and what do we take courage from, as it describes it in verse 2?
Nikki: Well, it says, “Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” So as we suffer, we look to Him, and we see that there was purpose in His suffering too. It was to save us, and He knew that. And that was the joy that was set before Him, and He endured the cross, and I appreciate the fact that it says in here “despising the shame” because it gives me permission to not try to pretend to enjoy my suffering. It’s something we don’t enjoy. It’s something He didn’t enjoy. He despised the shame but He endured. And He is victorious, He’s seated at the right hand of the throne of God, and so we know how this race ends.
Colleen: And He didn’t mind enduring the shame, even though He didn’t enjoy the suffering, and we know He wanted to get out of it, but He was willing to be shamed by unbelieving men and women for the sake of saving us and reconciling us to the Father, to the whole Trinity. It’s as if these first two verses are a complete summation of the gospel and living the life after being born again. Everything, in two short verses.
Nikki: And I would argue that it’s a more difficult task in some ways than trying to keep the Ten Commandments. It’s a high calling.
Colleen: It is. We have more help. We have the power of God. But we suffer more because we can’t feel smug that we’re doing the right thing always. We have to trust Jesus, as we sometimes walk without even knowing exactly what’s going to happen. As an Adventist, I thought I could more or less plan my life and work for goals. And the longer I live as a born-again believer, the more I realize that God has the plans for my life, and I have to increasingly submit to Him and to His word and not think I have the control and the last word, and that’s humbling.
Nikki: And we can know that involved in those plans is suffering, is trials. We’re going to have all of those things, it’s promised to us, and it’s purposed.
Colleen: And then in verse 3, it reminds us to “consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart,” and here I see the author reminding his readers that as believers we will endure hostility, and I think all of us as former Adventists have some sense of that already. I know that when I get around Adventists who know I’m a former, there is a very uncomfortable vibe in the room. Sometimes they want to take me on and sometimes they don’t, but even if they don’t, there’s a sense of – almost a sense of arrogance that, “I know who you are, I know what you’ve done, and I know I’m right.” It’s very hard to endure sometimes, and that’s just minor hostility, but we sometimes endure hostility even from our loved ones, and that gets harder to take.
Nikki: It can cause us to grow weary and fainthearted in this race. These are the things that make running hard. And sometimes even knowing how to run becomes harder to see in the midst of that. I love the command here that we “consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility.” That word in Greek for “consider,” it’s not just, you know, give it a passing thought. It’s focus on, be intentional, revisit this, meditate on it. It’s another command, and it’s a call to give our utmost attention to this. This gives us an example of how to endure. You know, we hear so much in Adventism, “Jesus is your example,” and so that was one of those things that I struggled with, even after leaving. The concept is there that as believers, as born-again believers, that we are made in the image of Christ. That’s part of sanctification, we’re becoming more like Him. I understand that. But the only time I can recall seeing the word “example,” Christ being our example, it’s an example of suffering, and that wasn’t something I remember learning.
Colleen: No, I had the example from Jesus, I was told, of how to pray and avoid sin. That was my example. It was not an example of suffering. But that’s what this tells us. So, Nikki, we’re moving into this discussion of discipline from our Father. Would you mind reading verses 4 through 6, please.
Nikki: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? ‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by Him. For the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives.’ It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?”
Colleen: That’s a really interesting – that verse 7, “It is for discipline that you endure,” interesting way to put it. But let’s just look through this section. It’s interesting also to me that the author is quoting here or referring to Proverbs and Job. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, you don’t think about the New Testament quoting Job very much, but these two verses in 5 and 6 are quoting from Proverbs and Job. He begins in verse 4 here by saying: I’m asking you to endure. Look to Jesus, He’s an example of suffering, and you will suffer, but you have the witness of those who have gone before to know that you will not fail, you will be held up by the Lord, you can endure because the Lord holds you, and Jesus is your example of suffering well because the Father is the strength that will hold you together. So with that in mind, he’s reminding them, Jesus suffered to an extent you haven’t suffered yet. You’re suffering here in your life, but you haven’t been martyred. You haven’t been killed for your faith yet. And then he talks to them about discipline. Nikki, what were you thinking when you read this section here? What came to your mind?
