Perfect Priest for Weary Pilgrims (eBook)

A Theology of Hebrews

Dennis E. Johnson (Autor)

Thomas R. Schreiner, Brian S. Rosner (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
216 Seiten
Crossway (Verlag)
978-1-4335-7556-3 (ISBN)

Infos

An Introduction to the Biblical Theology of Hebrews The book of Hebrews can be intimidating for modern-day Christians due to its connection to Old Testament text. However, once understood, this New Testament epistle offers great insights into the superiority and sufficiency of Jesus-rightly justifying his place as high priest.  In this addition to the New Testament Theology series, scholar Dennis E. Johnson highlights the main biblical-theological themes of Hebrews. Johnson explores how Jesus fulfills perfect priesthood by becoming the covenant mediator and the trailblazer who leads his people into a better inheritance. Hebrews calls Christian believers, both of the early church and today, to hold fast to their faith even when faced with persecution and exclusion. It reminds us to cling to the eternal Son who offered his body and blood as the everlasting sacrifice for our sin. - Ideal for Anyone Wanting to Study the Bible More Deeply: Perfect for pastors, seminarians, college students, and laypeople - Helpful Bible Study Resource: A great companion to commentaries on Hebrews  - Part of the New Testament Theology Series: Other volumes include Ministry in the New Realm and Hidden with Christ in God

Dennis E. Johnson (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is professor emeritus of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California and assistant pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Tennessee. He is the author of several books and contributed to the ESV Study Bible and the ESV Expository Commentary. Dennis and his wife, Jane, live in Dayton and have four children and sixteen grandchildren.

Textauszug

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The Wilderness Pilgrimage of the People of God

The promise of entering his rest.

Hebrews 4:1

Knowing Your Congregation

Good pastors know God’s people. Faithful preaching demands more than orthodoxy and oratory. A biblically accurate, theologically insightful discourse delivered with eloquence is not a sermon. At least, it’s not quite a sermon, since a crucial component may be missing: engagement with listeners’ lives, interaction with their strengths and struggles, their joys and sorrows within, and the threats without.

Classic and contemporary discussions of preaching stress that good pastors, knowing God’s people, address their sermons to their hearers’ needs. In the seventeenth century, the Westminster Assembly advised the preacher, in applying the message of a biblical text, to “wisely make choice of such uses as, by his residence and conversing with his flock, he findeth most needful and seasonable; and, amongst these, such as may most draw their souls to Christ, the fountain of light, holiness, and comfort.”1 In the nineteenth century, Patrick Fairbairn, Scottish theologian and biblical scholar, counseled pastors to visit church members’ homes and to interact with them in other ways. By such personal involvement the pastor

will thereby gain much in respect to intimacy with their state and feelings, and so become more skillful in dealing with their spiritual interests. His knowledge of them gets individualized; their distinctive tendencies and characters, . . . the special sins and temptations which they need to be warned against, the duties which require to be most urgently pressed: these things . . . will get familiarized to the mind of the pastor.2

In the twenty-first century, after decades of ministry in such disparate contexts as rural Virginia and New York City, Timothy Keller counsels preachers,

When you read the text and write the sermon, think specifically of individuals you know with various spiritual conditions (non-Christian, weak/new Christian, strong Christian), with various besetting sins (pride, lust, worry, greed, prejudice, resentment, self-consciousness, depression, fear, guilt), and in various circumstances (loneliness, persecution, weariness, grief, sickness, failure, indecision, boredom). Now, remembering specific faces, look at the biblical truth you are applying and ask: How would this text apply to this or that person? Imagine yourself personally counseling the person with the text.3

The author of Hebrews is a good pastor who knows God’s people. Because the author knows his hearers personally, having spent time with them in the past (13:19), he knows their “various spiritual conditions” and “various circumstances.” He can remind them of their strong beginning as disciples, and he can commend their ongoing faithfulness. But he also speaks pointedly about their immaturity, the possibility of lethal apostasy that threatens some of them, and the cost of discipleship they must be prepared to pay: social marginalization, public humiliation, imprisonment, homelessness, and perhaps even martyrdom.

Because Hebrews teaches theology for the sake of exhortation, to address the spiritual situation of a specific body of Christ followers, we open our exploration with what the book itself reveals about that first-century Jewish-Christian congregation and the challenges that they faced. Hebrews is tantalizingly reserved about this church’s locale, but we can form a picture of the congregation’s social situation and spiritual struggles, enabling us to hear this word of exhortation almost as though we were sitting in their assembly. We will also follow the author’s lead by viewing their situation and ours in a context shared by God’s people across various redemptive-historical epochs. In Moses’s day, David’s day, our author’s day, and our day, the people of God are a band of pilgrims traversing a wilderness on the way to their heavenly homeland. This wider biblical-theological perspective on the life situation of believers helps us to hear God’s voice addressing us with the truth that we need in our own time and place.

