HEBREWS XI. 39—40.
The passage: These people all earned a good reputation through their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised. God had provided something better for us, so that they would not reach completion without us.
However much we may want to understand rightly how the Jews were under a divine Ruler, we are often told this is only a matter of historical interest. The crisis the writer of the Epistle expected was, they say, the end of theocratic government. This view is held about equally by those who think the Jewish theocracy was real and by those who think it was merely a way of thinking natural to a Semitic people. The first say: the Jewish nation stood alone. Other nations had a general providential direction; the Jews in a special sense had a divine King, who not only fixed their births and deaths but ordered their society toward a particular end. When that end was reached, such a government was no longer needed among men. The words heard in the temple, “Let us depart,” and the events that followed, showed it had ceased, and the Canon of Scripture became its one record. The others say: in society’s infancy men needed to feel under some mysterious guidance. The Hebrews were not alone in this—every nation imagined a tutelary divinity; most, through conquest or mixture, enlarged their mythology and lost the definite sense of a Governor, while the Greeks found philosophical explanations of their early personifications. The Hebrews, separated by circumstance and rigid custom, kept the feeling longer; the priests kept it alive artificially after the nation had outgrown it, until Vespasian’s army destroyed both it and its shrine. After that the world moved on more freely, still often haunted by revived theocratic notions, but gradually freeing itself from such dreams toward a full development in which they would vanish entirely.
We can grant this second group two points where they differ from the first. Whatever made the Jewish nation peculiar, it was not that it alone recognized a divine government. Whatever made its institutions peculiar, it was not that other nations had nothing like them. Of all the institutions this writer reviews, only one was exclusively Hebrew: the sabbath. Kings, prophets, lawgivers, priests, temples, purifications, and sacrifices were found everywhere. Was there nothing in common between these things among Jews and among Gentiles? History shows that everywhere men believed the visible king must have an invisible counterpart; that some men’s words came from an inner inspiration; that law must have divine authority; that buildings must be set apart for permanent worship; that the worshipper must be cleansed of earthly pollution and must offer God what was dearest to him, even himself. Did these institutions not mean the same to the Jew? Was he sent to tell men these convictions were false and merely their own invention? No—he was sent to say these convictions are deeply true and must have come from God, but that men had corrupted them. The invisible King is not the copy of the visible one but his original; the prophet’s inspiration is wholly spiritual, not the vapor of some fountain; it is the I Am, not a wood-nymph, who teaches the lawgiver; the priest enters an unseen Presence he may not picture; the idol in the temple destroys the temple’s witness that God differs from his works; purifications must mean that the inner man approaches the living God, or they mean nothing; sacrifices must express the lower will’s submission to the true divine will, not a way of bending the higher will to the lower. The great mark of the Jew’s high calling was that he could bear this witness to the world, against its evil bent and his own. His covenant was, “In thee and thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” The clearest proof of that covenant’s reality is that he did not trample the faith of mankind but justified it, kept it from being smothered under evil, and foretold that the blessing he awaited would satisfy all nations and that Israel’s glory would light the Gentiles. Throughout he testified against the idolatries that divided the nations from the one Lord in whom they could be one. So there is no ground for thinking the theocracy would naturally pass away once the Jews’ exclusive position collapsed, as if it were bound up with that position. If it was a truth and not a fiction, it was a truth for all mankind—asserted by the cries of every people and by the very fact of Jewish separation.
If, on the other hand, it was a fiction, then like all fictions it could last only a while, and the destruction of Jerusalem was as likely an event as any to end it—one it could scarcely survive. But those who hold this must do more than repeat learned phrases—“proper to an infant society,” “kept alive past its time by priests,” “crushed by the Roman legions.” They must show by what other belief than that the unseen Lord was his King the Israelite was kept from the bondage to the senses that is thought typical of infancy, and typical of his Semitic kin—yet was not his. They must show by what other faith he could withstand the taunts of the priests and prophets of a hundred groves and high places, who called him irreligious, even atheistic, and whom he could only answer: “Whether I am religious I neither know nor care; I hold to the Covenant God made with my fathers and with me; I obey his law.” And they should consider whether the belief has ever left any living man’s heart that his personal and social life is as sacred as the courses of the planets and the round of day and night; whether that belief is not strongest in the brave and free and weakest in the base and cowardly; and whether it is not easier for a waking heart and mind to imagine nature exempt from a governing divine will than to imagine himself, his relations to others, and the course of history under such a condition.