Nikki: This section was a place where I really struggled when I first read it as a new believer after leaving Adventism, because I had my former view of God in mind. When you start talking about God and discipline, in my head it automatically became God and rejection, God and punishment. I had to really press into the Scripture, press into the words behind it, and understand what’s really being revealed about the God of the Bible in this. And in verse 7, where it talks about discipline, the word there in Greek is only used in one other place. In 2 Timothy 3:16, where we read that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, and it’s that word “training,” so this discipline, the other word we hear in there is disciple. This is training us, this is discipling us. This is not punishment or rejection. In fact, the text tells us later on it’s the opposite of rejection, it’s inclusion.
Colleen: And it’s interesting that the Old Testament even let us know that, and I love that the author of Hebrews expands on that and helps us understand what it actually means, but Proverbs said, “My son” – notice that family word – “don’t regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” So the author is taking these Old Testament passages and explaining to us that this is the case with God. He trains, He disciplines those He considers – those He loves, those He considers to be His true sons. It’s not the people that are outside the family who receive discipline. Anddiscipline, as you said, isn’t punishment. He’s essentially saying here that enduring in this life as a believer, this life of faith, enduring that is discipline in itself because as believers we will continually encounter opposition from unbelievers and from people who would try to cast doubt on our faith.
Nikki: So as an Adventist and even shortly after, I had the idea that if times were hard, that I was being handed over because I did something wrong, I was being rejected by God, and it was my job to do the work of figuring out exactly what it was because He probably wasn’t going to tell me, a pretty dysfunctional reaction to trials in life. But the Scripture is very clear that all those trials are built into that race. That’s to be expected. It was a comfort to me to see that these hard times are actually showing me that I am God’s child and that I am being trained by what He’s put in my life, and it was hard work to shift my thinking there. I even had to repent of some anger. I was like, you know, “What are you doing, God? You know what I went through when I was younger, and now you’re putting this in my life now?” And I really had to be humbled, and it wasn’t, honestly, until I saw the sufferings of Christ in their right place that I was able to pull myself out of that self-centered way of thinking and understand how big and how wonderful God is and what Christ did for us, and if He could do that, we can do these smaller things that God’s put in front of us. And they offer us the truth about who He is in the middle of it. In the midst of it, we learn to know our God.
Colleen: Yeah, so true, Nikki. We Adventists really did see reality inside out. We had a very human-centered view of what the world and the cosmos was about. We understood that God was for us, that God was limiting His power to accommodate our free will and Satan’s free will, that God was “sovereign,” but He was sovereign enough to lay aside His power and let us do what we were going to do. So every single thing about God and man I understood to be somehow related to me. I was the one in charge of how God would respond to me. We were the ones responsible for hastening or delaying the return of Christ. We were really the center of our own universe. So it’s not surprising you thought of yourself as being rejected if you did something wrong and were going through hard times, because after all, you were the one that determined how God would treat you, and I thought the same thing!
Nikki: I think a lot of people do, and you know, it was during this time that I was recommended a book by Pastor Gary called “The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God” by D.A. Carson, and in reading that I saw that the love God has for us proceeds from Him. We don’t elicit that from Him. It’s not a reward. It’s something that He has set upon us. He is the definer of what love is. And as an Adventist, I liked to take various attributes that I thought I understood, and I didn’t understand correctly, but I would take various attributes of God, and I would only see one at a time. I didn’t know how to see them all together. So if you were to talk to me about God’s discipline being a reflection of His love, it would have been very confusing to me. I’ll often tell formers, when they talk to me about feeling confused, is God mad at them, what did they do, I’ll tell them, “Go and study the attributes of God. Go and know who God is. Know what love is, and know that He’s the one who defines all of these concepts, and then Scripture’s going to make more sense as you read it.”
Colleen: That is the ultimate indicative. We have to know that God is all of His attributes all at once. He doesn’t practice love and then practice justice and then practice mercy and then maybe express vengeance. He’s everything all at once indivisibly. So without all of His other attributes, His love is not love. Without all of His other attributes, His justice is not justice. I did not understand that God as an Adventist.
Nikki: And that’s what teaches us how to love. He defines what love is, and love includes justice, and it includes truth. It includes all of these things that might scare us or be uncomfortable, but perfect love must include justice and discipline and teaching. All of this is included.
