Many of you are familiar with the book A Long Walk to Water, which is a children’s book about the early life of Salva Dut. Dut was born in 1974 in southern Sudan. At age eleven the Sudanese civil war reached his home. He was at school when soldiers arrived. The teacher told the students to flee, and they did. He ran into the bush and eventually reached a refugee camp in Ethiopia. He lived there for six years until civil war broke out in Ethiopia. Fleeing again, he led 1500 boys on an 18 month journey to Kenya, where they reached the Kakuma Refugee Camp. 500 of the boys died on the journey. He was one of the Sudanese “Lost Boys”. In 1996 he received sponsorship from a family in Rochester and moved to the United States. After settling in he enrolled at Monroe Community College and worked three jobs to pay for his education. He eventually founded Water for South Sudan in order to help stabilize people’s lives in rural Sudan.
I think Dut’s story helps us to understand a very important point in the passage we read from Hebrews we read today. That point is that God is stable, consistent, and reliable. I suspect that’s something we take for granted, but should not.
Let’s go back to life in a refugee camp for a couple minutes. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to live like that. You’re displaced from your home for an indefinite amount of time, or perhaps permanently. You were forced to leave by forces beyond your control; probably a civil war or an invading army. You lose not only your home but you also lose all the security that you have built for yourself. No more job, possibly permanent loss of any real estate owned, possibly no more retirement savings, investment portfolios, or any of the things we do to secure our lives. You’re adrift for an indeterminate amount of time, and any possible return to your old life is not at all within your control. Perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to resettle in a new country. But then you’ll have to start life all over again, and possibly learn a new language. Or perhaps you’ll spend the rest of your life in the refugee camp. That’s a bleak outlook for life. It is especially bleak if you’re a child or young adult.
In some ways, Salva Dut was lucky. He’d shown to the leaders in the refugee camp that he was intelligent, conscientious, hard-working, and had an agreeable personality. He was picked out among thousands to come to the United States. Any young person who lacks skills or intelligence will most likely spend their entire lives imprisoned in a refugee camp. They’ll have no freedom, poor education, no jobs, no hope; and perhaps worst – no real meaning to their lives. That’s bleak. But reverse the situation. Look at it from the perspective of a nation receiving refugees for permanent resettlement. How can any nation accept great numbers of people who have low skill levels unless the country can provide jobs, housing, and a whole lot of support?
Refugees are often at the mercy of endlessly shifting national and international dynamics.
Let’s be sure we’re thankful for the relative stability in our own lives. And let’s also be thankful for the absolute stability we have from God.
It is that absolute stability from God that the author of Hebrews wants us to put in our hearts. For, what if our faith lives were just as chaotic and unpredictable as a life in a refugee camp? What if God was fickle? What if God changed his mind from time to time on a whim? What if God were a great scientist and all of us are just lab rats God is running experiments on?
That may all sound ridiculous to us, but it would not have been to ancient peoples. In the Babylonian creation myths there was the idea that humans were created to be the servants and slaves of the deities. In ancient Greek mythology the gods were an unpredictable bunch whose lives would make for a great soap opera. People were trying to manipulate the gods to have their favor. The gods were manipulating each other. There was duplicity and lying. The gods were fickle. They would change their minds and change their loyalties.
I suppose it was a way in which the ancient Greek religions could explain the chaos and unpredictability of life, but it would be a horrible way to live if it were true. The ancient Greek gods acted a lot like poorly behaved humans and they were always trying to one up one another.
I’m not certain how the average person in ancient Greek society lived out their religion. And I’m not certain the average person in ancient Greek society actually believed all the myths about the gods. I do know that those who were highly educated thought it was all nonsense. I suspect the average person didn’t believe it all either, but they would still do things to earn the favor of the gods because they believed they’d provide protection from other forces; like chaos and random chance.
It is into this environment that the ancient Jews carried their beliefs that there was one and only one God. There were no others. And that this only God had created all things, and that nothing came into being without God.
Also, that God created humans in God’s own image. Humans were created to be in relationship with God, and that was a relationship that was distinctly different from God’s relationship with the rest of the created order. Also, that people were created basically good. Human failings were an aberration of God’s good design.
God was solid, consistent, and dependable. God did not play games with people.
