All Encompassing - Hebrews 4:6-16

4:6-7 - If God has tried to give his children the gospel all throughout time, because the people rejected it, it would make sense that He would try repeatedly. Paul demonstrates this when he says “God again set a certain day, calling it ‘Today.’” God tried to teach the people the gospel not only through Moses, but also through Joshua and David. Paul quotes Psalm 95:7-8 warning those who “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” I think at the overall message that Paul is trying to convey to the Jewish Christian converts in his audience, and it seems to me that he is saying, “Look, God has tried to give the Israelites the gospel repeatedly, but because they will not be obedient, they aren’t given the blessings of it. The gospel has been the same from the beginning of time, it just has been fulfilled now. Don’t be like the Israelites who rejected the gospel previously.” I guess that’s the whole purpose of this letter, “this is the same gospel as before, just don’t be like the Israelites who have rejected it.” 4:8 - it’s important to note here that the way that this verse has been translated makes it sound like “Joshua” was in charge of determining whether or not the Israelite people under his charge were worthy of the rest of the Lord. While Joshua was absolutely their prophet and sure God took his opinion into consideration, it is not possible that Joshua could have been the provider of that rest because he was a human man and did not control or provide the “rest of the Lord.” The article on this chapter says, “Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua and is transferred into English as Joshua. Paul has reference here to the man Joshua of the Old Testament rather than to Jesus Christ. His point is that the Israelites did not find their ‘rest’ under Moses nor Joshua, under whose direction they found and entered the Promised Land, or even under David, their greatest king.” In the NIV is says “Joshua” and in the KJV it says “Jesus,” so it’s important to keep straight who can do what, and also that Jesus, Joshua, Yeshua, and other names can be interchangeable for the Savior. 4:9-11 - There’s another difference between the KJV and the NIV where the NIV compares the “rest of the Lord” to a “Sabbath-rest,” and the KJV simply says it is a rest where the righteous “hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.” I see how the KJV could be translate to saying a “Sabbath-rest.” Both are profitable for consideration though, so we don’t necessarily have to choose which one is correct. The Sabbath type rest that could be compared to the “rest of the Lord” in that, on the Sabbath it’s not a day where we can just lay in bed the whole time, or stare up at the ceiling. People still need to eat, children still need to be taken care of, emergencies still need to be dealt with. In the hospital, people aren’t magically cured Saturday night then fall ill again Monday morning. Work still needs to be done in that church service needs to be carried out, it can still be hot outside, you can still get sick. The whole point of the Sabbath is to take it easy from what you can, but ultimately to renew your covenants through the sacrament, and focus on your relationship with Jesus. So the Sabbath might be hectic still, but there’s an inner-peace that comes, a spiritual growth despite everything that gets in the way. Similarly, the “rest” that God provides doesn’t necessarily mean that life will be easy, but it does mean that there will be an inner-peace, a guidance, teachings, and comforting that will come to the faithful. The KJV is less committed to the “Sabbath” type of explanation but the article quotes Spencer W. Kimball as teaching, “It is he who is the most dynamic, the one who works the hardest, puts in the longest hours, and lives the closest to his Heavenly Father who is rested- rested from his labors, but not put away from his work.” I thought that this was pretty profound, the “work” continues but the “rest” comes from a close relationship with God. For me, the “rest” part is about a calm assurance in all the gospel promises, an inner-peace that allows me to release my anxieties about the future, and understanding about the gospel that enables me to keep an eternal perspective. Another aspect of the KJV is that instead of reading “he also hath ceased form his own works, as God did from his,” as equating the “rest of the Lord” with a Sabbath type of “rest,” it has a different interpretation. The article on this chapter from gospeldoctrine.com says, “One of the goals of discipleship is to submit our will to the will of the Father. This means, in part, that we bury our own agenda and adopt the Lord’s. It means that our personal desires are replaced with divine desires. It means that the carnal mind is replaced with the mind of Christ. Paul also explains that it means that we stop doing our own work and start doing the work of the Lord. Once we cease from always being concerned about our ‘own works,’ we can focus on that work which ironically beings us rest.” I thought that this was an interesting way to look at it. If we think about our lives and the ways that we intuitively think will make us happy or fulfilled, it’s usually money, relationships, status, respect, and the various extremes of those. Jesus’ teachings are that happiness comes through serving others, being chaste and honest, no anger, etc. What we naturally think is best for us really revolves around ourselves and focuses on a lot of things that we can’t control. We don’t control how many people like us and how many people don’t. For the most part we don’t control how much money we have, we can’t force anyone else to be in a relationship with us. It’s the relentless focus on and pursuit of things that we can’t control that are what naturally make sense to us. It is counter-intuitive to think that if we focus on the pursuit of serving others and being morally clean and becoming even tempered, that we will find happiness. But when we focus on things we can’t control such as money, other people’s opinions of us and their willingness to spend time with us, our anxiety or desperation for it become all consuming. 