Colleen: And I think for me it’s important to notice I don’t learn how to love and practice justice by looking to God as an example. I can only learn what these attributes mean if I am born again and indwelt by His Spirit, so that I am filled with God Himself, who gives me His love and justice and mercy, and a nonbeliever has no access to that. The way humans identify these things is only mortal and human. It’s not absolute and real. So once again, the indicative precedes the imperative. We’re to love as God loves, but that means we have to know Him. We can’t love as God loves by example because we can never reflect God unless He fills us and indwells us and makes us His own. Yes, our worldview was entirely upside down. With God at the center of reality, all of these things, including discipline, make more sense to me. Would you real 8 through 11, please.
Nikki: “If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
Colleen: This is a really interesting passage to me. Fathers are not necessarily the strongest things that we have in Adventism. I think a lot of us had fathers who were varying shades of abusive to weak. Some of us had good fathers, but many of us didn’t. It’s an interesting thing here that the author is both comparing and contrasting a human father’s discipline with God. What do you think of when you look at verse 8, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, verse 8 was a relief to me when I felt like I was going through the tough terrain on the race. [Laughter.] It was a comfort to me. It felt like encouragement that I am not alone and that I do belong to God and I am not being rejected.
Colleen: In the context of when this book was written, the idea of illegitimate children was such that they did not participate in the inheritance of the legitimate children. Now, a man or a woman, but particularly a man, might have many illegitimate children, and they might even be members of the family, in a sense. But they were often excluded from inheritance because they didn’t come through the proper family line. This is saying if we’re not experiencing discipline in our lives, then even if we’re functioning in the Body of Christ, we may not be true children. Now, that’s not meant as a warning to say, “What if I’m not saved?” But what he’s saying is, if you are truly born again and a true adopted son of God, you will experience hardships in life and the discipline is, you will know the Father, the Spirit, and the Son never leaving you, but walking with you through those hardships. You’re not alone, and you’re being taught to trust Him.
Nikki: And the fact is, is whether we’re born again or not, we’re going to go through hardships; right? But when we’re born again, those hardships train us, they teach us, they have purpose all of a sudden. And that was brand new to me once I was born again, learning from the hard things. That wasn’t something I did before I was born again.
Colleen: Yeah, me either. And I find 9 really insightful as well. He says, of course, we had earthly fathers – now, some of us didn’t, but those who did had earthly fathers who disciplined us, and we respect them. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? He’s clearly contrasting the physical, genetic relationship of our earthly fathers, the flesh, with our relationship with the Father of spirits who gives us new birth, and isn’t that fascinating? It’s not a change of mind. He is the Father of spirits. As it says in John 1, we are born of God, not by a human’s will, not by a husband’s will, but born of God. And that’s a spiritual rebirth, and he clearly articulates that in verse 9. We have spirits that are born dead and need to be born again by the Father of spirits.
Nikki: If you have an earthly father who you respect, it logically follows that you respect your father, then you have this Father of the spirit, it ought to logically follow that you need to be subject to Him too.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Or more so.
Colleen: Or more so. When you’re born of God, you change from being in Adam to being in Christ, and our true Father is the Father of all who believe. He is our true Father. So even though we have human fathers that we may respect, and some of us may not, we have a true Father that will love us forever, and He’s the one that has our loyalty now. I also think that verse 10 is really interesting. He compares and contrasts the discipline of an earthly father with our Father of spirits. He says that earthly fathers disciplined us – it’s a temporary thing, for a short time, as seemed best to them. Now, that takes in a lot of possibility, doesn’t it?
Nikki: Yeah, it does.
Colleen: What seems best to an earthly father may not actually be best in the big picture. Earthly fathers can be subject to anger and can be subject to shortsightedness or a lack of a full picture and maybe practicing injustice. Who knows? But they still disciplined us as seemed best to them. But then he does this contrast with God, and he says, “He disciplines us for our good.” So even if we experienced discipline from an earthly father that ultimately seemed more harmful than good, we can know that our true Father disciplines us for our good so that we may share His holiness. What does that mean, “share His holiness”?
Nikki: That’s talking about being set apart.
