Focal Point

Guest (Male): Today on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez.

Mike Fabarez: An ad in a national magazine said, "Listen, if you want an open-minded spiritual community where no one's idea of God is better than anyone else's, then welcome to our church." The world loves that stuff, but that has nothing to do with biblical Christianity. There is a view of God that is better than your view of God; it's the biblical view of God. And we better adopt that or we'll be in big trouble, the Bible says.

Announcer: We've all heard it said that diamonds are a girl's best friend. But can you imagine a bride who loves her wedding ring more than her new husband? Well, today on Focal Point, Pastor Mike Fabarez cautions Christians against loving rituals more than the Lord.

The author of the book of Hebrews calls us to make the distinction between traditions and the one who came to fulfill them. As we'll see, his temptation isn't unique to first-century Jews. It's also a challenge for Christians today. Pastor Mike directs us to Hebrews chapter 13 for his lesson, Realities Instead of Rituals.

Mike Fabarez: I was away for a couple days, just trying to catch my breath a little bit. While I was absent, as things would go, my family, like a lot of yours, got sick. Three of the five Fabarezes came down with it and it was not a pretty sight. All those parental lectures about keeping your hands clean that occasionally they love to roll their eyes at you, there was a little vindication. Just a sense of, "Kid, that's why I'm telling you to keep your hands washed." Keep your hands off your face and all the stuff. I know they don't like the instructions, but there's that sense when they're hugging the porcelain throne all night long that Dad's not crazy. This is important.

I wonder as I studied Hebrews chapter 13 if the original recipients of the book of Hebrews didn't feel a little bit like a kid hearing a parent over and over again lecture them about clean hands. It's almost like you've got to think the first-century recipients of this book had to think, "Come on, this is over the top. A lot of drama, a lot of harsh exhortation here." If you've been with us through the study of Hebrews, you know it is filled with some pretty strong language.

But of course, as time would tell, the first-century churches that were established by the apostles didn't all make it. This infection that the writer of Hebrews is so concerned about, called heresy or false doctrine, crept into a lot of these first-century churches and just devastated them, obliterated them. They went from churches that seemed to be places where you could find a good spiritual meal every week to this distorted church that ended up actually deteriorating under its own weight because of the infection of what the Bible calls false doctrine.

The writer of Hebrews, as God's instrument, was warning that first-century church, "Don't let that happen to you." It starts on an individual level. A church never finds its way into the stray path of apostasy unless the individuals first go there. So the writer of Hebrews gets to a place of summary. In Hebrews chapter 13 verses 8 through 16, he gives us the book in a microcosm. He says, "I've just got to remind you, this is all important stuff." After some stern and harsh warnings in the book, he says you've got to make sure you do not leave this place of biblical orthodoxy, sound doctrine. Don't let anybody carry you away into something else.

Verse number 8, as you open your Bibles, I hope that you would to verse number 8, that's where we begin. You notice that the translators, depending on your Bible translation, had problems figuring out where to put this verse. Some people put it at the end of the paragraph above it, and some people start the paragraph with it. You can read 20 commentators and they all make choices, "Which does this go with?" It seems almost out of place, but it's not because it really segues both paragraphs.

Look at verse number 7, for instance. It reminded us of our leaders who taught the word of God to us in this historic first-century context. He says, "Remember them, consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith." Then he starts with this word that is usually just extracted from the context and it says, "Jesus Christ," verse number 8, "is the same yesterday, today, and forever." While we love to look at that verse as an ontological statement about the deity of Christ, that's not the context here.

The context is coming off of the heels of teachers that they knew who hung to this faith in Christ. They held to it and he's saying it's immutable, it's unchanging. That Christ is the target of this whole book. Then he says, verse 9, "Do not let anything carry you away. Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings." Because this is what the book was all about. The historic context was a bunch of people trying to reassess where they were. They grew up as good Jewish boys and girls adhering to the ceremonial Levitical laws of the Old Testament.

Now they were embracing Christ by faith and all the ceremony was supposed to be set aside and they were struggling with all that. He says, "Listen guys, it's good for your hearts," middle of verse 9, "to be strengthened by grace and not by ceremonial foods, which by the way don't even work. They are of no value to those that eat them." They don't strengthen your heart. They might strengthen your body, but they're not helpful in the real issues that God is concerned about. Verse 10, then he speaks figuratively of an altar. "We have an altar from which those who minister at the tabernacle have no right to eat."

