Joshua and Judges: Crossing the Jordan - Obeying God's delegated authority, part 23. Jos 1:16-18; survey of Heb.

Title: Joshua and Judges: Crossing the Jordan - Obeying God's delegated authority, part 23. JOS 1:16-18; survey of Heb.   

 

Announcements /opening prayer:

 

Remember, the issue is the Jewish Christian or the Jewish professing Christian who is an unbeliever, returning to his old way of Judaism in order to avoid persecution. He was also tempted to return to his old system because he was more comfortable with it. He had been brought up in the old way. His brain was hard wired for the old way. To associate with Gentiles, to leave behind the ways of the Law, especially food laws, rituals, feast, and circumcision and to pursue the new mystery way of the church was all a new frontier, and we know how the human race is with new ways of life.

 

In order to encourage them to forge on in the new frontier, the writer uses their hero Abraham as an example. He didn't even know where he was going.

 

HEB 11:8 By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.

 

HEB 11:9 By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise;

 

HEB 11:10 for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

 

Abraham's faith is specifically attested in the Genesis narrative.

 

GEN 15:6

Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.

 

Our author has already referred to Abraham's faith in the promise of God and his patient waiting for its fulfillment. He walked by faith and not by sight and made good the claim, father of our faith.

 

HEB 6:13 For when God made the promise to Abraham, since He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself,

 

HEB 6:14 saying, "I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply you."

 

This promise was made by God to Abraham after he had offered up his son Isaac.

 

Yet this promise was a recapitulation and elaboration of God's earlier promise to Abraham that He would bless him and make him a great nation, in Gen 12. At the time of the earlier promise, Abraham was childless, yet he believed God. As time went on and the disastrous decision to foster a child by Sarah's maid showed itself as just that, it was made clear to him that the promise would be fulfilled through the birth of a son to Sarah and himself when, at their age, by all natural reckoning, such a prospect would have been dismissed as impossible. Yet Abraham believed God, and in due course the promised child was born. On Isaac now hung every hope that the further promises of God regarding Abraham's descendants would be fulfilled; yet it was Isaac whom Abraham was commanded offer up to God. When Abraham's faith and obedience were shown in his readiness to do even this, he received a reaffirmation of the promises of God, reinforced here in HEB 6:15.

 

HEB 6:15 And thus, having patiently waited [patiently endured], he obtained the promise.

 

The promise of Gen 12, 15, and here in 22 are unconditional. Abraham had faith as to be the recipient of it, and in the return of Isaac to him, he obtained the promise.

 

After the offering of Isaac the Lord repeated His promise to Abraham and confirmed it by an oath. When men swear an oath in order to underline the certainty and solemnity of their words, they swear by someone or something greater than themselves. "As the Lord lives" was the supreme oath in Israel. Abraham swore by God. But God has no one greater than Himself by whom to swear, so when He confirms a promise, He swears by Himself.

 

HEB 6:16 For men swear by one greater than themselves, and with them an oath given as confirmation is an end of every dispute.

 

HEB 6:17 In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath,

 

God says "as I live" 26 times in the NASB. This is an oath in which He swears by Himself since there is no one greater.

 

Why is this significant to our study? Under unfair authority, if we are going to think and behave godlike and in the image of Jesus Christ, we have to entrust our souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right, 1PE 4:19. We must know Him who has promised and by means of faith in the truth of His word we must patiently endure. In this we will be Christ-like and we will glorify God.

 

But, just as we will see in Heb 11, so here in chapter 6, we must leave Abraham, while not ignoring the lesson from his example, and we must press on to the example of Christ and the promise of God in Christ. The physical descendent of Abraham are not saved. The believer is Christ is saved. Are the Christian Jews of the church the children of Abraham first and foremost or children of God. Abraham is called the father of our faith, but it is not faith in him that saves.

 

John the Baptist, in preparing Israel for her Messiah, pointed out that something more than biological descent from Abraham was necessary for acceptance with God.

 

LUK 3:8

"Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father,' for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

 

This insistence on the divine oath in God's promise to Abraham prepares the readers for the significance of the fact that God's promise regarding the priesthood of Melchizedek was similarly confirmed by an oath.

 

Why Melchizedek? Melchizedek, being both a priest and king, is a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, and one to whom Abraham offered a tithe, which is a type of the worship of God, as Melchizedek was obviously greater than Abraham and so possessed a greater priesthood than would come through Abraham and his great grandson Levi.

 

A test of your concentration.

 

• Suffering under unfair authority as a believer.
• Suffering for the sake of Christ.
• Jewish believers of the first century tempted to go back.
• Hebrews written for warning and encouragement (2, 6, 10).
• Heb 11 - Abraham and Moses examples.
• Heb 6 - Abraham to Melchizedek to Christ example.
• Heb 12 - given Christ example.

 

First we turn to the Lord's teaching on Psa 110 concerning Himself. Is it Abraham, Moses, or even David who is ultimately to be the deliverer of all things?

 

MAT 22:41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question,

 

MAT 22:42 saying, "What do you think about the Christ [Messiah], whose son is He?" They said to Him, "The son of David."

 

MAT 22:43 He said to them, "Then how does David in the Spirit call Him 'Lord,' saying,

 

MAT 22:44 'The Lord said to my Lord,

"Sit at My right hand,

Until I put Thine enemies beneath Thy feet"'?

 

MAT 22:45 "If David then calls Him 'Lord,' how is He his son?" 

 

MAT 22:46 And no one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question.

 

PSA 110:1 The Lord says to my Lord:

"Sit at My right hand, Until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet."

 

Though a king blessed by the Lord, and writing this psalm at the height of his power, David is subject to this King. David has conquered Jerusalem, set up the ark of the covenant on Mt. Zion and has vanquished all of Israel's enemies. Yet now he prophetically looks to the future, when the true King will take His stand on Zion and to Him David is fully subject.

 

In the midst of the final war over the final enemy, Ammon, David's sin with Uriah and Bathsheba is a dark stain. David fell at the height of his promotion and power, but One is coming who will not fail, and at the height of His popularity in Jerusalem, the city that He wept for just a few days prior, Christ will meet His greatest test and pressure with nothing but victory. Christ could do what David could not, and certainly what none of us can - fully obey the Father and fully deliver all from sorrow, sin, and death.

 

David, who is the type, lays his crown at the feet of the anti-type, who is Christ.

 

This, all of us must do in time, even though our crowns are crowns of clay as we sit on a liar's throne in our empire of dirt. Yet it is amazing how tightly we hold on to the crown, the throne, and the empire. We must cast these worthless crowns at the foot of His cross and in so doing we will have crowns of eternal gold to cast at His feet in heaven.

 

The psalm bears the threefold impress of the number seven, the number of God's perfection and His oath and covenant.