The writer of this Epistle certainly could not bear such a thought. He had been formed in the belief that the more fully man is brought under God’s government the more blessed he is, and that to escape it is to be cursed. His conviction that the world had just received its greatest blessing did not change this belief but deepened it. He says the Patriarchs were looking for “a city which had foundations, whose builder and maker was God.” Their faith made the promise real to them, yet they did not receive it; the actual gift was kept for a later day. Indeed—and he applies this to the Jews at every stage—they without their children could not be made perfect. He urges the Christians of his day to believe they had received a kingdom which cannot be moved, and tells them the coming earthquake, which would shake not earth only but heaven, would make it plain. The natural conclusion is that our Lord’s ascension would establish some fellowship larger, deeper, and more divine than what existed before. I cannot see how these words could mean anything else to a Hebrew Christian.
He knew what he had been told of his nation’s fathers. The sense of belonging to a divine kingdom had gone with them through life; the dread of death that sometimes seized them was the fear of not finding that kingdom again in the unseen world—of passing beyond God’s order and government. Their sustaining hope was that He who is and was and is to come must reign here and everywhere, that no corner of His universe would stay outside His dominion. And now, says the writer, He whom they awaited has come—the Son over the house, the King in whom the right is. The city that hath foundations is revealed, and you have received a kingdom. His words about the past rise into poetry; his vision of present and future becomes almost rapture. Could he mean to deceive men he was preparing for terrible calamities? He surely would have deceived them if his sense of “city” and “kingdom” did not at all match what those words had meant for generations.
There is, however, a passage where he speaks of a world to come which is not subject to angels. Here, it is said, he clearly means not an earthly society but a heavenly one that men enter after death. If so, why not let this passage decide the meaning of the more doubtful ones—why not take City and Kingdom, like “World,” to mean a wholly heavenly state? I have no doubt all these words express the same idea and all mean a state strictly heavenly—one that only death can fully open to any man, since He who opened it first overcame the sharpness of death. But if that world not subject to angels is one men do not enter until death, the Epistle’s whole argument collapses. Its writer holds that by His resurrection and ascension Christ claimed for man the blessing of fellowship with the Lord of angels. In man’s earlier growth, before he had understood the highest capacities of his being and realized his true place—though God was teaching him by various means—there was reason enough for him to feel subject to angels, to think they stood between him and the Holy One. But now his privilege and duty were to deny such subjection and mediation utterly, and to reject it as treason against the Lord who had taken his nature and clothed him with spiritual glory.
You can see at once this would be worthless if one could reply: “Yes, after death we may enter such a state, but on earth, by your own account, we still remain under angelic rulers and dependent on angelic intercessors.” So the world to come the Epistle speaks of cannot answer to our ordinary idea of a future state; it must mean some order established among human beings even here—one not yet shown to be the divine order of the universe, but of which Christ’s coming was, to those who grasped it, the clear sign and cornerstone. In that sense it fits perfectly the idea of a city or kingdom to which the Jew had been trained. For he had never been taught to see the invisible world as wholly separate and far off. In daily toil, among his flocks and children, on the judgment-seat, in battle, he had sought and found God. Could it seem more perfect to him that heaven and earth should be hopelessly divided? And could this be the blessing brought by the appearing of One who was both Son of God and Son of Man, who had hallowed both and gone up on high? Would he not rather expect that the old dream of a ladder set on earth and reaching to heaven should now become firm, solid reality?