It was not a physical altar; it's figurative, it's symbolic of a relationship with Christ and it's a kind of altar that they don't even understand. They don't connect with. Then he gets back to what we've already covered at length, the Day of Atonement. He talks in verse 11 about the high priest who carries the blood of the animals into the Most Holy Place, the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies where the ark of the covenant is. They sprinkle this blood in there as a sin offering. That happens once a year, Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, it's called still on your Hallmark calendars.

But the bodies are burned outside the camp. That's how we know it's the Day of Atonement. It's the one sacrifice where you didn't sacrifice it there in the courtyard on the altar. You took the blood of the animal that was slain as a sacrifice, you brought it into the Holy of Holies, but you took the carcass of the animal outside the gate and that's what it says, it's got to be burned outside the camp. That's not the normal sacrifice. That's the Day of Atonement sacrifice. So Jesus, making a parallel now in verse number 12, suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood.

If that confuses you and you've been to Jerusalem and you think the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is inside the city walls, it's really not. The modern city walls include that place, if that indeed is the place where Christ was crucified, but it was outside the ancient gates and Christ was crucified, whether it's at Gordon's Calvary, the Garden Tomb area, or whether it was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre site. Nevertheless, Christ was crucified outside the city gate. The Bible is clear on that. And he says it's like those animals' carcasses that were taken outside and burned up in a very strange sacrifice.

Usually that barbecue, if you will, that religious barbecue was used to nourish the people. They ate the sacrifices, but not this one. This one was consumed wholly by God symbolically in the Old Covenant on the Day of Atonement. And so it was that Christ went outside the gate and he was consumed, so to speak, wholly by God, but the people were made holy through his blood. All symbolic in the Old Covenant as we've learned through the book of Hebrews, but not for Christ. Christ and his people are truly cleansed. They're really made right before a holy God.

Look at this figurative statement in verse 13: "Let us then go to him outside the camp." Obviously symbolic. Christ is not waiting outside the city of Jerusalem; we're not taking pilgrimages there to find him. This is a figurative symbolic statement about us going out there to him because people who were in the positions of power and influence in their day didn't care for this whole Christianity thing. The "way" was not the "way" for them. And so if you're going to go and hang with Christ and hold tightly to this immutable message of Jesus, you were going to have to, bottom of verse 13, bear some disgrace.

Go outside, bearing the disgrace that he bore. If that torques you, verse 14, just remember that if you realize that holding to Christ is going to cost you something in terms of coolness in this world, just remember that this is not our world. We're not really interested in this one. For here we don't have an enduring city. We're just passing through; we're aliens and strangers as Paul put it, but we're looking for the city that is to come. That has been a big theme in the book of Hebrews. Through Jesus, therefore, look at the symbolism here, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise.

You're being maligned because you're not sacrificing anything anymore and the writer of Hebrews says, "Oh, you are. You have a sacrifice. It's not physical and literal; you're not killing animals in a symbol or a ceremony before God, but you have a sacrifice of praise that you can continually give to God through Christ." It's the fruit of the lips that, here's an important word, confesses his name. We talk about confession usually in relation to First John 1:9, homologia, to agree with God, to say what God would say. For you to stand with Christ, the immutable message, the New Covenant message of Christ, that's your sacrifice.

Don't be carried away by strange teachings. And don't forget, by the way, to live a good life. It says verse 16 to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased. That's your sacrifice. You've cast off the ceremony of the Old Covenant because it was nothing but a schoolmaster leading you to Christ. Does that sound familiar, the book of Romans? That's what the Old Covenant was all about. The fruition of the Old Covenant was the realities of the New. As the writer of Hebrews says, the Old Testament law and ceremonies was nothing more than a shadow of the things that were to come and the realities in Christ.

Now they were taking heat for that, but he says don't move from that. Stay there. After several, five very stern warnings throughout the book, he leaves this message resonating in their mind in the last chapter: don't be carried away by false or strange teachings. Teaching in the scripture, that word is often translated doctrine, depending on your translation. I know people don't like that; they don't go to church hoping for a message on doctrine, but that's what the Bible is. It is doctrine, it is teaching. It is a body or corpus of information that is true, God's truth.

