The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
“Take care.” It’s a common expression, often spoken from one person to another as they’re about to part company and head back home or continue on their journey. Implied in the admonition to take care is to make sure that one is safe, to be alert, to avoid those things that could be perilous, and to nurture those things that are beneficial. “Take care” can either be a well-wish or a warning. In the case of the letter to the Hebrew Christians, “take care” was clearly and decisively a warning. Christians to whom the epistle was originally written were facing an intense trial and were in danger of losing their Christian hope and falling away from the living God, as the text says. As a result, they began to suffer — suffering inflicted on them by their fellow Jews and by Roman authorities. See, living by faith and worshiping Jesus as the Son of God was not an easy thing to do in their culture. It’s becoming a rather uneasy thing to do in our culture, too. Hebrews 10:31 says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” That is, when one falls out of faith in Jesus Christ, by apathy or by sheer rejection, the grace of God no longer applies, but God’s judgment. Thus, the fear of falling into the hands of the living God is a legitimate fear of judgment against sin. Their faith in and confession of Jesus Christ as God’s Son put them at odds with their community and with their broader culture, which used, by the way, against them slander and social discrimination, physical abuse, and exclusion from just about anything they could be excluded from — imprisonment and confiscation of property — in order to shame and to break the will of the Hebrew Christians, and get them back in line with the dominant social order in their culture, namely Judaism. We are seeing more and more of that kind of pressure in our day and age, where if we actually speak and think and act and defend the Christian faith, and confess our faith in Christ, well, more and more the Law part of the Word of God is seen as hate speech, and something that has to be put to rest.
Suffering, suffering of any kind and of every kind, should come as no surprise to the Christian. After all, God worked His greatest work in the suffering, the Passion, of His Son Jesus Christ. Even so, He, in your life, in your greatest times of suffering, is there at work in and through your life and circumstances to bring you to Himself in the heavenly glory. That’s Paul’s point, by the way, in Romans 8:28, one of my favorite Bible passages: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” 1 Peter 4:19 says about Christian suffering: “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.” And Jesus warned His own disciples about that particular kind of suffering that comes along as long as you remain and confess the true Christian faith. He said in John 15: “If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you. Remember the words that I said to you: a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecute Me, they will also persecute you.” The warning was proving true for those first New Testament Hebrew Christians. For the Christian, you see, there’s two kinds of suffering: the suffering we must endure that’s common to all humanity — sickness, decay, brokenness, physical and psychological torment, families in trouble, marriages torn apart, ultimate physical death. All of these things are common; all human beings must suffer through them. But there’s another kind of suffering that Christians must endure, unique to Christians and Christian faith. That is suffering on account of our Christian beliefs and our exercise thereof. Thus, the warning in Hebrews: “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil” — namely, unbelieving — “heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.” As a side note, the first kind of suffering is something that’s harder to bear sometimes than the second, right? See, in the second, at least we know some fundamental things, like we’re suffering on account of our Christian faith, of our confession of Christ. We know reason and the purpose for our suffering as Christians, for Christian profession. The first one’s a little more difficult, right? We don’t know why one person contracts cancer and another does not, why one dies of a heart attack and another does not. We don’t know the purpose for which, specifically, we’re suffering under the common males. But as far as the Bible’s concerned, regardless of what suffering it is, God, God in Christ, is at work in the life of the sufferer to bring you home to the glory that Paul speaks about in that Romans chapter 8.
The question is: Why me? Why now, Lord? What are you doing? Why? Those are all affixed to that sort of first kind of suffering. Luther writes of our text: “In the suffering of a Christian, the whole emphasis of this statement is on the word ‘heart,’ for he does not say, ‘Take care, lest there be in any of you a grasping hand, or a deceitful eye, or a lustful ear.’ For above all must one take care of the heart, their heart, that it is good and pure and holy. But this uncleanliness of the heart is so deep that no human being is sufficiently aware of it, much less can purge it by their own strength. Therefore, the heart only becomes pure and good through faith in Jesus Christ alone.” In verse 13 we read this: “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” The Greek word, by the way, for “exhort” here, or “encourage,” is in a present active imperative mood. In plain English, that means that we are to strongly encourage each other, in the midst of our suffering, persistently, every single day. What we are supposed to do is be encouraging one another in our faith, to, quote, “hold fast to the hope set before us” — which is a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:18 and 19). This encouragement is to be unshakable encouragement, a strength that emboldens the one who suffers to persevere through the toughest of tough times, regardless of which kind of suffering you’re laboring under.
