In Hebrews 3:14, “We come to share in Christ when our confidence and trust in him hold firm.” So what does “sharing in Christ” mean – and why is our confidence so important in experiencing it?

According to Hebrews 5, both points are answered in “the obedience Jesus learnt from what he suffered” (8), because in his obedience to God he “became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (9) and he was “designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek” (10). To share in Christ, then, is to experience both his eternal salvation and priesthood in our lives, and the confidence that gives us. And so long as our confidence remains firm we’ll continue to share in Christ’s eternal salvation and priesthood.

The key to sharing in Christ, then, is our confidence and trust in him holding firm – a lesson well illustrated in the lives of the Israelites who also experienced God’s salvation and priesthood in their lives, but even after forty years of seeing him in action on their behalf, “their hearts were always going astray” (3:9-10).

So all those amazing miracles God did to rescue them from Egypt, protect and feed them on route to Canaan, enable them to defeat fortress cities all over Canaan, and prove himself real to them again and again, didn’t have the desired effect of trusting him no matter what.

Something was missing in their lives – but what? The Holy Spirit drops a clue in Hebrews 3:7, when he says, “Today, if you hear his voice.” The point being, that no matter what temptations they faced, nasty surprises they came up against, or their own minds doing a real number on them – each day hear God’s voice above them all.

That’s what Jesus did. “Every day of Jesus’ life on earth….reverent submission” to his Father’s voice was first on the list (5:7). It was tough but “obedience became a habit no matter what he suffered” (8). 

And now it’s our turn – in our case to “fix our thoughts on Jesus,” because as an “apostle” (3:1) he’s the one God is speaking to us through (1:2). Jesus, therefore, is the one we obey, because to “all who obey him” (5:9) he shares the same confidence and trust in God that he had. 

But where did his confidence and trust come from? According to Hebrews it was “Through the eternal Spirit”….(next blog)

In Hebrews 2:10, God is “bringing many sons to glory” by “making the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.” 

It was the kind of suffering that at one point Jesus was “so crushed by distress and misery that it felt like life itself was coming to an end” (Matthew 26:38). It hit him out of the blue in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his crucifixion. It was sudden and totally unexpected too. No Old Testament prophecy had said this would happen to him, and no record of God saying anything to him personally about it either. He’d had no warning or time to prepare. 

So God put Jesus through the worst thing that happens to us humans, which is being hit by something we’re totally unprepared for that makes no sense to us – making us wonder, just like Job and Old Testament Israel, what on earth God’s up to. The Israelites’ response, however, was to “turn away from the living God,” Hebrew 3:12. Their “hearts hardened against him” (8). 

But what did Jesus do when he felt his mind was exploding and he was reduced to uncontrollable tears of anguish, and even sweating blood? His response, Hebrews 5:7, was “reverent submission.” Unlike the Israelites, Jesus prayed desperately to his Father to “save him from death” – the death, that is, of his own heart hardening. I imagine in his “loud cries” that Jesus included John 5:20, that his Father loved him and would show him what he was up to; and John 12:50, that in everything his Father commanded him to do or put him through, it was all “leading to eternal life.” How crucial it was, then, that his Father “save him from the death” of losing sight of his Father’s love and eternal purpose. 

And his Father heard him all right, because Jesus’ reverent submission in the toughest of situations was exactly what was needed to make him “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him,” Hebrews 5:9. That’s because Jesus had done the very thing himself that leads to eternal life: that in the worst possible circumstances to hit a human, he’d turned to his Father as the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. In other words, Jesus had shown us in his own life the way to go. 

But how on earth is it possible for us to follow in his footsteps? Hebrews answers that: it’s by “Sharing in Christ”….(next blog) 

According to Hebrews 5, the office of high priest – and what he does – is the key to our salvation, not us or anything that we do. That point is made clear throughout the chapter, starting in verse 1, which states that “Every high priest is selected from among men,” for the specific purpose of “representing us in all matters related to God,” the biggest “matter” to God being the high priest “offering gifts and sacrifices for sins.”

Two points here: first of all, that God does not accept us representing ourselves in our dealings with him. We can’t act in our own defence, or argue our case. Which is understandable because God does not allow sin of any kind into his presence, and we are sinners. Only the high priest God selects is allowed to represent us; and secondly, only if the high priest offers the sacrifices for sins that God requires too.

On just those two points, then, we’re already totally dependent on our high priest. We don’t get a look in at all.