All of that sounds correct to our ears. But the author of Hebrews knew it created a problem. (We hinted at this a couple of weeks ago.) If God is solid, consistent, and dependable, then how can Jesus come in and claim that the path to salvation is now fundamentally different? How could it be that right relationship with God used to be based on temple sacrifices and rituals but now it is based on believing that Jesus of Nazareth was God come to life?
When we look at it that way it is concerning! The two approaches are radically different. Was there something wrong with the old way? If there was something wrong with the old way then why did God create it in the first place? Shouldn’t God have known from the beginning that it would have problems? Has God changed his mind? And if God has changed his mind, then will God change his mind again?
Is a life of faith with God any different than life in a refugee camp, where outside forces keep changing reality? If it is the same, then best you can do is to try your best to keep up, and ultimately hope that somehow, someway, you will actually be saved.
When Hebrews talks so much about the temple system like we read last week, and when it talks about the tabernacle system like we read this week, it is teaching us that God is indeed solid and dependable and consistent. Our faith is secure.
The change from the tabernacle to the temple was not a huge one. Basically the same systems were in place. The tabernacle system had been set up when Moses was the leader because the people were in their wilderness journey. Once they’d reached the Promised Land and established homes and eventually a government, then the temporariness of the tabernacle was replaced with the permanence of the temple.
And now, in order to make the shift from the temple to Jesus God has not rejected the temple system. God has not rejected the old religious laws. Remember, in Matthew 5:17-18 Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not on stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
So, the religious laws stay. God had not made a mistake in creating them, and God had not somehow changed his mind. Instead, the old religious laws were a forerunner of what God had in mind all along. And now, in Jesus they are not abolished but fulfilled.
All of that means that if the way to right relationship with God has changed it is not because God has changed any requirements. It means that in Jesus God has fulfilled them, without our need to work.
So, God is consistent, solid, and dependable.
All of this is good news. A life of instability as found in a refugee camp is bad. But even our relatively stable lives are susceptible to chaos, chance, and the bad decisions of ourselves and others. Through it all God stays constant. God’s love, grace, and forgiveness are with us always.
This is excellent news for us. God our creator keeps a solid hold on us whether life goes well or is hard. Ultimately we know that we are saved. Eternal life will certainly be good.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Monday, August 10, 2026
August 9, 2026 Faith in the Heart Hebrews 8
Several weeks ago the Union Pacific Railroad took one of their Big Boy steam locomotives on a nationwide tour to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. It came through upstate New York and I know several of our members went to see it. I did not get a chance to see it. It is understandable why steam locomotives are fascinating to us. They are complex and you can see the complexity in motion. The wheel drive rods, eccentric rods, and valve systems are mesmerizing to watch as power is transferred to the wheels. There’s also the boiler and all its piping, the sand domes, superheaters, and turbine generators, which may or may not make sense to you, but they are all in view. Ultimately, you can see the power in motion.
Contrast a steam locomotive with a diesel or electric locomotive. Even though a diesel or electric may be equal or greater in power, there’s nothing to see. They’re relatively dull.
The same could be said for clocks. It can be mesmerizing to see the insides of an antique mechanical clock. The pendulum, escape mechanism, and gears are all in motion at various speeds and directions. But an electric clock, even if it has moving hands and a second hand, is dull. There’s nothing to see.
Keep the fascination of a smooth running mechanism in mind and imagine yourself as a Jew living almost 3000 years ago. Perhaps you live in the countryside about 30 or 40 miles from Jerusalem. You live close enough to make it to Jerusalem for the three pilgrimage holidays each year. Jerusalem is the holiest city and the temple is its holiest place. The temple building isn’t big by today’s standards, (It was roughly the size of our sanctuary and surrounded by levels of storerooms.) but it was the biggest and most impressive building you’d ever see in your life. Around it are the altar and fires, smoke, and incense. Priests and officials come and go in orderly fashion. There were holy objects: cups, basins, ladles, fire pokers, and more. Animal and grain offerings are made regularly. Special bread is made and taken in and out. The temple, the center of your faith and religion, visibly runs like smooth machinery. It is a spectacle like a large steam locomotive running today. But instead of being a means of transportation, it is the mechanism of faith at work: forgiveness, reconciliation, the practices and rituals of right relationship with God easily seen. It is a visible expression of dynamic faith.