But what signs were there that such a society would rise from the ruins of the Jewish commonwealth? Every institution that heathen had received as a witness of a link between the visible and invisible worlds, and that the Jew had recognized as coming from the Lord of all, had lost its original meaning and become its opposite. The idea of a king ruling in the name of an unseen King was surely not kept alive in the Herodian princes or the tetrarchs who governed by Rome’s leave; everywhere that idea had been swallowed up in the worship of an emperor who was, in his own and his subjects’ eyes, the real King of kings and God of gods. The prophet, from whom men had asked a higher truth than they could find themselves, had become among the heathen the lying augur; in Judæa a claim to the name rested on being a more reckless assassin than one’s fellows. The Law in which the Greek had heard the Eternal Voice and on which Roman greatness had rested was now thought to depend on Cæsar’s will, while the Jew’s confidence that he held the divine Law excused every crime. The sabbath had been a main reason for calling Christ a blasphemer and putting Him to death. The priesthood everywhere seemed grounded on denying anything unseen. Abominations were set up in every temple and might soon be set up in Zion. Purification rites elsewhere had become filthy orgies—and the Jewish rulers were practicing such things even as they taught the people to shout “Crucify Him!” before Pilate. Sacrifices in Rome and Jerusalem alike were prized as ways of buying the right to sin.
If you turned instead to the Christian assemblies, there was, amid much that was discouraging, a beautiful realization of human brotherhood and devotion to an unseen object. But how would an onlooker, especially a Jew, judge their distinctive ordinances? He might say: “You keep the ceremony by which we admit Gentile converts to the outer sanctuary and call it a sufficient sign of entering God’s covenant; you have another rite that seems a love-pledge to a departed Friend; you let those He chose as apostles exercise a fatherly rule over you, and to meet the material needs of your members you have handed some of the apostles’ duties to other officers. But can such customs—created by no awful penal edict from God’s throne—make up for the loss of those sacred institutions that all nations confusedly recognized, and that we received in purity from the Lord of all, who taught us to understand them?”
One might think the writer of this Epistle had overlooked both objections. His references to distinctly Christian ordinances are rare. He assumes Christian assemblies exist, warning the Hebrew Christian not to forsake them; he mentions Baptism once or twice, perhaps the Eucharist once; that there were rulers in the Church he mentions in passing, using the vaguest possible word for them. Yet the Jewish objection to the dignity of Christian ordinances is met far more satisfactorily, for the whole doctrine of the Epistle answers it. The Aaronic priesthood rested on a formal positive law; therefore, he argues, those who held it were discontented and craved a priesthood resting not on an outward command but on God’s oath. The priesthood is only one application of this principle, though the most striking. Each institution is shown to be imperfect insofar as it was merely an institution: until its eternal ground was revealed—in Man’s relation to God, in the Son’s relation to the Father, in God’s self-affirming Being—its truth and meaning stayed hidden. Once that ground was declared, the communion of man’s spirit with God for which he had been trained would become fully possible, and whatever method divine Wisdom chose to set forth the union of Humanity with God as a fact, and to bring men into that communion, would surpass the earlier methods that had seemed merely formal and arbitrary. Granting this, the Christian could say: “Just because our ordinances have the character you describe—no legal penalties, only a few loving words of command, speaking of a relationship to One Unseen and to all His brethren, requiring the inner man’s obedience to an authority that can enforce no other—for that very reason they embody the whole mystery of the New Dispensation that law and letters could only shadow from afar. In the water our Master was owned as the Son of God and the Spirit came upon Him. We ask no other witness that the Father has made us sons in Him and given us His Spirit, no other proof that in us Jews as in heathens everything that is merely our own must be washed away. Our Master, the night He was betrayed, said, ‘This is my Body, this is my Blood. Do this in remembrance of me.’ We ask no other proof than this bread and wine that place does not separate us from Him; that we are as truly with Him now He is ascended as He was with us when born of a Virgin and dying for us; that being with Him we are united to all who own Him on both sides of death; that He can raise us to fellowship with them and Himself, and fill us with His own life, so that we give up our selfish position and our own life. We want no other ground for obeying His Apostles than that He chose them. Fatherly rule we feel to be the highest rule, speaking to our spirits, not our senses; and filial subjection the most perfect, since it is a subjection of the spirit that only the Divine Spirit can give.”
So without any exaggeration the writer could describe those he addressed as having come to the heavenly Jerusalem, joined to the company of the firstborn and the spirits of just men made perfect, standing in the presence of Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant and of God the Judge of all. Either the ordinances given them meant nothing—mere impious formalities—or they meant this: an actual fellowship between earth and heaven, a declaration that man had been brought into the condition all past discipline had prepared him for. They said the revelation of the Unseen God, longed for by prophets and kings, had been made to the covenant children; that the words “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed” were fulfilled, since the Jewish blessing, the glory of Israel—the knowledge of God—had through their seed been brought within reach of all peoples; that out of the defined national society had grown a society with no possible limit, because its basis lay in the original constitution of Man, that is, in Him in whom all things were created, in His relation to the Father whose brightness and express image He is.