And the Bible, just to step out for a minute and look back, is all about us holding on to that message, just like the writer of Hebrews is saying to his audience. Hold to that message. Hang on to it. The problem is, though, like in their day, we've got an issue going on and that is that we are tempted to stray from that course. Here's another word we don't like, but that's all it means: the word heresy. Do you know the word heresy simply means, the root of that Greek word is choice? When people choose to step off the path and they don't hold to the immutable message of Christ.

When they choose to twist it into some kind of strange teaching and they choose to follow that path, they are in what we call heresy. They're choosing the wrong path doctrinally. And the Bible says that's of utmost importance. The writer of Hebrews would know and historically we observe that when you let that wrong thinking about God enter into your life, it's like a virus that will devastate your church, it'll devastate your family, it will devastate your life. We're tempted today to take our teaching about God in our culture and say it's not all that important.

We don't need to be so exacting, we don't have to be so particular. Do we need to really be so narrow-minded? Take for instance an ad in a national magazine that I read just this week. This is an ad for a church. Listen, if you want an open-minded spiritual community where people respect each other's beliefs—sounds good, sounds very American, very pluralistic—where no one's idea of God is better than anyone else's, then welcome to our church. World loves that stuff. That gets big ads in national magazines. Christians say, "Well, that's fantastic, we like that non-condemning, non-judgmental, non-narrow, very open."

But as Granny used to say, you can be so open-minded that your brain falls out. Did your grandma use to say that? There comes a place in our lives where we've got to realize that has nothing to do with biblical Christianity. There is a view of God that is better than your view of God; it's the biblical view of God. And we better adopt that or we'll be in big trouble, the Bible says. Anything but biblical teaching about the immutable message of Christ, the unchanging message of Christ, the Bible says is strange teaching. Don't go there, the writer of Hebrews says.

Paul said if it was needed in the first century, it will be so much more of a necessity in future generations. Here's what he says in Second Timothy chapter 4. You're familiar with this verse, just listen to it. You've heard it before: "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine." What is that? Teaching, right, accurate, biblical, truth-laden teaching. But instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. Have you ever heard that?

If it was true in the first century that we need a stern warning to keep our doctrinal hands clean, if they needed it then, boy do we need it now. And we need to know that if we think we stand, we better take heed lest we fall. The reality is we need to know that because we are human, we are susceptible to heresy. Let's put it this way on your outline, that's the whole message of the book of Hebrews: be careful. And you need to beware of our weakness for false teaching. Beware of our weakness for false doctrines.

There are so many things out there that you and I are susceptible to because of a basic human proclivity. A propensity, a pattern of our lives that makes it a natural temptation for us. Let's take a look at the first two verses, verses 8 and 9. Look at the implied concern here. Jesus Christ, same yesterday, today, and forever. It's immutable, it's unchanging. It doesn't change. You want sound doctrine, there it is. It is, as Jude put it, once for all delivered to the saints. It's where the book of Hebrews started, the finality of God's revelation is in Christ.

The problem is we're open to strange teachings. Now, that's a pejorative word, it's a negative word, but we like hearing a new take on things. That's really what the word is. Strange is the translation, but all it means is it's different. It's a different kind of teaching. Now Christ is unchanged, but there's different teaching out there about Christ that's appealing to us. Why? Because we like innovation. We like new stuff. We want the new and improved. We want the novel idea. Our hearts in our humanity are drawn to that. We want the upgrade, we want the next thing, we want the new thing.

If right now some of you are thinking, "Now wait a minute, this doesn't seem fair because the whole point in the book of Hebrews is the New Covenant and that's new and you're telling me to leave the old and embrace the new. I don't get it; that seems like a contradiction." Please understand this: everything in the book of Hebrews about the New Covenant is nothing more than pointing to the Old Covenant that looked to, predicted, and is nothing more than a portent to the New Covenant. The New Covenant is simply the resolve of the old. We call it the New Covenant, but it is the Old Covenant reaching maturity. That's all it is.

