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HOLY HELP FOR THE HOPELESSRESCUES BELIEVERS FROM JUDGMENTHebrews 11:28-31INTRODUCTION Mortal danger has the effect of focusing our minds and giving us clarity of vision. When the danger of dying confronts us nothing matters except escape. All the worries and concerns of “normal” life are of no consequence. We gain perspective on what really matters. When the family runs to the basement to hide from the tornado or flees from the house that is on fire or from the flooding river you are not worried about your neighbor’s barking dog or how to pay for college or what your friend really meant when she said she couldn’t come to your party. When you know that tomorrow the eye of the hurricane is going to come ashore where you live you are not obsessing about your weight or your wardrobe or how you’re going to get to watch both of your favorite TV shows when the networks scheduled them at the same time. When the doctor tells you that you have terminal cancer your worry about how your retirement accounts are doing seems pretty funny. The people to whom the letter to the Hebrews is written are facing mortal danger. They are in the midst of persecution; threatened with physical harm, loss of property and death because of their faith in Christ. The author is seeking to strengthen their resolve to remain faithful to Christ no matter what it costs them. He has spent most of his letter demonstrating the superiority of Christ to that religious system from which they had come and to which they were tempted to return in order to escape persecution. In chapter 11 he is taking a chronological tour of OT characters that lived by faith in the future, unseen promises of God and thus were able to persevere in faithfulness to God without ever receiving in the present the fullness of what was promised. In these four verses he looks at the faith of two individuals and two groups. What all four of these events share in common is that through faith in God’s promises people escaped God’s judgment. In each case the people who believe are delivered from God’s wrath and those who do not believe perish. The author wants to put their present danger in perspective. Yes they might be killed by men because of their faith in Christ but they need to remember there is a fate worse than death. The author is saying to these fearful people and to us, through these stories, what Jesus said in Luke 12:4-5, "I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” His goal is get these people and us to fear God’s anger more than we fear the hostility of men or any other threat we might face on this earth. He aims to convince us that though faithfulness to Christ will result in the loss of earthly pleasure and perhaps even death, yet the worst thing that can happen to a human being will not happen to those who trust in Christ. Thus we should remain faithful no matter what harm is threatened. He intends for us to have our minds focused and our vision clarified by the fact that God’s judgment is a certainty that we can only escape if we have faith in Christ. MAIN POINT It is only through persistent faith in Christ that…I. We escape the angel of death (v. 28) As we examine this first escape from God’s judgment we need to understand what it is that Moses believed. Of what did his faith consist? First of all Moses believed that God was going to send the destroying angel to kill the firstborn sons of every household in Egypt and the firstborn male offspring of every animal in Egypt as well. The promised judgment was in the future. It was unlike anything that Moses had ever experienced in his life. There was nothing in his experience that would enable him to understand or expect that such a thing could happen or would happen. Therefore, his faith is his conviction that this unseen, future event was without question going to happen because God said it would happen. Second, Moses believed that the blood of a slaughtered year old, unblemished male lamb that had lived in his home for 5 days when spread upon the doorway of his home would prevent the angel of death from killing his firstborn son or any of his firstborn male animals. The way we know that this is what he believed is because he did what God told him to do in order to be safe from the destroying angel. He spread the blood of this lamb on the sides of his door and over the top and thus the angel of death passed over his home. In addition the angel also did not touch any home in Egypt upon which the blood was smeared. Not only Moses but all who believed that God was going to kill firstborn sons in every home and who also believed that the blood of the lamb would save those firstborn escaped the touch of the angel of death. However, the angel of death did not pass over any of the homes without blood, from the most powerful to the least powerful in the land of Egypt. No house without the blood of the lamb escaped but all the firstborn in those homes perished and that unexpectedly. If you read through the account of God’s destroying of Egypt’s firstborn in Exodus 12 you cannot fail but be struck with how much of the language is used throughout the rest of the Bible in reference to God’s judgment against sinners. He strikes down the firstborn. He sends his plague against them. He brings judgment on the gods of Egypt. There is loud wailing in the darkness throughout Egypt after the Lord kills all the firstborn. The judgment fell on all regardless of station in life, both rich and poor, both kings and slaves. All this language is used throughout the Bible to describe the horror of God’s universal, eternal judgment. The destruction of the firstborn is a foreshadowing of hell which is the expression of God's eternal, implacable hostility towards sinners. But Moses and the people