God also required the high priest of his choosing to be “subject to weakness” (2). Which sounds risky, especially when we’re so dependent on him being perfectly acceptable to God on our behalf. But to represent us properly God wanted his high priest to be made of the same stuff we are so he’d “deal gently with us when we sin from lack of knowledge or stupidity” (2). It meant, then, that the high priest would be up against the same weaknesses we have, and therefore God required of him personally “to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as the sins of the people” (3). 

The high priest, therefore, had to provide a perfect sacrifice that God not only accepted on our behalf, but on the high priest’s own behalf too. And fortunately, we have “such a high priest – one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners” (7:26) who “offered himself” (27). So in himself he provided the perfect sacrifice God required. 

So again, every step of the way, and in everything that God required for our salvation, it’s all been the high priest’s doing, not ours. And there’s only one person given that “honour” and “glory” by God (5:4-5), and that is his very own Son (5) – but with no special favours given to him too, because he not only had to suffer a human death (2:9), God also required that he be made “perfect through suffering” (10). But “Why did Jesus need to suffer?”….(next blog)

When thinking of “What we do,” there’s that intriguing verse in Hebrews 4:11 which says, “Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest,” and it’s compared to the Israelites too, who didn’t enter his rest because they “disobeyed” (3:18).

So what “effort” or “obedience” on our part is required of us to enter God’s rest? Or put simply: what are WE supposed to do? 

In reply, the author of Hebrews hits us out of the blue, and seemingly totally out of context too, with verses 12 and 13. Which start with a point well documented in history, that “God’s word has an enormous effect on people. That’s because it slices right down to our innermost desires, motives, intentions and attitudes, revealing all to God who sees every bit of us in vivid detail, and we cannot hide from him either. And one day we get to meet this God who knows everything about us, out in the open, face to face.”  

Scary stuff. So we’d better put the effort in, right? But think how much effort it would take to be perfect in such a God’s eyes. Not a desire, motive, intention or attitude must be left unchecked. Every bit of his word must be followed in exact detail. Not even one thought, wish, or daydream allowed to stray into territory God wouldn’t approve of.  

Impossible? Yes, but absolutely necessary, verse 11, so that “we don’t fall into the same disobedience trap the Israelites fell into.” Is there an answer to all this, then? According to verse 14, yes there is, because it starts off with “Therefore,” the answer then being, “since we have a great high priest….let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.” 

Verse 15 then explains what that faith we profess is: it’s faith that we have a high priest in God’s presence right now, who knows every weakness we’ve got, and from his own experience as a human knows exactly what we’re up against, and he’s there on our behalf, ready to help us in any way we need. 

Our response to that is in verse 16: “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with fullest confidence, that we may receive mercy for our failures and grace to help in the hour of need.” The “obedience” and “making every effort” on our part, then, is totally trusting Jesus to do that for us now and always, because “HE is our salvation, not us”….(next blog) 

Hebrews 10:19 tells us that “we have confidence to enter into the Most Holy Place (and into God’s very presence).” And what gives us that total confidence? The last sentence in verse 19: “the blood of Jesus.” 

Verse 20 then goes on to say, that we have “a new and living way opened up for us through the curtain (into God’s very presence).” And how was this new and living way opened up for us? The last two words in verse 20: “his body.”

So, verse 22, because of Jesus’ blood (verse 19), and because of his body (verse 20), “let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.”

Any mention of “works” needed on our part? A hint in verse 22, perhaps? – that we “draw near to God.…having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.” Does that mean we can only confidently enter God’s presence if our hearts are sprinkled and our bodies washed”? Well, yes, but is it up to us to get those two things done? 

Not according to verse 21, which hints instead that all this confidence we have, and hope we have, and full assurance of faith we have, are the result of “having a great priest over the house of God.” 

In other words, it’s all his doing. He’s the one who, through his blood and his body, got us into God’s presence in the first place. Because that’s what high priests do. In Israel of old it was the high priest who did “the sprinkling (of animal blood, Leviticus 16:15-16), and the washing (of his own body, 16:4)” that God required of him to enter his presence. No sprinkling or washing by the people at all. All they did was watch the high priest in action, in hopeful trust that God would honour the high priest’s actions on their behalf. It was a total act of faith in their high priest, therefore, no works on their part required. 

Well, “we have such a high priest in the presence of God” doing the same for us (8:1-2). He “went before us, entering God’s presence on our behalf” (6:19-20). We “come to God through him and his intercession for us” (7:25), just like the Israelites of old went through their high priest and his intercession for them. But “If it’s all faith, what do we do?”….next blog)

In Jesus “offering himself unblemished to God,” Hebrews 9:14, his sacrifice also “cleanses our conscience from dead works.” 