4:11-13 - The way that people, the Israelites in this example, can disregard the gospel of God really makes us wonder at just how important is it? If people are able to reject the commandments and live lives totally contrary to the gospel and they aren’t immediately punished by God, it makes you wonder just how big of a deal all of this stuff that Paul is teaching is. He seems pretty concerned that his audience will reject the gospel, but if it doesn’t have big, obvious, severe consequences, then does it really matter? The answer is YES! It does matter. God does not punish us for our disobedience in big dramatic ways because we have our agency, which means that our obedience to the gospel wouldn’t be because we believed it and wanted to be obedient, but instead that we would obey to avoid punishment. That’s not the purpose of life. Paul has repeatedly pointed out in this chapter how important the “rest of the Lord” is, and we’ve talked about that extensively, but there’s another reason why what Paul’s talking about is important. He says, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” There are a few important notes about the particular words and phrases used here: “quick” – Living, like “quickened” to be made alive, this is the opposite of “dead” “powerful” – most of the translations take this to mean “active,” in that the word of God is purposefully working in our lives. “Sharper than any twoedged sword” – the article on this chapter likens this to the “small, piercing voice of his Spirit in reaching us.” I think that this is one of those things where I have to draw on my own personal experience because I can’t think of this applying in any other way. I have had several times when the Spirit has come at me suddenly and aggressively and honestly, took my breath away. I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach from something that didn’t physically happen, but that spiritually did. This is what I think this phrase means, that the Spirit can speak to your spirit in a severe and devastating manner. Because honestly, this life in this body is important and all, but we’ve lived for eons of time before just as spirits, that is who we really are. And I think that’s what the next few parts of this verse are, that the “word of God” is capable of causing a physical reaction through our spirit. “A discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” We people, we think and do things that can be embarrassing or harmful or that would have consequences, and there are so many people who think that if they don’t get caught, nothing they do matters. There’s a range of circumstances in which this concept is important. The obvious first thing is that anything that we do will be known to God who is just and loving towards all, and that includes the people that we wrong. This keeps us from living in the mindset of “as long as I don’t get caught, it doesn’t matter.” The flip side of that is that when we are wronged or accused of something, we can be assured of justice for our suffering. This is important because we can feel like God condemns us all day long, but if we don’t feel like he will stand up for us to, then there really isn’t a point in having a relationship with Him. Not only does God know the innermost workings of our spirits, but he’s that way for everyone else too, for “all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” 4:14-16 – Paul equates not only this all knowing God to “Jesus the Son of God,” but also that he is the “great high priest,” bringing it around again to Judaism. It’s one thing to see Jesus as God but for him to be considered in the context of the Judaism that they were familiar with would be a powerful connection between the old Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. Not only is this Jesus the highest religious authority, he is also all knowing, capable of spiritually connecting with us in a powerful way, but he is also fulfills this role and can “be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” The IM quotes President Howard W. Hunter as teaching, “It is important to remember that Jesus was capable of sinning, that he could have succumbed, that the plan of life and salvation could have been foiled, but that he remained true. Had there been no possibility of his yielding to the enticement of Satan, there would have been no real test, no genuine victory in the result. If he had been stripped of the faculty to sin, he would have been stripped of his very agency.” There’s a C.S. Lewis quote that I love that says, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good… Only those who try to resist temptation known how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of the wind by trying to walk against it, not by laying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later… We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who known to the full what temptation means.” This changed my understanding of just what Christ had to endure. We have to assume that most of that temptation came to Jesus through the atonement because as a Middle Eastern man living under the Roman Empire, there was no meth that he had to be tempted with and overcome, he wouldn’t know the temptations of a woman, or anything like that. And in order to be just, he couldn’t just say, “I lived on earth for a period of time, therefore I have overcome all temptations that anyone can ever feel,” because that wouldn’t be the case and we could always say, “yeah but you didn’t experience whatever so you don’t know what it’s like to want to do something because of that,” and we would be right to say that. So the only way that Jesus can truly overcome all temptations would be to experience every single aspect of everyone’s lives throughout all time. Because Jesus is all knowing, all powerful, and understands everything about every aspect of us, we can “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” The IM comments, “In many ancient cultures, to approach a king’s throne uninvited was to risk one’s life, but at the king’s invitation, one could approach and speak with assurance. To approach God ‘boldly’ means having confidence that God wants us to approach His throne and that we will receive His help.” This is a concept that Paul’s audience would have been familiar with, I’m sure that they couldn’t imagine walking up to the Roman Emperor whenever they wanted, they knew that death would be there before they made it to his throne. Also when we read about Esther, she was nervous to speak to the king about saving her people even though he was her husband because she hadn’t been formally invited by him. This is a foreign concept to us because we don’t really deal with royalty now in this country, but not only will God not kill us for trying to talk to him but he has already called for us to use his open invitation. And what can we go talk to him for? Anything. We can be forgiven at any time for any thing, and we can be given “help in time of need.” It’s really kind of an interesting concept to think about, that God is the ultimate everything, has all power, all knowledge, all ability, is both just and merciful, and he wants to hear the ramblings of us talking about our day, he wants to give us blessings and gifts and help us feel better when we are sad. It’s hard for us to understand because we live in a world and mindset of limited resources. But his situation is that he can love, care about, and plan for each and every one of us in each and every aspect of our lives. It’s really kind of crazy to think about, just how big God is, and how small we are and yet we are the most important thing to him.