Colleen: For holy purposes, which is to serve God. So His discipline of us is for our good. It will not break us and warp us and give us trauma, but it may be very hard when it happens, but ultimately we’ll look back and we will see that it has perfected us. It has sanctified us. And in verse 11 he develops that theme a little more. “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful.” [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: “Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” And I know that I have experienced that in my discipline from my Father, my true Father. There have been really hard things I’ve had to walk through that I wondered how I’d get through, and I wondered if it was even God’s will that this was happening to me, and yet His word always stands in front of me and becomes the thing I have to say, “I have to submit to this,” and as I do, I realize that His discipline is that He’s standing with me and walking with me through the things I feel like I can’t endure, because this is the path He’s set for me.
Nikki: It seems to me that this verse implies that there are those who won’t be trained by discipline. We see a lot of active commands in here, things that we are required to participate in as we run this race: laying things aside and running with endurance and looking to Christ. I think that it’s entirely possible for believers to refuse to learn from the things that are put in front of them and stunt their maturity and their growth in Christ.
Colleen: You know, I agree, and think I can look around me and see that happening in some people that have been in my life rather closely at different times. It doesn’t mean they’re not true believers, but I think we can refuse to learn from discipline sometimes. And you know, the Lord doesn’t leave us alone when we do that. He keeps making us bump into the things that we resist.
Nikki: I’ve always appreciated the prayer that you taught me to pray as a new believer, that I would learn and know what I need to learn and know through what I’m going through, that God would show me what I need to know.
Colleen: In fact, that is something I still pray for myself. We can’t see everything, and the only thing we can do sometimes is submit to our Father and say, please show me what is real and teach me what is true and keep me in reality. That is an ongoing prayer I pray. So do you mind reading verses 12 and 13. These two, I think, are extremely important for us who’ve come out of what we’ve come out of.
Nikki: “Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.”
Colleen: It’s full of metaphors of broken bones, isn’t it? [Laughter.]
Nikki: Yeah. [Laughter.]
Colleen: And damaged knees. But I think it’s really significant that we who came out of Adventism but have found the Lord, so often we have discovered that God shows us the truth about our lives as He shows us the truth about Himself. And sometimes we have to face the fact that our past was really very traumatic. And I know we say this periodically when we do these podcasts, our experience has been – right? – that more often than not former Adventists have a lot of trauma in their pasts.
Nikki: Yeah, well when you grow up in a system of untruths, people have learned how to justify a lot of bad behavior.
Colleen: And when you finally learn what is true, suddenly all kinds of things have to come into focus in a brand new way because now you have a new center to your reality. Instead of reality being based on the great controversy worldview that says we are responsible for vindicating God and obeying Him and proving that the law is fair, we now have a reality that says Jesus has taken the curse of sin, has reconciled us to God, and is the one we listen to. And what does that do with our family and friends who still believe the Ellen White great controversy worldview? It puts us at odds with them. And sometimes people have deep wounds in their personalities, in their thinking, in their emotions. Those are actually like weak knees and weak legs that can actually cause us to become crippled if we don’t find an antidote and a new source of strength. This book is asking us as believers to help strengthen these weak spots in our fellow Christians. We come out with triggers and with points of pain and reactions that we don’t even always understand, but I know that I have had to deal with them in my own life. I’ve had to deal with things where I automatically respond with defensiveness or with anger or with shame – shame is a big one. It may not actually even be a proper response to the thing I’m reacting to, but it triggered something from far behind that was rooted in an Adventist worldview, with parents who believed the Adventist worldview, and those things will destroy me if I don’t learn to submit to something that’s stable.
Nikki: So I didn’t understand before starting to prepare for this podcast that these verses were talking about kind of a corporate encouragement of each other. I guess I read myself into the text, or a command for one person, but it’s actually referring back to Isaiah 35:3. It says, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.” And then if you read into 4, it says: “Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.'” This “your” in here is talking about the group of believers, and we’re to come alongside each other and to encourage each other with the truths about God, to make straight paths. I believe that that’s a quote out of Proverbs.
Colleen: Proverbs 4:26 and 27: “Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.” So how do we do that? When we come out of, for example, Adventism, with a false worldview and a false understanding of God and salvation and our own sin and with weak knees and broken limbs – [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – how do we help each other become strong and not destroyed and crippled by our own weakness?