The belief that such a heavenly commonwealth was already set up on earth could steady a Jewish Christian facing any collapse of the structure God had raised for his fathers and himself. It would explain at once why he need not look for a new Sinai, a new priestly order created by edict to replace Levi, or the sudden coming of an heir to David’s throne or a new dynasty to replace the old covenant kings. To expect these would show he had missed the divine purpose and the prophetic idea, or was content to live without its real fulfilment.
But did the Epistle’s doctrine also answer the other part of the question—not the supposed feebleness of Christian ordinances, but the abuse and subversion of those institutions in which both heathen and Jews had seen a proof of the Divine Presence? These still existed and would likely survive the coming judgment on the Jews. If they survived, what witness would remain on earth that they had any worth—that they were not simply the property of Oppression and Falsehood? The Jewish nation was bringing forth something larger and deeper than itself and would die in the birth. How would its child, the New Society, relate to these old social forms—stand aloof from them, destroy them, or remake them? To an unbelieving Jew or heathen the question would seem absurd: what could these tiny bodies, scarcely able to survive in their own homeland, have to do with the great kingdom of the world? How could the emperor’s policy and the vast machinery of pagan life be touched by such men, any more than by other fanatics needing the sword or a contemptuous toleration? But suppose someone then or later believed that a stone had been cut from the mountain without hands, destined to break in pieces all that opposed it—would this Epistle help him decide whether any of these old institutions could exist and harmonize with the power growing among them, and on what conditions? Let us test the question with each.
I. The Davidic king had witnessed to the nation’s permanence in an Unseen Lord; that king and nation alike were in covenant with Him and united to each other by their common allegiance to Him; against all idolatry that confuses visible things with the Invisible Lord, as destructive of national life; and against all Babylonian attempts at universal dominion as the impious effort of a creature to become absolute and independent.
These principles of the Jewish kingdom were declared by lawgivers and prophets and interpreted by the history. In them lay the undeveloped truth that One who is Son of God and Son of Man is the real Head of Humanity, and the promise that He would be shown as Lord of the universe. Among those who believed this truth had come to light, was there any place for a visible king?
If Humanity had indeed been glorified, there could be no one claiming to be king of the exclusively righteous Nation. Still less could anyone claim to be king of the world; a Roman emperor must interfere with the belief in a crucified man reigning over creatures whose nature He took, even more than a Babylonian monarch interfered with the belief in an unmanifested King on Zion. Wherever the conviction grew strong that Jesus of Nazareth was truly King of kings, it must struggle with Cæsar’s claim to that title until one gave way. But if out of that kingdom distinct nations should arise, it would not clash with the new dispensation for each to be ruled by a man confessing allegiance to the divine Son, reigning under a covenant, judging in His name, even warring against false gods somewhat as the old Jewish kings did.
Is there anything in that glorification of humanity the Epistle speaks of to make such a result impossible? Might one not rather expect that, if such a revival of national life ever happened, this would be its great sign and even its moving principle?
The Jewish prophet witnessed that men on earth can receive divine communications; that every true teacher must receive them; that only so far as he does can he understand past, present, or future, sympathize with men’s needs, or open to them God’s mysteries. In himself and his words the prophet pointed to One who would perfectly do this—declare the counsels of the Holy One, have full fellowship with men, and reveal the Father. Were those who believed this had come to say, “The prophet’s office is now obsolete; we no longer need it”? They could rightly say so of many accidents belonging to the Jewish prophet—his exclusiveness, the gradual dawning of light, the seemingly sudden and chance character inspiration had while man’s relation to God was not yet set forth. It was now also less possible than ever for any man to call himself the prophet of the world; any such claim must wrestle with the belief that the divine filial prophet had actually come, until one was overthrown. But could the truth “Man has been brought near to God; the Spirit of God has come to dwell among men” extinguish human inspiration? Could it do anything but expand and deepen it, taking it out of the realm of strange phenomena and showing it as the rightful law of all thought, feeling, and act—making it an anomaly that any gifts by which men help their brethren should seem self-produced rather than springing from and renewed in the Perfect Wisdom?