You are not ignorant. You know full well that the temple and the system of sacrifices is not the be all and end all of faith. You know that people abuse it. You know that wealthy people can commit all sorts of sins, and then just pay for forgiveness for them with sacrifices. To a wealthy person it could be like a business calculation: it’s more profitable to do sinful things and pay the cost of the sacrifices than to just be truly good. Just like a company today may breach a contract or ignore a court order because it is cheaper to pay a large legal team to tie up their opponents in court rather than to actually abide by the law. So while you know that sort of manipulation happens, you know that is an aberration of God’s intentions. You know full well that a true and good relationship with God is based upon faith and a good heart. Still though, there is something satisfying and meaningful in seeing the mechanism of forgiveness and faith at work.
That would have been about 3000 years ago. About 2600 years ago the Jewish nation had fallen. Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. Many Jews were deported to Babylon. Many had fled to Egypt or to other lands. And the temple was destroyed. The visible core of faith and all of its smooth machinery was gone. You still believed that God is real and that God is powerful, but the visible operation of faith is absent. That’s hard.
It is into this absence that the prophet Jeremiah writes, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
Those are famous words from Jeremiah. They were quoted by the author of Hebrews in what we read today. In their original context of the destruction of Jerusalem we understand what they mean. God is reassuring the people that even though the visible mechanism of the temple is gone, it is not the end. God will do something new. In fact, it suggests that God will ultimately do something that leaves the entire temple system irrelevant.
The author of Hebrews has been using that to point to Jesus. Last week we read that Jesus is the ultimate high priest. Today we read a bit about how that works, and how it is rooted in the prophesy from Jeremiah. But therein is something ironic. Jeremiah prophesies that God will write the law on the hearts of his faithful people, and they will no longer need instruction in faith because they will somehow automatically know it. That sounds wonderful, but if that’s really the case, then why was a teaching like Hebrews written? Shouldn’t people’s natural knowledge of God make writing down any sort of teaching irrelevant? If we all know God fully from the heart without any instruction, then what’s the point of Bible reading, and teaching, and church, and sermons for that matter? I’d certainly be out of a job!
Of course that’s not what Hebrews intends. But it does get at what is the heart of faith. It is that God plants a seed of beliefs, and yearnings, and moral commitments, and life principles inside us. And then we are to live them out. We learn, we grow, we explore, and we mature what God has planted inside us; and we do it along with God.
Next week we’ll explore that more as the teachings of Hebrews continues to develop. For today, let’s connect this growth of faith from a seed planted with the mechanism of a locomotive, or a clock, or the ancient temple system.
Our brains are fascinated by things that cause wonder. And our lives want things we can see. We are curious beings and we want to know how things work. God has not put us in this life and said, “I’ve planted a seed of faith in your life, now live it out with no tangible means of what it looks like.” No, God has put us in this life and given us many things of faith to see and do.
The church is an excellent example. Ideally a church provides teaching for the growth of God’s seed of faith. A church provides rituals and mechanisms for life and for forgiveness. In the not to distant past a church was the center of all of life’s rites of passage: birth, baptism, Sunday school, first communion, confirmation, marriage, and funeral. Any given Sunday the worship service has its flow and ritual, just like the temple system. There is gathering, singing, Bible reading, preaching, prayer, and maybe baptism or communion. The sacraments of baptism and communion are special promised ways where the mechanism of faith is at work for us. We can see, hear, touch, and taste our faith in action. These are God’s gifts to us.
Faith like a diesel locomotive where there is nothing to see, or a digital clock, or a computer-generated virtual reality would be exceedingly dull. God has made the life of faith interesting and interactive. Though we may want a life of ease and comfort – and perhaps we think we’d want a faith that somehow comes into our hearts automatically and without effort – God knows better for us. God knows how to inspire us to grow, and to value excellence, and to give us integrity and honor. All of that comes to us from our God of the new covenant, the ultimate covenant for all time.
Contrast a steam locomotive with a diesel or electric locomotive. Even though a diesel or electric may be equal or greater in power, there’s nothing to see. They’re relatively dull.
The same could be said for clocks. It can be mesmerizing to see the insides of an antique mechanical clock. The pendulum, escape mechanism, and gears are all in motion at various speeds and directions. But an electric clock, even if it has moving hands and a second hand, is dull. There’s nothing to see.