I know that may sound like double talk, but let's put it this way. You remember a couple weeks back we looked at Paul's response to his Herod, Herod Agrippa II, and he said in Acts 25:26 as he gives his defense to Felix and Agrippa, "I'm not saying anything more than the prophets have said would be true." In other words, this is simply the complement to the Old Covenant. It is what the Old Covenant was all about. The New Covenant is not some new novel idea. He says this is what the Old Covenant said.

Now, that is the newness of the New Covenant. What people want to present to us today is a new novel idea about the New Covenant. We love to add another layer of innovation to that. If you want to put it in terms of the cult groups, we'd like to add another testament to Jesus Christ. We would like to—I know that was offensive to some, but that's the reality. That's the new, strange, foreign, extra teaching. The finality of Christ cannot be added to. There's not another prophet that comes after that one-ups the New Testament.

The New Testament could be called the final testament, right? Old Testament and Final Testament. They didn't sound as good as Old Testament, New Testament, I realize, but that's the idea. It's the Old Covenant that points to the Final Covenant, the fulfillment, the fruition. Today though, we like to listen to people that have brand new ideas about God, brand new ideas about Christ. Look at how many movements within evangelicalism are based on, "Listen, I know you've never heard this before but here's a new way to look at God."

That should be in our ears strange teaching. Because we don't look forward and futurize about God; we're supposed to look back at the immutable message of the eternal Christ. That's the point of biblical New Testament doctrine. And we're supposed to see it in context of the Old Covenant that led to it. And yet how many people say, from cult leaders to the fringe movements of evangelicalism that really's become the central movement of evangelicalism, that we've got something brand new for you.

The whole emerging church movement, if you want to look at it that way. The leaders of the cults that say every creed and church denomination is an abomination to God, I've got something new for you. Beware if it's new, novel, and innovative, it's not sound doctrine. If it's the new open theism, let's just think about that, theologically astute people. We know we've got a problem because the true message is the old message, the unchanging message, and we find it here, not in the latest new idea like the Athenians in Acts 17. Remember how Luke adds one little commentary on that culture? They love to do nothing more than give themselves to discussing the newest and latest ideas.

They just want to talk about the new stuff. I know that we struggle with the old stuff, but be careful. The movements that are now prominently displayed in magazines like Christianity Today and whatever modern Christian periodical that you read, so often it is birthed from this attitude of "the old is bad and I'm going to give you a new perspective on this that you've never heard before." Trouble, problem. We should be concerned about the periodicals that represent Christianity, the historic doctrine of the New Testament. That should be our concern.

Let's grapple again with the book of Hebrews or Romans chapter 6. Let's not say, "Well, let's just sit there on a rock and understand how God might be evolving in our brains." That's not the idea of scripture. God doesn't ask us to do that; he asks us to go back to the once-for-all delivered message in scripture. Be careful because there is a lot of a contrarian spirit. Look at the emerging church for instance. Are you familiar with that? Look it up, don't look it up, whatever. Bottom line is this: it is so often led by, "Well, I've been there and I've done that, now what's next?"

"I grew up in the church and they taught the Bible and all that but come on, let's just rethink this whole thing." Rethink this whole thing? How about we continue to re-examine this thing and master this thing and become rooted and grounded in sound doctrine? That's the goal of the Christian church, not to sit around and go, "Well, let's just think about new ways to figure this out." Be careful, he says, that you're not carried away by all kinds of strange teachings because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Be careful for the contrarian spirit that so often leads the way for these folks. Or as I often quote, C.S. Lewis liked to call it chronological snobbery. Remember me saying that? There is this sense that we've got it figured out. I love these young guys and their cool outfits and their goatees—nothing against goatees, like your goatee—but these really cool guys who sit there and write these articles in these magazines about how it's just so refreshing to have this new perspective because we have really got it figured out in our day.

There is this sense of chronological snobbery, which today, here's the paradox of it all, the new cool thing is to say we can't figure it out. And we're really cool to figure out that we can't figure it out. Have you read the emerging church stuff? That's what it is. The old way, our grandparents thought they had it figured out because they're always quoting the Bible. Well, here's the thing: we can't figure it out. And we're really smart to figure out that we can't figure it out.