If the prophet’s office meant communication and submission between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, the lawgiver’s office meant just as clearly that man resists the divine will, that all men have tendencies toward such resistance. It declared a distinct, formal, divine punishment for transgression, that every disobedience must receive its just recompense. This penal law too came from God’s voice—here He spoke not through the creature but directly and terribly to it. The law was dispensed by the judge or king, but he could not dispense with it; he was its servant, not its master, and its sentences bound him as much as the meanest subject. Yet, as Deuteronomy shows—and it is a key to all the books and the whole history—there was always a recognized meaning in the law higher than its letter, and this meaning was its essential righteousness, mercy, and grace; it was what the true covenant-servant sought to fulfil and delighted in, the law he meditated on day and night. The terrors remained for the evil nature in him, and he used them to coerce it, knowing they would prove real against anyone who set up idols or moved his neighbor’s landmark; yet to be told there was no law, or that he was not under it, would have been the heaviest curse. How was this changed under the new dispensation, resting on One who had the law in His heart and perfectly fulfilled it? There must have been a change. Since what had been only an idea under the Jewish economy—something above positive penal law—was now accomplished in a Person, the law of life in that Person must be the highest utterance of the Divine will, and penal positive law only secondary. Man must be seen first in his true state, his relation to God, and his evil rebellious nature treated as a hateful growth to be cut off. But while that evil nature exists and shows itself in its fruits, can penal law be said to have lost its function or been absorbed into a spiritual principle? Since every distinction grows sharper in stronger light, such confusion would suit the new economy even less than the old. So if the Christian Faith ever triumphed over what upheld imperial power and became the ground of society, one would expect, along with the revival of distinct nations and sovereignties, a revival of reverence for Law as having its source in God’s unseen majesty and its force in “The Lord saith.” The deepest and most dreadful issues, as in this Epistle, would concern the abuse of spiritual privileges and rejection of the divine voice from heaven. But it would be acknowledged, so far as the Christian principle was, that the Divine Voice still speaks also in language suited to earthly minds—heard in every threat of specific punishment for specific acts against a nation’s peace; that the judge is still a divine officer to mark the bounds of right and wrong, and all civil and military authority divine instruments to uphold the one and punish the other, so that whenever these powers make unjust decrees or habitually do wrong, it is felt as a betrayal of a trust that He who gave it will come out to avenge.
The sabbath needs special attention in relation to the new economy. Its obligation to a Jew rested on a literal positive law, yet it belonged to a time earlier than all such law. As the Epistle says, it spoke of a rest accomplished and a rest not yet accomplished; of God’s rest, the rest of Creation; of man’s rest, the rest of deliverance from bondage; of man’s rest as the image of God’s; of man’s rest as perfect only when he entered into God’s rest.
By the Epistle’s teaching, the command ordaining this, like every institution, was leading toward the discovery of a Person in whom its meaning was fulfilled—One in whom God and Man meet and are reconciled, in whom both may rest. Did the institution lose its meaning for those who believed this Person had come? As always, once the ground of a precept is known, the precept cannot be urged as bare authority apart from its ground. To keep a mere creation-sabbath simply because the command requires one is to ignore the reason the command itself gives. So some change must be expected here, or it would stand as an unexplained anomaly. But could anyone claim that the relation of work to rest, shown in the sabbath’s relation to the six days—so hard for the Gentile world to grasp, as its whole mythology and philosophy show—had ceased to exist or needed less to be woven into human life than before? Could anyone say that, because the meaning of man being made in God’s image was now revealed, the idea of man’s rest and work as images of God’s had lost its point or needed less expression in practice? Could it be argued that, because Christ had glorified poverty, the poor man’s rights that this ordinance so blessedly asserted, and tied to what is most divine, need no longer be put forth so plainly, or the method no longer be counted divine? Could it be said that, because Christ had fully entered God’s rest, that rest should no longer be felt by the weary and oppressed as a reality breaking through their ordinary experience?