of Israel escape this horror by placing the blood of the lamb upon their doorways. Notice that God did not spare people his wrath because of their nationality or because of their religious performance but because of their faith in the blood of the lamb. How often this language is used in the NT to describe how it is that Christians escape God’s just judgment against our sins. “For you know that it was not with perishable things like silver and gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect” (1 Peter 1:18-19). “…he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12). “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). “For Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7b). "God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood" (Romans 3:25). "Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him" (Romans 5:9). The only way to escape God's just anger is to take refuge in the blood of Christ, to trust that his death was in your place. There is another way that Christ’s sufficiency as our savior from God’s angel of death is also seen in this verse. Why is it that only Moses is said to have kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood by faith when we know, as did the first readers of this letter, that thousands of Israelite households and probably even some Egyptian households also kept the Passover and smeared the blood? What the author is alluding to is the representative nature of Moses in relation to the people of Israel. What Moses did the people did. He alone is mentioned in v. 28 because he is the foreshadowing of Jesus as our mediator and representative to God. The argument of the NT is that for all who are “in Christ”, that is all who are united to Christ by faith, what Jesus did we did. When Jesus died, we died. When Jesus was raised from the dead, we were raised from the dead. Jesus did all that he did as our representative head so that everything that belongs to Jesus belongs to us his people as well. So the author to this letter by referring to Moses and the people keeping the Passover and sprinkling the blood on their door frames, reminds these tempted people that because of Christ they have been delivered from certain death at the hands of God’s destroying angel. If you have taken shelter under the blood of Jesus then the angel of death will pass over you and not destroy you in hell forever. If you do not trust in the blood of the lamb you will be destroyed when God sends the destroying angel into the world. All of us are always in mortal danger. The angel of death is coming. He could come at any time. None of us knows when and where he will strike next. Yet, escape from his destroying power is open to all who will take refuge in Christ, the lamb who was slain for all who will trust in him. Living by faith in him is the only way to be prepared for the certain judgment of God. Trust him now and keep on trusting him. Do not turn away. It is only through persistent faith in Christ that…
II. We safely pass through the flood of God’s judgment (v. 29) The day after God destroyed the firstborn of Egypt and preserved the lives of all the firstborn who had taken refuge under the blood of the lamb all of Israel together with a number of believing Egyptians left Egypt and began the journey to the Land of Promise. After a few days they came to the Red Sea and camped on its shores. At that time the Lord told Moses that he was going to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh would pursue Israel and thus God could get glory for himself by destroying Pharaoh and his mighty army. God did not tell Moses how he was going to do this, only that he was going to do it. Thus Pharaoh, by God’s will, pursued and trapped Israel against the Red Sea. Do you remember what happened when the Israelites saw the army of Egypt coming towards them? They were terrified and said to Moses, for the first of many times, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? … It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.” Under the threat of the army they are ready to abandon God and his Savior Moses and return to Egypt. How appropriate is this for those to whom this letter is written! Like the Israelites, they have taken refuge under the blood of the lamb and so have left behind their former life as slaves of sin but now they are again threatened with harm. How will they respond? Will they return to Egypt by returning to their Judaism or will they believe God and go to the Land of Promise? This is the same question that faces us on a regular basis when we encounter difficulty and threat as followers of Christ. Will we move ahead in faith or will we return to a life without risk and without Christ? Moses tells the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” So Moses holds his staff towards the Red Sea and all through the night God’s angel keeps the army of Pharaoh at bay while an east wind drives the waters apart, so that dry land appears. This is the point at which the author to the Hebrews picks up the story. He says it was by faith that the entire nation walked through the midst of the sea as if on dry land. In contrast, the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same were, literally, swallowed up. The obvious point is that the reason the Israelites were not drowned but passed safely through the water was because they had faith in God’s promises and that the Egyptians were swallowed up by the water because they did not have faith in God’s promises. Both the Israelites and the Egyptians performed the same action. They both went into the midst of the sea. The difference is that one of them had faith and the other one did not. The Israelites did not deserve to be kept safe, as was clearly seen in their response prior to crossing. The piled up water was