Keep the fascination of a smooth running mechanism in mind and imagine yourself as a Jew living almost 3000 years ago. Perhaps you live in the countryside about 30 or 40 miles from Jerusalem. You live close enough to make it to Jerusalem for the three pilgrimage holidays each year. Jerusalem is the holiest city and the temple is its holiest place. The temple building isn’t big by today’s standards, (It was roughly the size of our sanctuary and surrounded by levels of storerooms.) but it was the biggest and most impressive building you’d ever see in your life. Around it are the altar and fires, smoke, and incense. Priests and officials come and go in orderly fashion. There were holy objects: cups, basins, ladles, fire pokers, and more. Animal and grain offerings are made regularly. Special bread is made and taken in and out. The temple, the center of your faith and religion, visibly runs like smooth machinery. It is a spectacle like a large steam locomotive running today. But instead of being a means of transportation, it is the mechanism of faith at work: forgiveness, reconciliation, the practices and rituals of right relationship with God easily seen. It is a visible expression of dynamic faith.
You are not ignorant. You know full well that the temple and the system of sacrifices is not the be all and end all of faith. You know that people abuse it. You know that wealthy people can commit all sorts of sins, and then just pay for forgiveness for them with sacrifices. To a wealthy person it could be like a business calculation: it’s more profitable to do sinful things and pay the cost of the sacrifices than to just be truly good. Just like a company today may breach a contract or ignore a court order because it is cheaper to pay a large legal team to tie up their opponents in court rather than to actually abide by the law. So while you know that sort of manipulation happens, you know that is an aberration of God’s intentions. You know full well that a true and good relationship with God is based upon faith and a good heart. Still though, there is something satisfying and meaningful in seeing the mechanism of forgiveness and faith at work.
That would have been about 3000 years ago. About 2600 years ago the Jewish nation had fallen. Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. Many Jews were deported to Babylon. Many had fled to Egypt or to other lands. And the temple was destroyed. The visible core of faith and all of its smooth machinery was gone. You still believed that God is real and that God is powerful, but the visible operation of faith is absent. That’s hard.
It is into this absence that the prophet Jeremiah writes, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
Those are famous words from Jeremiah. They were quoted by the author of Hebrews in what we read today. In their original context of the destruction of Jerusalem we understand what they mean. God is reassuring the people that even though the visible mechanism of the temple is gone, it is not the end. God will do something new. In fact, it suggests that God will ultimately do something that leaves the entire temple system irrelevant.
The author of Hebrews has been using that to point to Jesus. Last week we read that Jesus is the ultimate high priest. Today we read a bit about how that works, and how it is rooted in the prophesy from Jeremiah. But therein is something ironic. Jeremiah prophesies that God will write the law on the hearts of his faithful people, and they will no longer need instruction in faith because they will somehow automatically know it. That sounds wonderful, but if that’s really the case, then why was a teaching like Hebrews written? Shouldn’t people’s natural knowledge of God make writing down any sort of teaching irrelevant? If we all know God fully from the heart without any instruction, then what’s the point of Bible reading, and teaching, and church, and sermons for that matter? I’d certainly be out of a job!
Of course that’s not what Hebrews intends. But it does get at what is the heart of faith. It is that God plants a seed of beliefs, and yearnings, and moral commitments, and life principles inside us. And then we are to live them out. We learn, we grow, we explore, and we mature what God has planted inside us; and we do it along with God.
Next week we’ll explore that more as the teachings of Hebrews continues to develop. For today, let’s connect this growth of faith from a seed planted with the mechanism of a locomotive, or a clock, or the ancient temple system.
Our brains are fascinated by things that cause wonder. And our lives want things we can see. We are curious beings and we want to know how things work. God has not put us in this life and said, “I’ve planted a seed of faith in your life, now live it out with no tangible means of what it looks like.” No, God has put us in this life and given us many things of faith to see and do.
The church is an excellent example. Ideally a church provides teaching for the growth of God’s seed of faith. A church provides rituals and mechanisms for life and for forgiveness. In the not to distant past a church was the center of all of life’s rites of passage: birth, baptism, Sunday school, first communion, confirmation, marriage, and funeral. Any given Sunday the worship service has its flow and ritual, just like the temple system. There is gathering, singing, Bible reading, preaching, prayer, and maybe baptism or communion. The sacraments of baptism and communion are special promised ways where the mechanism of faith is at work for us. We can see, hear, touch, and taste our faith in action. These are God’s gifts to us.