V. That same entering of the Son of Man into God’s perfect rest, which substantiates the sabbath, also substantiates, by this Epistle, the idea of the Priest. The Jewish High Priest represented the holiness of the separated, sanctified nation; he was divinely chosen to his rank as the nation was chosen to its. His was a family designation, since all Israel was a family; he headed a body of priests, all consecrated by formal ceremony—he representing the nation as a whole, they its individual members. He drew near to God in the nation’s name, offering its sacrifices, setting its greatness and holiness not in itself but in Him who had taken it into covenant. Yet in all these respects, the Epistle teaches, the office was imperfect. Its designation was merely legal, not a sign of any direct relation between priest and Lord of all. It was tribal, not universal; at best he represented a nation’s purity, not humanity’s. He only represented that purity, not showed it forth; he had to offer for his own sin as well as the people’s, so he was not truly one with them—sin cut him off from them and from God. He did not actually enter God’s presence; the temple’s arrangement showed the veil could be drawn back only at set times. Suppose, then, the faith took hold that a filial Priest had appeared, with the highest designation, representing all humanity, perfectly pure, perfectly sympathizing with men, seated at God’s right hand—what place would remain for priests on earth? We must answer: if the Epistle’s argument means anything, for a High Priest there could be no place. Anyone claiming to be the Priest of the Universe would clash not with some accident of the New Dispensation but with its primary idea, the thing that had been unfolding for ages; such a claim, however disguised, must fight the principle it opposes until one is overthrown. Even if the attempt to set up a mortal High Priesthood began from an earnest wish to make the Invisible Priesthood more real to men, and even if it seemed to do so, hidden in it—to appear one day—would be the denial of a real relationship between man and God. From it would come the degrading of man’s spiritual rights, subjection to creatures, and all the evils the writer saw threatening the Palestine Christians. It would mean the loss not only of the Christian idea of priesthood but of the Jewish one—the formal adoption of the heathen notion, which the heathen himself resisted as a corruption, that the priestly order is separated from humanity rather than its representative, not the head of a kingdom of priests but someone to be admired precisely because he is wholly unlike ourselves. From the world’s experience alone we might guess this principle, rooted in man’s nature, would assault Christianity; from the Epistle alone we can say what the effect would be if it prevailed. But are we therefore to say the idea of priests on earth is impossible—men who witness of the ascended filial High Priest, of the real relation between God and man, of Humanity’s spiritual glory; joined as an order through the generations, yet without tribal limit, resting not on a carnal command but on the gift of the divine Spirit; declaring that the oil of gladness is not theirs alone but flows from the head to the skirts of the garment, and that the gifts they receive for helping their brethren show that all such gifts, given to any class for any work, have the same source? Would such an order clash with any maxim of the new economy—with the heavenly character of the Head, the privileges of the body, or the distinctness of any member? Would they have only a figurative right to the name of priests? In what one mark of the office would they be lacking, except those that belonged to an imperfect age, or that one property which is His alone and apart from whom they are nothing? Should we not rather think that if the priestly idea dropped out of Christian thought, the sense of what mankind gained by Christ’s ascension would vanish too; that if it were limited to Him who alone fully realizes it, belief in His union with His brethren would weaken; that if it were claimed only by the whole Christian body, belief in that body’s unity in its parts and as a whole would evaporate, leaving only a vague blessing for each person, enough to raise him in his own esteem but not to assure him he may draw near to God with a pure heart?