a threat to them as well as a threat to the Egyptians. However they escaped being drowned because they believed that God would keep the waters from destroying them because of his promise to them. The Egyptians, on the other hand had no promise from God but acted presumptuously. They believed they were strong enough to escape the threat of the waters of God’s wrath. They did have faith but it was faith in their own strength, not in God’s promises. There is a path or a way of life that leads through the waters of God’s judgment. While all who have faith must walk through that path it is possible to walk on it and yet not have faith. As Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:5 there are those “who have the appearance of godliness but who deny its power.” Or as Jesus says in Matthew 7:24-25 there are those who profess faith in Jesus as Lord and who pray and even drive out demons and perform miracles in the name of Jesus but whom Jesus does not know. You can, like the Egyptians, attempt to follow the path of the faithful but to do so trusting in your own strength and not the strength of Christ. It is only those who walk this path by faith in Christ who will safely pass through the waters of God’s judgment. Why are you here this morning? Why do you live the way you do? Do you think that because of your religious activity or moral behavior that God is obligated to be good to you? Are you relying upon your performance or upon the performance of Christ? Is your faith in God’s promised deliverance to those who rely on Christ or in your own goodness and faithfulness? It is only through persistent faith in Christ that…
III. We overcome all that separates us from heaven (v. 30) Forty years separates the event recounted in v. 29 from that referred to in v. 30. The author skips over those forty years of Israel’s history without comment. There is a reason for this. He is seeking to illustrate what faith is and what it does and the period of time from when Israel crosses the Red Sea until entering the land of Canaan is not a time of faith but a time of unbelief and disobedience. He has already referred to this time period in chapter 3 where he uses the unbelief of Israel and God’s declaration that they will never enter his rest as an example for these professing Christians to not shrink back from Christ but to boldly follow him where he leads. Now he uses the days of Joshua and of Israel’s entering into the Land of Promise as a positive example of what faith is and what faith does. Back in chapter 4 he used entry into the Promised Land as a metaphor for entering into God’s land of rest, into that eternal rest in the new heavens and the new earth. He says at the end of chapter 3 that the reason the generation of Israelites who came out of Egypt did not enter the rest that God promised was because of their unbelief. Now here we find the children of that disobedient generation coming to the first barrier hindering their entry into the land of rest, which is the fortified city of Jericho. It was the sight of cities like this that provoked unbelief in their parents and subjected them to forty years of desert wandering until they all died (Numbers 13-14). How will they respond to the same threat? The Lord commands them to march around the city once a day for seven days in silence. Then on the seventh day, the Sabbath day, the day of rest, they are to march around the city seven times. When they finish their last circuit the priests are to blow the trumpets and the people are to shout and when they do the walls of Jericho will fall down and then they are to go into the city and destroy all who live there. The author of our letter says that it was by faith that the walls of Jericho fell down after being encircled for seven days. Their faith was demonstrated in their obeying the word of God. They did what God said and the barrier that hindered their entrance into the land was destroyed. It was by faith in the word of God that they were enabled to enter the rest of God. They were united to the promise of God by their faith and thus what stood between them and the Promised Land fell. How foolish would God's command and promise have appeared to those living in Jericho, indeed to anyone who knew anything about taking fortified cities? How can marching around a city for seven days in silence and then seven times on the seventh day and ending with a shout and a trumpet blast bring down fortified walls? There was no reason to expect this strategy to work except for this one reason: God said it would work. This is no different than the foolishness of the cross of Jesus. How can a guy dying on a cross 2000 years ago actually destroy sin and death and the devil and hell? How can his death gain forgiveness of my sins and obtain eternal life for me? What possible reason can you give as to why we should trust in this bloody death? The reason we trust is because the God who made everything and who rules over all things has told us that this cross is the weapon that will destroy every barrier standing between us and heaven. Listen to what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” Or again in Acts 20:32, “Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” There are fortresses and barriers that are designed to keep us out of the Promised Land. The threat of loss for the sake of Christ, our sins, the enticement of this world’s pleasures, false ideas about God and his salvation, persecution, the lies and fury of the devil, etc are all arrayed against us to keep us from obtaining what God has promised. Yet, we have, in the word of God as we read it and hear it and then believe it the means by which every hindrance can be thrown down. God's word of grace, his good news of the cross of Christ is the trumpet blast that overthrows everything standing between you and heaven. As we trust in the foolishness of the cross and of living a crucified life we will discover like the Israelites that the walls will come down so that we can enter into God's promised rest. It is only through persistent faith in Christ that…