Faith like a diesel locomotive where there is nothing to see, or a digital clock, or a computer-generated virtual reality would be exceedingly dull. God has made the life of faith interesting and interactive. Though we may want a life of ease and comfort – and perhaps we think we’d want a faith that somehow comes into our hearts automatically and without effort – God knows better for us. God knows how to inspire us to grow, and to value excellence, and to give us integrity and honor. All of that comes to us from our God of the new covenant, the ultimate covenant for all time.
Monday, August 3, 2026
August 2, 2026 God’s Commitment to You Hebrews 6:13 – 7:10
Science class in middle school and high school can be fun. You explore the basics of physics and do all sorts of cool experiments. Even backwater schools like the one I went to had a Newton’s cradle with the five balls suspended on strings that bounced back and forth. You could test the idea of conservation of momentum. You might have done an experiment to test the acceleration rate of gravity. There were basic chemistry experiments where if you carefully measured all the ingredients you’d get a predictable reaction; perhaps something would foam up, or precipitate out. (Somehow there were never chemistry experiments about how to make explosives, which would have certainly caught the interest of my classmates and myself.)
Basic chemistry and physics classes in college were the same. They made it appear as if the world worked in precise predictable mechanical ways. Science could describe everything perfectly.
But then there were more advanced science classes. Things didn’t work so predictably. In civil engineering I remember studying different soil types and testing their stability. The results could be erratic. I remember someone asking the professor in a foundations design class how you build a building or bridge on such instability. He replied, “You design with a factor of safety of 5 to 7 and then you just hope it stands!” We didn’t like that answer. Complex science and engineering in the real world gets messy.
And if you truly push science to its limits you eventually get into quantum physics, where none of the rules seem to apply anymore.
The world is an immensely complex place. At every moment there is an immeasurable number of forces at play – more than any computer model can ever factor in completely. We can often usable information from these things for the purposes of engineering, but they are still woefully incomplete.
Many people want proof for God. I certainly get asked that plenty of times as a pastor. It is understandable. God is the ultimate mystery and we want to know more. The problem is that people want scientific proofs for God that fit into the simplicity of middle school science. They want to do a simple experiment that reliably shows some supernatural force is at work, or existent. But the world doesn’t work that way. Many people get frustrated or scared. They just walk away from belief in God because it cannot be proven simply.
It is important to respect all of that. I understand. People say that if there is no scientific proof of God then the whole concept of God is suspect. But they have to realize they are inadvertently expecting God to exist within the same simplicity that they had in middle school. While Newton’s cradle is a simple cool demonstration, the God who created this immeasurably complex universe will never be confined to such simplicity.
The book of Job in the Old Testament does an interesting thing as Job questions God and complains to God about unfairness in the world. In Job 38 God questions Job asking if Job has the power to create or shape the earth, or understand its creatures, or to control the weather. If Job can demonstrate that he has the power and the intellectual complexity then maybe Job can understand God. But Job does not have that power, and thus the full nature of God will forever be beyond the fundamental limitations of Job and all humans.
That is all a lengthy way to get at our passage from Hebrews for this week. Hebrews 6 and 7 talks about Jesus being a high priest after the order of a guy named Melchizedek. Melchizedek is called the King of Salem and a priest forever; and without parents or genealogy.
What Hebrews says about Melchizedek, and the way it relates him to Jesus, stretches our logic. Last week I invited you to watch a YouTube video about all of this and I sent out an email with the link. I suggested that because the reasoning is fascinating, although obscure; and because I didn’t want to spend today’s entire sermon talking about the intricacies of the argument. Biblical scholar Alexander Purdy calls the passage, “thoroughly uncongenial to modern modes of thought.” (Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 11, Pg. 657) Which, is just a fancy way of saying it is confusing. If you didn’t watch the video, I suggest that you do. If you did watch it, then I hope it helped to make our passage from Hebrews something more than “thoroughly uncongenial to modern modes of thought.”
We want to take the passage to its next step, which is what its original readers would have done with it. It is about the trustworthiness of God. In what we read from Hebrews last week we learned that the hearers of the message were having some faith struggles. Some were falling away. Some were questioning. Some had doubts. Why wasn’t faith working in a simple, understandable, straightforward, logical way? Despite the messiness of faith and life, the author of Hebrews wants to get across the absolute trustworthiness of God. God has gone all the way to give that assurance. God has sworn by himself, as the story of Abraham in Genesis states. God could do no more than that, and that is the ultimate ground of confidence in God’s dependability.