It must have deeply moved a Palestine Jew when this letter was written to reflect: “This temple made with hands is about to perish—He said so who glorified it and called it His Father’s house. We know His glorified Body is the great Temple of all, and that we are spiritual temples in which He promised to dwell. But suppose the earth is not at once destroyed, and buildings still go on being raised—will those who receive Christ’s gospel be barred by their faith from raising temples to the Unseen Majesty of heaven and earth?” Again the Epistle seems to settle the answer. A temple that means, as the Jewish one did, that the veil between men and God is not withdrawn, binding men to a figurative worship and teaching them that God lies hidden somewhere in the forms of nature and art rather than embodied in a man, would be at odds with the Christian revelation. And because that temptation lies near men’s hearts and kept reappearing in Jewish and heathen life, it was not unreasonable that Christian men might for a time be turned from outward forms and their link with the invisible, or at least held back from elaborate efforts to express their awe of one through the other. But since the imagination, blocked in one direction, tends to run wild in another—playing as mischievously with intellectual as with sensual shapes—such a restraint, needed for a time, might not continue. The Jewish temple, far from leading to idolatry, had been its great witness against it: animal and earthly forms had been redeemed and dedicated to the Unseen God so they would not be honored in themselves; the setting apart of a building signified that God is not a presence in earth or air but a living Person. Such a testimony might be needed as much in the new time as the old. The belief that Christ redeemed the earth by dwelling on it proved no part of it was unholy, but not that no place might be set apart as a witness of its holiness and a mark of His dominion. His going into the unseen world might show men were not to dwell among visible things, but not that visible things could not be turned into tokens of the invisible, drawing men away from themselves. He had spoken in parables from nature and then promised to show men plainly of the Father: this might prove the purely spiritual vision is the highest and best, a blessing the poorest saint may reach sooner than the most learned—but not that He would not hereafter give His servants, as of old, the power to translate the language of earth into that of heaven, making wood and stone testify of the Holy and Infinite Presence and of man’s ascent into it, as once they testified to Greek minds of the human and finite and of men’s power over it.
Tomorrow the Church will speak of One who was presented pure to God in the substance of our flesh. Here is the realization of the idea of purification that took various forms under the Old Economy. Some of those forms were plainly suited to an Eastern people’s education, beautifully blending moral training with the removal of physical evil and care for bodily health. To make these universal would set aside the idea of a dispensation for all peoples; to treat them as sacred merely because a divine Lawgiver gave them would exalt law above its own end, against the Epistle’s maxim. To use any outward purification merely to mark the conscience’s need of cleansing, without showing that cleansing could be truly effected by a divine process, would destroy the difference between the two economies. To use outward for inward purifications would restore not the Old Economy but the pharisaical version of it. And to teach that any purification could make men pure in themselves, apart from Him in whom man’s purity dwells, would deny the central truth of the New Testament. But the Palestine Jews had been taught in practice that an outward act of purification was the entry into the Christian family. This act had every mark of universality, intelligible to all peoples. Its accompanying words showed it spoke of nothing legal but of adoption into a filial covenant; of nothing external but of service to an Unseen Lord; of nothing merely future but of a purity already won for men in Christ; of nothing unreal but of the cleansing of heart and conscience from the corruptions of world, flesh, and the Evil Spirit, worked by the indwelling of a Divine Spirit. To suppose this token of an accomplished, continuing blessing—gathering up the whole aim of the Old Economy and the great revelation of the New—could ever become obsolete would be to suppose that every dark dream of heathenism and every imperfect notion of Judaism would be allowed to prevail against the truth that came to satisfy the one and disperse the other. Such dreams might return—probably would—but in every age this simple rite of Baptism, read by the words of Scripture, would prove the great barrier against them.
I have been led without meaning to into the Epistle’s next subject—the Covenant. It would misuse language to call this a Jewish institution; it was rather what explained all the institutions and assured the Israelite they were truly divine. Believing in it, kings, priests, law, sabbaths, temple, purifications were all precious beyond words; losing faith in it, all became dreary formalities, dead letters, mere temptations to idolatry or self-glory. In Ahaz’s day, forgetting the Covenant was the sin, leading to Syrian idols and distrust of God’s care for David’s house; in Zedekiah’s day it led to the wilful confidence that Nebuchadnezzar’s armies could not destroy the city; in our Lord’s day it led to a feeling that God could not really show Himself to His creatures, that He was far off—to theories about Him instead of faith in Him, to sects instead of national fellowship, to failure to recognize the true King, to the cry “We have no king but Cæsar!”, and so to ruin and destruction. Now the Hebrew Christians are told in this Epistle that the Old Covenant has passed and a new one has taken its place, of which they are heirs. Two questions then arise about themselves and all later Christians: how is this Covenant different from the Jewish one, and will forgetting it have the same effects? To the first they could answer at once, if they understood the Epistle’s doctrine: a covenant of sonship differs from one of servitude, and adoption is better than mere election. Circumcision cuts us off directly from other nations, and only by implication from our evil natures; in baptism the main thing is separation from the evil nature, and only incidentally from any other people. Circumcision was Jewish, baptism is human; circumcision marked the males of one country as the Lord’s subjects, baptism marks men, women, and children of all countries as adopted into one family, sealed with the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
To the second question the Epistle’s warnings replied even more decisively. The Jewish Christians are reminded again and again that their sin was essentially their forefathers’—the sin of distrust, of not believing they had been taken under God’s government and that He was really in fellowship with them. But the degree of wrong and danger differed greatly. To disbelieve in the heavenly Covenant was worse than disbelieving the earthly; to deny their birthright in the divine kingdom was to throw away a blessing far greater than Esau’s; not to claim citizenship in the New Jerusalem was an exile beyond any comparison with that of those who gave up circumcision and the Law to be like the heathen around them.