Nikki: Well, this picture in Proverbs takes me back to the race and setting our eyes on Christ, and I think that one of the ways that we help each other is by constantly pointing one another back to Christ, back to what He did, what it means, back to those indicatives that we were talking about earlier, what’s true about who we are and why we’re doing this and reminding one another of these things, and those are precisely the things that believers did for me during some of my biggest struggles after becoming a believer and walking through some of these dark times that we have in this race. It was those who came and said, “Nikki, stop looking at the hurt and the pain and look to Christ, and look at what He’s done.” And you know what? In our culture today, that wouldn’t necessarily be considered the most compassionate response, but as believers we have to be prepared for other believers to come alongside us and not coddle our wounds, but turn our eyes and lift our gaze and encourage us to run well.
Colleen: And the only way we can find a straight path that will not lead us astray is to submit to God’s word. We find the truth about Christ, we find those indicatives, in Scripture. Scripture is the living word of God, and that’s where we find how to live. When I am triggered – I know that’s a word that seems overused sometimes today – but I think of that day which I’ve mentioned in the past where I was so overwhelmed with my own emotion over something I frankly don’t even remember now that I decided I couldn’t go on, and I went to bed at 11 a.m. and decided I was going to sleep out the day. I had to remember to ask God to show me what was real, and when I finally did that, I realized what was real was much bigger than my reaction. What was real was that God was on His throne, He had given me something to do, and I had to get up and do the work He put in front of me. And it’s Scripture where I find that consistency. Scripture is the straight path. Scripture is what teaches us to keep walking towards the goal that God has set before us because Christ is with us, and even if everything in us is screaming, “No! It’s not fair!” we have to keep walking towards Him in the way He asks us to walk, and He will redeem that situation.
Nikki: It makes me think of Proverbs 3, just a chapter earlier, verse 5 through 8, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.” So we see here in Hebrews 12, in making straight paths for your feet and strengthening your weak knees, you’re doing this so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. And it’s Christ, it’s God Himself, who straightens those paths for us as we lean not on our understanding and our interpretation of what we’re walking through, but we trust Him and acknowledge Him in all of our ways.
Colleen: And as we learn to do that and learn to trust Him, just like those witnesses we read about in Hebrews 11, we become able, as it says in 2 Corinthians 1, to help and strengthen and encourage other believers with the same strength and courage we’ve received from the Lord and from His word, and by doing that, by coming alongside others who are struggling in ways that we have, or even in slightly different ways, we help each other to walk that straight path of trusting God’s word, and we help others not to become helplessly crippled by their weakness, but instead their weaknesses will be healed, like ours are being healed. It doesn’t mean we don’t have scars, but we aren’t permanently crippled. I think about having broken my leg when I was in college. It was a very bad break. I had a cast for a total of 12 weeks. What I learned was that at the end, after the bone healed, there was a callus in the bone that was actually stronger than the original bone. I have that callus in my tibia and my fibula, and they will always be there and always show up in x-rays, but they are stronger than if it hadn’t broken in that particular spot. And I’m not crippled by that break. That’s what we do for one another when we bring God’s word into the situations we struggle with and teach each other to trust God and to trust His word. It will not lead us astray. Nikki, would you mind reading verses 14 through 17? And these are the last verses we’ll look at today.
Nikki: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.”
Colleen: So when you read, “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord,” what do you think, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, here again, I think we’ve got to define our terms biblically, because in today’s society “strive for peace with everyone” looks like tolerance, and when we look at what all of Scripture says, obedience to God is supreme. It makes me think, honestly, of Roman12:18 where it says, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” I love what Spurgeon said. He said that we don’t pursue peace at the expense of principle. We honor God first. And yet, the word there is to strive, it’s to pursue. It’s an active command. We pursue biblical peace with everyone. That has with it the idea that we’re not divisive, we’re not creating unnecessary, unholy divisions, because I believe there are holy divisions. The truth divides, the word of truth divides.
Colleen: Pursuing peace can sometimes mean refusing to engage in an argument with somebody you know would like to just argue, who’s not interested in the truth. Or it can mean having a difficult conversation with someone who actually is wanting to know something about truth. It might threaten something that they already believe. So the Holy Spirit gives us wisdom, but pursuing peace means just exactly what you said, it’s biblical peace, and ultimately that is only found in Christ. His presence in us gives us the ability to behave peaceably, even with those who disagree with us. Now, they may make a stink or a big fuss, but God asks us to submit to Him and not to just react to the other person’s hostility.
Nikki: And it’s right there in the text, that we strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness, the set-apartness, without which no one will see the Lord, and so that peace can’t compromise that holiness that we’re called to, to be God’s distinct people, set apart for His work.