Crises in a Messianic Synagogue

The title, “To the Hebrews,” attached to this document as early as Papyrus 46 in the second century, is probably correct: that first audience had been raised in Judaism and could trace their ancestry back to the Israelite patriarchs. Those to whom God spoke through prophets in times past were, biologically and covenantally, their “fathers” (1:1). These Hebrews had come to believe that Jesus was the royal Redeemer promised in the ancient Scriptures, the Messiah4 to whom God had spoken the words of Psalm 2:

You are my Son,

today I have begotten you. (Heb. 1:5; 5:5)

They had started their Christian life confident that Jesus’s death completely atoned for sins so that the animal sacrifices mandated in the law were no longer needed. Now, however, some seem to question the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice and are casting longing looks back toward the comfortingly familiar and visible rituals of Israel’s sanctuary.

These Jewish followers of Jesus would recognize the divine authority of the ancient Scriptures given to Israel. Therefore, our author builds his case for Jesus’s superiority squarely on those Scriptures. Hebrews cites and explains God’s ancient word from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament widely used by Jews living outside the promised land in the Dispersion (diaspora, “scattering”; see John 7:35; James 1:1). They are acquainted with the law’s directions for Israel’s corporate worship: a sanctuary constructed according to the pattern shown to Moses on Sinai (Heb. 8:5; 9:1–4), priests authorized to enter the sanctuary (5:1–4; 7:16), and sacrifices offered by those priests on others’ behalf (9:5–10; 10:1–4). The hearers know Old Testament history so well that, having recounted major stories (11:2–31), the author can allude to other Old Testament individuals and events by name or circumstance, expecting that such brief mention will bring whole narratives to mind (11:32–38). As Jews throughout the Roman Empire gathered each Sabbath in synagogues (synagōgai) to pray and to hear Scripture read and applied (Luke 4:15–16; Acts 9:20; 13:14–15; 18:4), so our author urges this congregation not to neglect its assembly (episynagōgē, ESV renders as “to meet together”) for mutual exhortation (10:25).5

But this synagogue of messianic (Jesus-following) Jews is no longer accepted by the broader Jewish community. During Jesus’s days on earth, Jews who expressed faith in him risked expulsion from synagogues (John 9:22; 12:42). Jesus warned that such rejection would escalate after his death and resurrection (John 16:2), and it did (Acts 6:8–15; 13:44–50; 17:5–9; 18:4–7). The original audience of Hebrews experienced repudiation and harassment when they first came to trust in Jesus:

But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. (Heb. 10:32–34)

Persecutions such as these—public ridicule and humiliation, imprisonment, unjust seizure of property—were not unusual in the first Christian centuries, nor have they been down to the present (Matt. 5:10–12). Hebrews 13:12–13 suggests that, for these Jewish Christians, such hostility was associated with their expulsion from synagogues and banishment from the wider Jewish community.6 Jesus himself “suffered outside the gate” of Jerusalem (13:12), not only geographically but also socially, ostracized from the Jewish community. Therefore, his followers must “go to him outside the camp,” sharing his reproach (13:13). They must embrace exclusion and deprivation as Moses did when he forfeited royal privilege in Egypt and instead chose mistreatment with God’s people—“the reproach of Christ” (11:26; see 11:24–26).

In addition to the loss of acceptance, freedom, and property, their very lives were, or could soon be, at risk. Although their “struggle against sin”— to persevere in faith—had not reached the point of bloodshed (12:4), they had witnessed “the outcome” of previous leaders’ faithful patterns of conduct (13:7).7 The direction to “remember” those leaders suggests that their lives had ended, possibly by martyrdom. If martyrdom was looming, these believers especially needed to hear that God’s Son became human to set free those who had been enslaved by the fear of...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.8.2024
• Reihe/Serie: New Testament Theology
• Verlagsort: Wheaton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Schlagworte: Arminian • Bible study • Biblical • Calvinist • Christ • Christian Books • Church Fathers • Commentary • Doctrine • Faith • God • Gospel • hermeneutics • New Testament • Old Testament • Pastor • Prayer • Reformed • Student • sufficiency of jesus • Systematic Theology • Theologian
• ISBN-10: 1-4335-7556-6 / 1433575566
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-7556-3 / 9781433575563