Hebrews 12 begins with the metaphor of the Christian life as a race where we throw off everything that can hinder us and the sin that so easily trips us up. If you’re running the race, how you process relationships with others and what you do when people hurt you will significantly affect how you run and how far you’ll go.
If your idea of a life of faith is less problems, less challenges, God answering every prayer in the way and time you want, this passage is going to make you uncomfortable. How do you cope when life is difficult? How do you process the reality of suffering? How do you make sense of life when things come at you that seem to make no sense or have no purpose?
Hebrews 11 is called the “faith chapter” of the Bible for obvious reasons. The word “faith” appears over 20 times in this chapter and in the 40 verses that make up this chapter you have faith described here in the opening verses and then you have a grand demonstration of faith through the lives of Old Testament heroes of faith.
In Hebrews 8, the author talks about the old covenant aging and a new covenant that has come. What’s wrong with the “old covenant”? As the author of Hebrews says, “For if there had been no fault in that first covenant, no place would have been sought for a second” (8:7). Why does the author of Hebrews say that Jesus is part of a “better covenant,” a “new covenant”?
In science, there’s a common phrase that says, “we stand on the shoulders of giants.” It conveys a sense of humility that what a scientist discovers today is only made possible by the discoveries of those that have gone before him/her. This is what we are doing when we read and study Hebrews 7 and Melchizedek.
Verses 4–8 of Hebrews 6 is one of the more difficult passages in the N.T. Churches have divided over the question of the security of the believer. It’s often called “eternal security” and tends to put people into one of two camps: one camp says, “once saved, always saved” and the other camp uses the language of “losing one’s salvation.”
Often, we look to things or to someone to provide satisfaction and meaning. And when that happens, then like the original audience for this letter, I’m looking for a “Jesus substitute”—another priest. When the priesthood and the system of sacrifices were established under Moses it was a foreshadowing of what was to come.
One of the significant themes in the Bible is rest. It shows up in the second verse of the second chapter of Genesis; “God rested”; and it closes off in the second last book of our Bible describing a new heaven and a new earth where we will be at rest—free from all the things that rob us from rest. And in between, we see the value, the reason, and the promise of rest.
Hebrews 3 is directed to people who were thinking about quitting and going back to their old way of living. When the going gets tough and you are tempted to quit, there are four things you need to do: Remember who you are, learn from history, check your heart, and engage deeply in a Christian community.
All of us who are followers of Jesus have likely had the experience of wondering if wholeheartedly following Jesus is worth it. For most of us, we’ve gone through disappointments, or we’ve become distracted, or we’ve experienced some pressure to throw in the towel on our faith. We continue in chapter 2 and the focus is on Jesus’ humanity.