So if the tendency to forget the Christian Covenant—which appeared so early—should in some form mark the Church in every age, now tempting men to make it less broad, now to empty it of spiritual reality and reduce it to a form, now to treat its sign as something in itself apart from Him who gave it, now to make its worth depend on human acts or feelings, now under some pretext to shut baptized men out of its privileges and responsibilities—then from Scripture’s hints we must expect all other evils—superstition, relapse into Judaism and heathenism, party spirit, godlessness—to follow in the train of this sin; that divine judgments would often bring men to feel it; and that, since it contains the principle of apostasy, apostasy would be its final issue if the warnings went unheeded.
- Following the Epistle’s order, we come at last to sacrifices—a subject closely tied to priesthood yet treatable on its own. Remember that the Jewish notion of sacrifice is not only in the daily offering or the yearly atonement. Every Jew was regarded as a sacrificed man. The firstborn, the chief of a man’s strength and the family’s representative, was formally devoted to God and formally redeemed from death by giving up an animal. Sacrifice, then, was not merely a remedy for transgression, an anomaly. It was seen as the true state of a creature in covenant with God. By entering that covenant he gave himself up; the sign of death was set on him; he held his life only on reprieve, though it might last seventy years or eighty. Every daily animal offering renewed the confession that death was his natural condition, from which God was keeping him. Every offering for a particular sin acknowledged he had departed from the true state of an Israelite, broken from allegiance to the King and union with the members, and asked to be restored—a witness that giving up what caused the separation is necessary to restoration.
The Perfect Sacrifice realized this idea in both aspects. He offered Himself as a Son, because His delight was to do the Father’s will in human flesh, as it had been before the worlds. He offered Himself for transgressions, because the creatures whose nature He bore, instead of delighting to do His will, had rebelled and lived to themselves. How, then, would those who believed this atonement made think of sacrifices afterward? Animal sacrifices could not stand now the human Sacrifice was offered; figurative sacrifices had been lost in the real one that took away the sin of the world. There might be new attempts to put the figure in place of the reality, the imperfect for the perfect. Since the flesh strives so hard against the Spirit, and man tries so hard not to be a receiver, such devices of a conscience deluding itself could well be predicted. From these untruths others must follow—fearful confusions of the spiritual with the sensible, perhaps even of the thing offered with Him to whom it is offered. Such contradictions, if they appeared in Christian doctrine or worship, would have a long and desperate struggle with the principle they disturbed, until it cast them out. But what would they have to fight, if not the principle of Sacrifice in its highest form?
Must not that idea reach even more deeply into this dispensation than into the old? Must not the presenting of the one real perfect Sacrifice to the Father, and the continual thanksgiving for it, be the central act of all worship and all fellowship among men? Must not the offering of the worshipper’s own soul and body as living sacrifices be the necessary fruit of that act, giving meaning to every service, from the greatest to the meanest? Must not a return to Jewish and heathen notions of sacrifice, with their dark superstitions, be the reaction against a mind that undervalues sacrifice? And must not that mind at last destroy the very idea of communion between heaven and earth, and between man and man, replacing the creed and practice of the Gospel with those of unmitigated selfishness?
With these hints gathered from this Epistle as our guides, we may venture on the difficult problems the Church’s history presents, trusting that even if we do not solve them all, we shall at least learn to draw a clear line between what is God’s work and what, however closely mixed with it, springs from an evil, counterfeit, destructive principle.