But that’s still messy, and it doesn’t actually prove anything about God’s dependability. So what if in an ancient text about Abraham (of questionable historical reliability) God swore an oath to Abraham? Who cares? It doesn’t mean anything for then (or even for today for that matter). All of this can go round and round and round and end up nowhere.
The author of Hebrews knows all of this. He also knows Greek philosophy well. That may help us get our head around these proofs that just go in endless circles. The ancient Greek philosophers not only wanted to understand things, they wanted to know how they understood things. How do you know what you know?
How do you know something? Did someone tell you? Did you read about it? Did you experience it first hand? If you experienced something first hand, how do you know your observation was complete? Was there more than meets the eye? Were there factors at work that you missed or chose to ignore?
The ancient Greeks realized that knowing something -beyond the most basic things- gets pretty complicated too. Just about everything in this world gets complicated when you start to dig into it.
And so, what can you trust? Can you fully trust history? Is history not an interpretation done by someone else? Can you fully trust experience? But experience is limited and there are often many factors in other situations. Can you trust your logic and reason? But logic and reason can easily be warped by ignorance and fear. Can you trust science? Remember, even scientific discoveries are made by people who are funded for their research. And with the funding comes an agenda. Governments, corporations, and universities do not fund science that isn’t going to give some sort of useful return to them.
The author of Hebrews would argue that everything we humans think we know is suspect and prone to error. Therefore no human knowledge is absolutely trustworthy. There must be a surer ground for confidence than what we failure-prone humans can perceive. He argues that surer ground is God. And, if God is to be known, then God must have chosen to reveal himself in that way.
Now, we’ve still gone nowhere in the circles of logic, but Hebrews has made its point. The only sure and certain knowledge that can ever be obtained about anything can only be about God and come from God. Therefore, God is ultimately and always absolutely trustworthy.
That probably still leaves us with more uncertainties than we’d like. That leaves us still wanting more proofs than we currently have, and are likely to ever get.
But remember what we read about God earlier in Hebrews. God’s ultimate revelation, and the most trustworthy way of understanding God, is Jesus. And Jesus was perfected, not by being superior but through suffering. The suffering Jesus is now in God’s presence -in the Holy of Holies- working for us to perfect us; incomplete. Confused, messy as we are.
And so, even as our knowledge of God is as limited and imperfect as it is, and even as our trust in God is apt to waver, and even as we are likely to doubt and question; even in all of these failings, Jesus, the perfect one, is trustworthily laboring on our behalf. That is not our work. That is not our own effort or righteousness, but Jesus’ own righteousness.
These chapters of Hebrews may confuse us. The logic is, at best, weird. But the purpose is for us to have confidence in the midst of our uncertainties and live in trust of the absolute God.
Basic chemistry and physics classes in college were the same. They made it appear as if the world worked in precise predictable mechanical ways. Science could describe everything perfectly.
But then there were more advanced science classes. Things didn’t work so predictably. In civil engineering I remember studying different soil types and testing their stability. The results could be erratic. I remember someone asking the professor in a foundations design class how you build a building or bridge on such instability. He replied, “You design with a factor of safety of 5 to 7 and then you just hope it stands!” We didn’t like that answer. Complex science and engineering in the real world gets messy.
And if you truly push science to its limits you eventually get into quantum physics, where none of the rules seem to apply anymore.
The world is an immensely complex place. At every moment there is an immeasurable number of forces at play – more than any computer model can ever factor in completely. We can often usable information from these things for the purposes of engineering, but they are still woefully incomplete.
Many people want proof for God. I certainly get asked that plenty of times as a pastor. It is understandable. God is the ultimate mystery and we want to know more. The problem is that people want scientific proofs for God that fit into the simplicity of middle school science. They want to do a simple experiment that reliably shows some supernatural force is at work, or existent. But the world doesn’t work that way. Many people get frustrated or scared. They just walk away from belief in God because it cannot be proven simply.
It is important to respect all of that. I understand. People say that if there is no scientific proof of God then the whole concept of God is suspect. But they have to realize they are inadvertently expecting God to exist within the same simplicity that they had in middle school. While Newton’s cradle is a simple cool demonstration, the God who created this immeasurably complex universe will never be confined to such simplicity.
The book of Job in the Old Testament does an interesting thing as Job questions God and complains to God about unfairness in the world. In Job 38 God questions Job asking if Job has the power to create or shape the earth, or understand its creatures, or to control the weather. If Job can demonstrate that he has the power and the intellectual complexity then maybe Job can understand God. But Job does not have that power, and thus the full nature of God will forever be beyond the fundamental limitations of Job and all humans.