IV. We, though disobedient, will not perish with the disobedient (v. 31) Verse 31 is one of those shocking verses that are sprinkled throughout the Bible. The last person whose faith the author describes is a non-Jewish woman named Rahab who was a prostitute and who lived in the city of Jericho, which is full of idol worshipping, child sacrificing, sexually immoral, greedy people who hate God and God's people and whom God has determined to destroy. It is shocking that such a person would be placed in the same list and on the same level as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. This Gentile prostitute is treated as if she is no different from these giants of biblical history. The author includes her instead of a whole host of other well known OT characters that he could have used to illustrate faith. Look at v. 32 which has a partial list of those the author could have picked but did not: Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and all the prophets. Why is she included in this list? First and foremost it is because she had faith in the promises of God regarding his purpose to destroy the Canaanites and give their land to his people Israel. She exhibited her faith by hiding the two spies at risk of her own life. She betrayed her city and joined herself and her family to the people of God because she was absolutely certain that Jericho would be destroyed and that Israel was going to take over the land of Canaan. She had heard the stories of how Yahweh had delivered Israel from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea forty years prior to Israel's appearing on the eastern shore of the Jordan River. When she heard, she believed. She trusted that what this God said was going to happen, would happen. Jericho would be destroyed and Israel would rule Canaan. Nothing mattered to her except escaping that coming judgment and belonging to the people of God. But she is also included to show that God's salvation is not limited by race or gender or religion or relative sinfulness. Rahab demonstrates that God's salvation is open to people of every nationality and ethnicity, to men and women, to those raised in Christian homes and those raised in Moslem homes and, most importantly, without regard to how sinful you have been. Rahab stands as evidence that God's salvation is not based upon any human consideration. God saves whom he will, according to grace, not according to merit. He pays no attention to what human beings pay attention to. The fact that salvation is not based on human performance is seen in v. 31 in another way. Notice how the people who live in Jericho are described: "those who were disobedient." This exact same phrase is used to describe all those Jewish people who God killed in the desert over the forty years of wandering following their rebellion at Kadesh Barnea. The Jewish people God rescued from Egypt and the idol worshippers who lived in Jericho are no different from one another. Neither group deserves God's kindness. Both are sinful and deserve condemnation. If any are saved from either group it must be by grace through faith. So just as Joshua and Caleb were the only ones saved out of the generation of disobedient Jews so only Rahab and her family are saved out of the disobedient residents of Jericho. Prostitution is an ugly and poisonous sin. Make no mistake, prostitutes and their customers deserve divine judgment. Rahab is not saved from destruction because her sins were somehow not as bad as the rest of those who lived there. She is forgiven and rescued from destruction and given a place in God's family because she trusted the promises of God, not because she somehow earned her salvation. Her action of saving the two spies from her murderous fellow citizens was the fruit of her faith, not the cause of her salvation. There is another reason that Rahab is included in this list. Rahab eventually married a man named Salmon from the tribe of Judah. They had a son named Boaz who, like his father, married a Gentile woman named Ruth who through faith joined herself to the people of God. Boaz and Ruth had a son named Obed who had a son named Jesse who had a son named David and the Son of David is our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Rahab, through faith in the promises of God is fully accepted as a member of God's family. She is not a second class Christian because she was a prostitute and a Gentile and a woman. I know there are people sitting here this morning who feel that their sins are too great for God to accept them. There are some who feel that their social standing or their gender or their age makes them second class citizens in God's family. There is no sin and no human condition that can keep you from joining with God's people and going to heaven and living as a full member of God's family. There is no second class or first class Christian. We are all sinners saved by grace through faith. We all have equal access to our heavenly Father through our savior, Jesus Christ. What you were does not matter. What matters is what you have become by God's grace through your personal faith in God's promised salvation through Jesus. Though you are disobedient and deserve to be destroyed you can escape the coming destruction of the city of man by trusting in Christ. You can be a full member of the body of Christ through faith in Jesus. It is only through persistent faith in Christ that…
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
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