Colleen: And then in the next verse, he says, “See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.” What does it mean that no one come short of the grace of God?
Nikki: I think it’s a warning to see to it that no one rejects the grace of God, that no one fails to take hold of the grace of God.
Colleen: And I think it’s important for us to remember, as we come out of a really deceptive religion and find the freedom of the gospel, the joy of knowing Jesus and being born again, that in every group of believers there are some who are still dabbling, as we’ve talked before, the soils are always present, the different soils. Even ourselves, we may be tempted to look away from the path that God has set before us, and he’s basically saying, don’t fail to lay hold of God’s grace, which enables you to let go of the past so that you can experience the discipline of God. The grace of God makes us able to look to Jesus and stop looking back, stop hanging on to the unresolved tensions of those who disagree with us that might still be Adventists or might still be something else that they want us to be. Let go of the past and take hold of God’s grace, and doing that means we will walk in that straight path He’s set before us, and we will experience discipline, but that is how we experience joy and maturity and sanctification, being set apart for Him.
Nikki: And can I say that when I first read this as a new former Adventist, I read it to say, “See to it that no one fails to deserve the grace of God.” I just put my former worldview right in the text, and so again, words matter, definitions matter. Grace, by its very definition, means undeserved favor, unmerited favor. So this isn’t talking about earning God’s favor. We can’t do that.
Colleen: And then he ends this section by comparing failing to take hold of the grace of God, he compares that with being like Esau. I remember Esau, who was the firstborn of Isaac, and Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for what the Bible calls in the King James Version a “mess of pottage.” He sold his birthright for food. It was a random, fleshly, off-the-cuff decision born out of extreme hunger, but Jacob was cunning, and he had devised that moment. He fooled Esau. But Esau was so ungrounded in the eternal things of God that he allowed his desires of his flesh at that moment to surpass his desire for the spiritual blessing of the birthright that was his by birth order, and he sold it to his brother, and God calls that immoral and godless. Esau served his flesh, not the greater eternal realities of the spiritual truths that came with the birthright. And then he goes on to say that even after that happened, Esau regretted what he had done, and he wanted the birthright back. But you know what? Esau wasn’t ignorant when he sold that birthright. He knewwhat the birthright was. He knew it was supposed to be his by natural law, but he chose to sell it. This was not something he did without understanding the consequences. Yes, it was rash, yes, it was impulsive, but it wasn’t without his knowledge of what he had done. And it says here, “There was found no place for repentance.” And another way we might put that is, he was unable to repent. There was no repentance in him. He regretted what he had done, he cried, but he hadn’t loved the spiritual truths of the birthright enough to retain it, and he had sold it, and there was no ability for him to repent.
Nikki: This is a pretty strong warning to the church that the letter to Hebrews is written to. I mean, we’ve just gone through Hebrews 1 through 11 before this, learning about how the New Covenant is greater, the Lord is greater, the offer is greater, the grace is greater, all of this is so much greater, don’t refuse to obtain this gift, this grace that God is offering you. Don’t go back to something, don’t go back to a meaningless, obsolete system because that somehow satisfies your flesh, your immediate need or desire, even acceptance. I mean, it’s talking about – earlier it says “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace,” “that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.” You get the sense that there was tension in this church, that there was arguing and division about the Christian life now as a Hebrew. And the warning here is clear, and it was clear in the previous chapters that we’ve looked at: Don’t thumb your nose at what God is offering you.
Colleen: So if you’re reading through this with us and studying Hebrews with us and you realize that you have never trusted the finish work of Jesus and accepted the grace that He is offering you through His shed blood and His resurrection, we just ask you to lay down all those backwards glances, all those doubts, all those second guesses and realize that God cannot lie, His word cannot fail, and He is offering you life, eternal life, if you trust Jesus. We just ask you to seriously think about what Jesus has done for you and to trust that and to place all of your future and your past and your sin and your hope at the foot of His cross and let Him transfer you from death to life through this finished work of His shed blood. If you would like to contact us, write to us, have comments or suggestions, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Go to proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails, to find our magazine Proclamation! online, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Write a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and we’re so glad that you’re sticking with us through this walk through Hebrews, which completely shatters the old worldview that says we have to find Jesus to get to the law. That’s backwards. So thank you for walking through this book with us.
Nikki: Bye for now.
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