That is all a lengthy way to get at our passage from Hebrews for this week. Hebrews 6 and 7 talks about Jesus being a high priest after the order of a guy named Melchizedek. Melchizedek is called the King of Salem and a priest forever; and without parents or genealogy.
What Hebrews says about Melchizedek, and the way it relates him to Jesus, stretches our logic. Last week I invited you to watch a YouTube video about all of this and I sent out an email with the link. I suggested that because the reasoning is fascinating, although obscure; and because I didn’t want to spend today’s entire sermon talking about the intricacies of the argument. Biblical scholar Alexander Purdy calls the passage, “thoroughly uncongenial to modern modes of thought.” (Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 11, Pg. 657) Which, is just a fancy way of saying it is confusing. If you didn’t watch the video, I suggest that you do. If you did watch it, then I hope it helped to make our passage from Hebrews something more than “thoroughly uncongenial to modern modes of thought.”
We want to take the passage to its next step, which is what its original readers would have done with it. It is about the trustworthiness of God. In what we read from Hebrews last week we learned that the hearers of the message were having some faith struggles. Some were falling away. Some were questioning. Some had doubts. Why wasn’t faith working in a simple, understandable, straightforward, logical way? Despite the messiness of faith and life, the author of Hebrews wants to get across the absolute trustworthiness of God. God has gone all the way to give that assurance. God has sworn by himself, as the story of Abraham in Genesis states. God could do no more than that, and that is the ultimate ground of confidence in God’s dependability.
But that’s still messy, and it doesn’t actually prove anything about God’s dependability. So what if in an ancient text about Abraham (of questionable historical reliability) God swore an oath to Abraham? Who cares? It doesn’t mean anything for then (or even for today for that matter). All of this can go round and round and round and end up nowhere.
The author of Hebrews knows all of this. He also knows Greek philosophy well. That may help us get our head around these proofs that just go in endless circles. The ancient Greek philosophers not only wanted to understand things, they wanted to know how they understood things. How do you know what you know?
How do you know something? Did someone tell you? Did you read about it? Did you experience it first hand? If you experienced something first hand, how do you know your observation was complete? Was there more than meets the eye? Were there factors at work that you missed or chose to ignore?
The ancient Greeks realized that knowing something -beyond the most basic things- gets pretty complicated too. Just about everything in this world gets complicated when you start to dig into it.
And so, what can you trust? Can you fully trust history? Is history not an interpretation done by someone else? Can you fully trust experience? But experience is limited and there are often many factors in other situations. Can you trust your logic and reason? But logic and reason can easily be warped by ignorance and fear. Can you trust science? Remember, even scientific discoveries are made by people who are funded for their research. And with the funding comes an agenda. Governments, corporations, and universities do not fund science that isn’t going to give some sort of useful return to them.
The author of Hebrews would argue that everything we humans think we know is suspect and prone to error. Therefore no human knowledge is absolutely trustworthy. There must be a surer ground for confidence than what we failure-prone humans can perceive. He argues that surer ground is God. And, if God is to be known, then God must have chosen to reveal himself in that way.
Now, we’ve still gone nowhere in the circles of logic, but Hebrews has made its point. The only sure and certain knowledge that can ever be obtained about anything can only be about God and come from God. Therefore, God is ultimately and always absolutely trustworthy.
That probably still leaves us with more uncertainties than we’d like. That leaves us still wanting more proofs than we currently have, and are likely to ever get.
But remember what we read about God earlier in Hebrews. God’s ultimate revelation, and the most trustworthy way of understanding God, is Jesus. And Jesus was perfected, not by being superior but through suffering. The suffering Jesus is now in God’s presence -in the Holy of Holies- working for us to perfect us; incomplete. Confused, messy as we are.
And so, even as our knowledge of God is as limited and imperfect as it is, and even as our trust in God is apt to waver, and even as we are likely to doubt and question; even in all of these failings, Jesus, the perfect one, is trustworthily laboring on our behalf. That is not our work. That is not our own effort or righteousness, but Jesus’ own righteousness.
These chapters of Hebrews may confuse us. The logic is, at best, weird. But the purpose is for us to have confidence in the midst of our uncertainties and live in trust of the absolute God.
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