GYC West 2014: I Am The Conflict Continues

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GYC West

The Cross & The Great Controversy

Winston Green

Content With Christ

Patrick Dillon

Redemption and Conflict

Confidence through the Conflict

Redemption and the Church

Father, this life that we live, it's all about you.

So we pray this morning that you would grace us with your presence and bring our minds to the words in your scripture.

And Father, I pray that you'd be lifted up and that you could help me hide behind your cross.

Father, you know that I'm a weak vessel and you know that I'm imperfect, but you are strong and you're perfect.

And so I pray that you would help me convey that this morning.

And I ask this in the name of Jesus, amen.

So just to get a little idea of the book of Hebrews, we wanna look at the background of this sermon letter.

It's always good when you're studying the Bible to look at the background of the book.

It gives you context for what's happening.

And oftentimes you can find applications for your everyday life.

In fact, the main point that I'll be sharing with you this morning, part of it has come from just looking at the background of the book of Hebrews, so it's very valuable.

So this book was written around the time of the Jerusalem Council in 50 AD.

Now you have to understand, in the first century after Pentecost, there was a lot of debates going on about the ceremonial laws of Moses and whether people should be circumcised or not.

And more particularly, the Jewish Christians were the ones who were persecuting the Gentile Christians.

And they're saying, you have to keep the Mosaic laws in order to maintain your identity as a Christian.

And so they had to call this general conference session, you could say.

These issues were distracting them from who Christ was and what he was doing for them in the heavenly sanctuary.

And so what Paul does, as a pastor would do, is tactfully reorient them from what was in the past and shift their focus on the present.

And so we start in Hebrews 1, reading in verse 1 and 2, it says, Long ago and many times and in many ways, I'm reading from the ESV, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by who?

I mean, the Jews back then highly revered these fathers and the prophets who had spoken to the fathers back in the day.

So what he's doing is he's tactfully bringing them back to Christ And he doesn't want to give them the impression that the prophets or the fathers were not relevant because absolutely they were.

They were the ones in whom received the covenant promises, the covenant promises of Israel.

But he's saying that God in these last days, he's doing a bigger and better thing than he ever has, and he needs to convince them of it.

And so he goes on from verse 3 all the way to verse 4, and he, in this flowerly, flower, is that a word, flowerly?

Okay, flowerly language, explains Christ's identity.

And then he'll go on to explain Christ's work and it's beautiful because what Paul does is he pulls out his theological ammunition and he takes all of these texts that apply to the covenant promise made to David in 2nd Samuel 7 you can find that there.

Most of these texts are coming from the kingship Psalms, and you can find that in Psalms 89, Psalms 110, and they're remarkable promises.

What he's saying is they're fulfilled now.

And he needs them to understand that Christ is better than the angels.

I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, and I was in a Goodwill store.

And I was looking at these shoes, and this girl was trying these shoes behind me.

And she walked away, and there just so happened to be a board that was leaning up against the wall.

And as soon as she stepped away to try on the shoes, the board fell down.

And she's like, oh, thank you, Michael Archangel.

And I was like, whoa, I didn't expect someone to say that, you know, especially in San Francisco.

And it just hit me that even though this woman may have been religious, but there's a good chance that she wasn't religious.

Because a lot of times people love the idea of some angelic being directing their lives and protecting them every step of the way in their life.

And to the Jews, you'll find this in the Jewish apocryphal literature in the first century, they highly revered the angels.

They seen the angels as being a resemblance of God and they were actually his messengers to communicate his word.

And in chapter 2, he actually alludes to that.

And so he's saying, this son, who has fulfilled the covenant promises of David, he's way better than the angels.

The angels are pretty much helping out those who he wants salvation for.

In Hebrews 2, verse 1, after saying all of that, he sums it up and he says, therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard.

What does that mean if someone has to pay much more closer attention to something?

This isn't new stuff, brothers and sisters.

This was actually the functioning worldview of the Christians back in that day.

That a king would come and restore the kingdom of God, according to the promise made by David.

And everything that came with that, he's saying, Look into this.

Might have had a teacher in the classroom or maybe a boss at work tell you, hey, you're doing a good job with what you're doing, because you're actually studying or you're actually working.

I was a machinist probably 8 years ago up in Canada, Alberta, Canada.

And oftentimes, my mind would be wandering off, and I'd be daydreaming.

That job requires for you to basically cut metal so within a thousandth of an inch.

And so I needed to pay much more closer attention to what I was doing, because if I even went off a hair, I would eventually completely drift off and mess up what I was working on.

And this is what Paul is trying to bring to the attention to these Christians is that they're gonna start slowly and gradually drifting away from the original gospel message.

Kind of like a ship that's on course to his destination.

Do you know if you turn the wheel slightly, a degree or so, that eventually it's gonna veer off.

And you may not even know that it's veering off.

The same thing here, it says, therefore we must pay much more closer attention to this gospel message, to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.

Paul then reminds them that this gospel message was proclaimed with power.

He tells them that the Holy Spirit was poured out, that God bore witness by signs and wonders, and this confirmed that what Jesus had done was legit, that this was a legit thing.

Now turn with me to verse 5, Hebrews 2 verse 5.

And this is really where he tells them, or at least makes it clear what he's been talking about.

To angels that God subjected the world to come.

Paul here is talking about the new heavens and the new earth.

He's saying that God didn't bring under control the inheritance of the new world to angels, but to Christ.

And so what he's saying is yes, Christ has done this great, great thing, but none of the angels had ever accomplished anything for you.

And what I want to bring to your attention is this, that in the first century, these Jewish Christians were being distracted.

And they weren't necessarily being distracted from things that were wrong.

They were talking about things that were biblical.

They were talking about what it meant to be a Christian.

But they were making the doctrines and the debate the object of their faith rather than Christ himself.

Paul addresses these issues in the New Testament.

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Series

The Cross & The Great Controversy

Content With Christ

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The Five Solas

Why Protestant?

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How the Wise Get Oil

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Encounters With Jesus

Jesus’ Encounter With The Centurion

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Breakout Session C

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1h 7m

Why Persistence Matters

33m

Saul’s Presumptuous Act

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Sex and Mental Health

1h 29m

Sabbath School: Obeying God’s Call

2h 12m

The Unhindered Gospel

What Does God Remember?

31m

Looking Unto Jesus

56m

Sound Doctrine