Surprisingly, verse 9, what the author of Hebrews meant by “dead works” were “the gifts and sacrifices being offered (by the Old Testament Israelites).” Perhaps even more surprising is that, despite all those sacrifices and rituals being perfectly designed by God and strictly obeyed by the Israelites, they “were not able to clear the Israelites’ conscience.”

The sacrifices were able to make the Israelites “outwardly clean,” verse 13, so their bodies didn’t die the death they deserved, but that entire religious system was useless when it came to clearing up the consciences of the Israelites enough for them to enter freely into God’s presence (8). 

In short, therefore, that old religious system amounted to nothing but “dead works.” If it crossed the minds of the Israelites, therefore, that by putting even more effort into their religious duties it would then turn those dead works into good works that would please God enough to let them into his presence, they’d soon find out that it would not, because they were still stuck with “God finding fault with them” for their “hearts always going astray” (3:10). 

So the problem was their weak heart, which could not be cured by all those “dead works” sacrifices that only kept the Israelites alive physically. But God had made provision for that by “making a new covenant” (8:8), in which he promised to “put my laws in their minds and write them in their hearts” (10) – as well as clean the slate totally of all their past wrongdoings (12).

Not only in this new covenant, then, were the Israelites’ consciences scoured clean from the memory of all their past sins, they were also scoured clean from the pressure of doing all those “dead works” sacrifices to be good enough to enter God’s presence. And now, thanks to God giving them the heart they’d always lacked, they could, from now on, willingly and happily “serve the living God” (9:14). 

This too, then, is included in the “new and living way opened up for us into God’s presence by the blood of Jesus” (10:19-20). And it was Israel of old that played an essential part in that – in teaching us that this new living way is entirely “By faith, not works”….(next blog)

According to Hebrews 10:19-20, “We’ve been given complete freedom to go into the Most Holy Place, because the death of Jesus opened a new way, a living way” for us, so that now, verse 22, “we can come near to God with a sincere heart and a sure faith.” So, what is this “living way” that only becomes available to us through Jesus’ death? 

There’s a clue in Hebrews 2:14-15, that Jesus “by his death destroyed him who holds the power of death – the devil – to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” 

Before Jesus’ death, then, no such means of destroying the devil’s power of death existed. The devil had free rein to tempt and deceive Adam and Eve into rejecting and resisting God, the result of which – for them and anyone else the devil influenced into sin – was slavery to the fear of death, exactly as God had promised in Genesis 2:17. 

For the Israelites in the Old Testament, however, God relieved that fear of death by cleansing them of their sins through the death of animals on the Day of Atonement once a year (Leviticus 16:29-30). So the death of animals dealt with the consequences of the Israelites’ sins, but never did it stop the Israelites from sinning in the first place. The gory parade of death, therefore, just kept on going year after year. But what a way to go, when the only way of dealing with death from sin was more death, in the killing of millions of innocent animals. 

It was totally “a death way” of dealing with sin, but a solution came along in the person of Jesus, who “Unlike the other high priests (in Israel) does not need to offer sacrifices day after day for the sins of the people,” because he “sacrificed for their sins once and for all when he offered himself,” Hebrews 7:27. And that included all the sins that all the Israelites had committed; he “set them free” from the whole lot (9:15). 

Because when “Jesus entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, he obtained eternal redemption” (9:12). Never again, therefore, would sin – past, present or future – need to be dealt with by death. Jesus’ own death took care of that. This, then, is the new “living way” Jesus introduced, so that the devil no longer holds the power of death, and we’re no longer in fear of it either. 

And just as important, Jesus’ death was also the new “living way” of “Cleansing our conscience from dead works” too….(next blog)

When Hebrews 10:20 speaks of “a new and living way being opened up for us,” there must be something ‘old and dead’ it was replacing. Which it was: Hebrews pictures it as “old” and “new” covenants – the old one being “obsolete, aging and soon to disappear” (8:13), and the new one replacing it being “superior” and “founded on better promises” (6). 

Which seems odd, though, that God would set up a system with built-in obsolescence, in which “Day after day the priests did their religious duties, offering the same sacrifices over and over again, but nothing in what they did took away sins,” Hebrews 10:11.

Jesus was also recorded as saying to his Father, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them” – yet “the law required them to be made” (8). So here we have God requiring a system he didn’t like, that also made it “impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (4).

But Jesus clearly knew what was going on, because in verse 9 he said, “Here I am (Father), I have come to do your will.” And that was enough to “cancel that old system and put in place a new one,” because Jesus understood God’s will, that the only way in which we humans are “made holy is through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10).  