Verse 15: “As it is said, ‘Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.'” The writer is actually quoting Psalm 95:7–8, which reminds the Hebrew Christians of their day, and all Christians in our day, of the unfaithfulness of the Israelites of old. There in Psalm 95:7–8, God said, “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put Me to the test.” The psalm is warning the Christians, the Hebrew Christians to which the epistle is written, and all subsequent Christians, not to be like our ancestors in the faith, who once possessed it but then gave it up. In those days, the Israelites saw and they experienced firsthand the mighty miracles of the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, yet they fell away due to their persistent refusal to trust God, in His Word, in His will, and in the way in which He works in the world. Verse 16: “For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was He provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness?” The Israelites had put God to the test. They had spurned His grace, provoked His anger, so they did not enter the promised land. The whole generation had to die off before God led them across the River Jordan into the land of promise. If those who witnessed the ten plagues, saw the Red Sea, pardon, saw the holy presence of God descend upon Mount Sinai, and witnessed so many other miraculous works to keep them alive in the wilderness wandering, rebelled against the Lord God — if those who saw it still fell into unbelief — how much more possible and likely is it for those of us who didn’t see it? The author sees a similar situation brewing in the congregation of the Hebrew Christians. Faced with hardship and suffering, the Hebrew Christians were showing signs of faltering. History was about to repeat itself. So the author warns them: “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”
Who needs this type of warning? Well, if you’re born of flesh and blood, you’re included. You need the warning. Falling away, becoming apathetic toward the faith — which is obvious by church attendance across the board these days — falling away and becoming apathetic toward the faith, outright rejection, is a real danger for most Christians today. Very few who are baptized go on to lead a life in the church. They don’t take it seriously. They don’t heed the warnings. They allow their apathy to become unbelief. Remember St. Peter in Matthew 26:33: And Peter answered Jesus, “Though all of them might fall away because of You, I will never fall away from You.” The Hebrew Christians had not been listening to the Word of God. They had been going back to their old Jewish ways. Hebrews 5:11 says they had become dull in their hearing. They were experiencing hardships like persecution. They were being slandered and discriminated against. Some were being physically abused, excluded from any fellowship of any kind, imprisoned, and even property confiscated under Roman law — all in order to break their spirit, and punishing them for their confession of Jesus as the Son of the living God, who died to take away their sins and rose on account of their justification. Tempted to, quote, “drift away,” these new converts to Christianity were told by the author of the epistle, probably Apollos, to take hold of right doctrine, to remember what they had been taught. Hebrews 2:1: “Therefore you must pay much closer attention to what you have heard, lest we drift away from it.” They were in danger of losing hope, giving up the faith once delivered to the saints, going back to their Jewish religions of works-righteousness. And so doing, they would also then be granted the protection of Roman law that had been written specifically for the people of the Jewish faith. In so doing, they would be free to live again under the good graces of their culture and of their government.
It’s hard for sinners to trust in a God we do not see, when our lives and our families seem to be falling apart. It’s hard to set aside criticism from family members and friends over our religious convictions. It’s risky to stand opposite of what the culture deems as right and wrong, as appropriate and inappropriate. It’s much, much easier and safer to simply take the path of least resistance, to say nothing, or to, at worst, consent to their false doctrines and belief. Here in the epistle, the author uses five rhetorical questions to remind his hearers that no one is above Israel’s ability to fall into rebellion and to unbelief. Verse 16: “For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was He provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” What happened to Israel of old can happen to any one of us today, to any Christian, church, denomination, to any congregation, to any individual in those congregations. Thus, the admonition throughout the New Testament: “Therefore let anyone who thinks he can stand, take heed lest he fall.” That’s 1 Corinthians 10:12. The good news set forth in Hebrews 4:2 is that there still remains a Sabbath rest for God’s people — for those who hear His voice, who hold fast to the confession of Christ, who remain partakers in all that He is and all that He has to give.
In the midst of these exhortations and these five rhetorical questions, the writer of Hebrews reminds us that we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold fast to our original confidence and remain firm until the end. The phrase “we have come to share” expresses a continuous state that results because of a prior event, a past thing. In other words, we have been made partakers already. We are partakers now. The only question is: will we remain partakers in the future, by virtue of our true Christian faith? Thus, the Hebrew congregation, and the author of the epistles, were not insignificant entities. But they’re partakers of Christ. We are royal companions to our brother, Jesus Christ. We share in Him — in what He is, what He has, and what He has done for us. That’s the heavenly calling that the author of Hebrews is talking about: that it is Christ Himself who is our possession, and we His. These Christians have everything to lose if they fall back, but everything to gain if they press on in their current state as partakers in Jesus Christ. So the author says, “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today.'” The ancient church father Chrysostom wrote, “Even if a man has sinned, as long as it is ‘today,’ he has hope. For as long as we are in this world, today is in season.” That’s another way of saying that every time you hear the call to repentance, it’s time to answer today, to repent, to confess one’s sin, and throw themselves on the mercy seat of Jesus Christ. Joined to Christ in the waters of Holy Baptism, the Christians, these Hebrew Christians, and you, are partakers in the Gospel. You all share in Christ, who He is and what He has done and what He has already given to you. You lack nothing. You have everything, even to see you through the darkest and deepest, most troubling times of your life. He was made like us in every respect, so that He might become our merciful and faithful High Priest in service to God, our heavenly Father, making propitiation for our sins by the sacrifice on the cross. He was the faithful Son of God for the wayward children of Israel, and wayward Christians, for you and for me. Christ’s obedience covers our disobedience. Christ’s perfect trust in His heavenly Father covers our lack of trust in our heavenly Father and His will and His ways. This is our confidence and our confession. This is the hope that we share in Jesus Christ, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, Hebrews says, and urges us to hold on to this confidence, this hope, this confession, to cling to the words and the promises that are given to us in the biblical text, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In the midst of trials and suffering, remember the words of the apostle Paul: as partakers in Christ, we are afflicted in every way, but we are not crushed; perplexed, but we are not driven to despair. It even acknowledges that we can get confused, not understanding why the suffering has come upon us, but that is not to drive us to despair. Persecuted, but we’re not forsaken. Struck down, but we are not destroyed. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). So on this day, today, take care, for your sins have been forgiven you. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.