If you use Facebook, we are posting these each day on our page there, and we will also post these here each day. We welcome your thoughts here or on Facebook.
Day 337 – Thru the Bible
Today we continue Hebrews.
Hebrews 5 – Jesus was appointed to be our High Priest according to the will of God. This office involved His being both God and man. underscores Jesus’ deity when it applies to Him the divine designation “Son”. underscores the genuineness of His humanity when it speaks of Jesus’ “flesh,” His “loud cries and tears,” His learning “obedience,” the fact that “he suffered,” and His “being made perfect” completing all that was required of Him. The eternal Son of God took to Himself genuine humanity—“flesh”—in His incarnation. His “loud cries and tears” pertain to His whole earthly life as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah ), perhaps epitomized in Gethsemane. His learning “obedience through what he suffered” provides a clue to the meaning of the difficult expression that He was “made perfect”. He was made “perfect” in the sense that He became perfectly qualified in experience to be “the source of eternal salvation” to all Believers.
How the Son of God loved us to humble Himself in such a way! Our lives say “thank you” every day for such matchless grace.
How does your life say “thank you”?
Hebrews 6 – Although the writer issues a strong warning to his hearers about the perils of falling away from Jesus, he is confident that those he addresses will not fall away. Why? He knows that God is just and will not forget the Hebrew Believers’ diligence, love, and service, all of which testify to their having truly received Jesus as He is offered in the gospel.
Our subjective confidence (i.e., our human assessment) of our final salvation is based on three things: the Word of God, the inner witness of the Spirit, and a changed life. The author here highlights the third: he wants “each one” of his readers to persevere so as to “have the full assurance of hope until the end.” This is not salvation by works but is perseverance in service and love that demonstrates that the readers “through faith and patience inherit the promises” of God.
This chapter is famous for its strong warning passage, and rightly so. Unfortunately, its strong preservation (“eternal security”) passage is not nearly as well known. God made promises to Abraham and fortified them with an oath. Abraham believed God and “obtained the promise” and the readers of this letter are to do the same. God stooped to meet us in our weakness; He added His oath to His promise (as if His Word were not enough!). Why? So that we, heirs of the promise made to Abraham and Believers in Jesus, “might have strong encouragement.” God does not want us to doubt our salvation.
At the same time He spurs us on so that we might “hold fast to the hope set before us.” Our hope is secure as an “anchor of the soul” that Jesus took with Him into the Most Holy Place when He returned to the Father’s presence. He went to heaven “as a forerunner on our behalf;” therefore, we will surely follow Him there.
Such a hope inspires us to love Him who loved us like this and to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33).
Just as Abraham’s belief brought him salvation, how has your belief brought you salvation?
Hint: They’re both based upon the same promise that was made by God and fulfilled by Jesus.
What other thoughts or questions does today’s reading bring up?
Some of these notes are from the ESV Gospel Transformation Bible study notes. We highly recommend this study Bible.
Videos produced by www.TheGospelProject.com.
All links you need to be a part of this are here – Thru the Bible in 2018.