Jesus, therefore, perfectly fulfilled what God created the office of high priest for, to “do away with sin” (9:26) – not “by (the old) means of the blood of goats and calves, but by entering the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood and securing our redemption forever” (9:12). 

And having “offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, Jesus sat down at the right hand of God” (10:12), where he now “lives to intercede for those who come to God through him” (7:25), meaning that we can now “enter the Most Holy Place (where he is) with confidence” (10:19), and “draw near to God with full assurance of faith” (22). 

The Israelites under the “old” system never experienced this, because “the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed” (9:8), but for us “a new and living way (into the Most Holy Place) has been opened up” (10:20). 

A “new way” replacing an old way is easy to understand, but “What does ‘a living way’ mean?”….(next blog) 

In Hebrews 7:25, “Jesus is able to save completely those who come to God through him.” But why the word “completely”? 

Because there’s a comparison being made in Hebrews between two ways of dealing with guilt; one way that saves from guilt completely and perfectly, and the other that does not. And it’s a crucial difference that affects the very heart of our relationship with God. 

On the one hand, there was the Old Covenant system of “repeating the same sacrifices endlessly year after year,” which God set up to enable the Israelites to stay in contact with him despite their sins – but – it still left them “feeling guilty” (10:1-2). Their conscience still bothered them, so in their relationship with God they were never at rest. Which is why that “former (Old Covenant) regulation was set aside” as being “weak and useless,” because it “made nothing perfect (or complete)” (7:18-19). It didn’t save completely and perfectly. 

That old system did have a purpose, though, as both an annual reminder (10:3) and as “an illustration,” Hebrews 9:9, to show that all those “gifts and sacrifices being offered (and all the “various ceremonial washings” too, verse 10), were not able to clear the conscience.” 

And that was the issue, that pesky conscience that made you feel you were never really “in” with God. And that too was pictured by the high priest being the only one allowed into God’s presence on the Day of Atonement (9:7), while you and all the other Israelite tribes could only watch from a distance.

But that changed when God made Jesus our high priest, because unlike the high priests of old whose “sacrifices could never take away sins” (10:11), Jesus “entered the Most Holy Place once and for all by his own blood” (9:12) and “did away with all sin (for all time, 10:12) by the sacrifice of himself” (9:26). And topping that off – “how much morethe blood of Christ cleanses our consciences” too (9:14). 

Meaning that, unlike the Israelites, we can “enter the Most Holy Place” (10:19) and “draw near to God with total confidence” – because in Jesus’ blood we’ve been saved completely from our pesky “guilty conscience” (22). That’s because, Hebrews 10:20, what’s been opened up for us is “A new and living way”….(next blog)

In Exodus 28:29, “Whenever Aaron the high priest enters the Holy Place he bears the names of the sons of Israel over his heart.” The names were on a square breastplate with twelve precious stones mounted in gold settings, “each engraved with the name of one of the twelve tribes” (16-21). Also in “the breastplate over Aaron’s heart,” verse 30, were “the Urim and Thummim, the means by which decisions for the Israelites were made.”

On each of his shoulders the high priest had an onyx stone engraved with the names of the Israelite tribes, also set in gold, six names on each shoulder (9-12). Imagine, therefore, being an Israelite, and watching this man, with your clan name represented by its very own precious jewel, enter the one place on earth where God was present – and the crucial reason for it happening being you. 

And God made sure the high priest understood that, not only by having him carry the names of all your Israelite clans over his heart, but also in the onyx stones on his shoulders carrying all your burdens into God’s presence too. He carried the Urim and Thummim over his heart as well, which God had provided to reveal his will and wisdom to the high priest in critical matters affecting the nation (Numbers 27:21, 1 Samuel 14:41, 28:6). 

In the high priest, therefore, the Israelites could see that God knew them and loved them – in his wish to guide them through difficult times, carry their burdens, meet their needs, and view them like precious jewels. Which is exactly what God wants us to see as well, because as Hebrews 8:1 points out, “We have such a high priest” too, “Jesus the Son of God” (4:14), who right now is “at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven” (8:1) to “meet our need” (7:26). 

And what a high priest he is too, because God in his love for us has given Jesus the ability “to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (7:25). We have a high priest, then, who has us over his heart too when he enters God’s presence because, having “shared in our humanity” (2:14) and “been tempted in every way, just as we are” (4:15), he not only “sympathizes with our weaknesses” (4:15), he can also “help” us when we’re weak and being tempted (2:18). But what does “Jesus saves completely”mean?….(next blog)