Hebrews, Part 4 of 6

[00:00:00] Shall we begin with a word of prayer? We thank thee, our dear Father in heaven, for thy great love for us. We thank thee so much for the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray that thou will bless us as we look into a portion of thy word again tonight. We thank thee for the ministry of thy Spirit to us, and we pray that thou will keep us all in the straight and narrow way through Jesus Christ our Lord with thanksgiving. Amen. [00:00:34] Now we've looked at three themes so far. The superiority of Christ in the first several chapters, superior to the prophets, 1.1-3, to angels, 1.4-2.18, to Moses, 3.1-4.13, Secondly, we saw past, present, and future rest. This theme runs from 3.7 to 4.13. In the third study, we saw Christ as our great high priest and how adequate and how marvelous he is. [00:01:15] Now tonight we look at the glory of the New Covenant and we see the superiority of Christ to the Levitical priests and we come to a good understanding, we hope, of how Christ belonged to what the writer calls the Order of Melchizedek. This is one of the less clear themes of the New Testament. It's not found anywhere else, but Psalm 110 verse 4 says, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. [00:01:52] So it's in the Old Testament, and it's picked up in this 7, 1 to 10 in particular. So our first topic tonight is that Christ is greater than the Levitical priests which are ministered to Israel. And we have a comparison of Melchizedek and Abraham and the lessons that come out of that for us believers. He tells us in 7.1 that Melchizedek blessed Abraham. [00:02:27] This story is found in Genesis 14 in the Old Testament. And there are a number of things said about Melchizedek here that call for discussion. It says in 7.1, this Melchizedek was king of Salem. Now we know that place as Jerusalem, right? In other words, this city was sometimes called Jebus, with a B, and sometimes Jerusalem as a longer title. [00:03:03] and here is just Salem. This Melchizedek was king of Salem and a priest of God most high. He met Abraham returning from the defeat of the kings and blessed him. Now he goes on to talk about that whole thing that the superior blesses the inferior. And there's a point here about Melchizedek and then in 7.2 Abraham gave Melchizedek tithes. [00:03:40] And then the writer explains that Melchizedek's name means King of Righteousness. Whoever wrote this book must have known Hebrew because Melchi is the prefix to this word and that means king of and Tzadik in Hebrew means righteousness so Melchizedek the spelling is not quite perfect in English for the original Hebrew means king of righteousness and also king of Salem means king of peace he's drawing lessons from etymology [00:04:26] and shalom in Hebrew means peace. Modern Jews call it sholom as if it was S-H-O-L-E-M, sholom. And here it's salem, but it's the Greek spelling of the same thing. Now verse 3 says about Melchizedek, Without father or mother, without beginning of days or end of life, Like the Son of God, he remains a priest forever. [00:04:58] This does not mean that Melchizedek had no earthly parents. And it doesn't mean that he wasn't born. And it doesn't mean that he didn't die. What does it mean? It means in the record, there's no father or mother. In the record, his birth is not registered. In the record, his death is not registered. Do you understand? the literary accidents of the story furnish a theological comparison with the Lord Jesus Christ [00:05:29] because he literally was without beginning or end of days he was eternal both ways he always existed and he always will exist and so on but that statement calls for good explanation or it will be misunderstood and the resurrection of Christ the Lord Jesus Christ. [00:06:20] Christ, who in reality is our eternal priest. Do you have any questions? So in 7.2 and in 7.4, he makes out that Melchizedek is a sort of a type of our high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. And in 7.4 he says, just think how great he was, Melchizedek. Even the patriarch Abraham gave him a tenth of the plunder. He tithed to him, just like Israel gave tithes for the support of their priests, so Abraham gave tithes to Melchizedek, the king and priest of the Most High God. [00:07:11] He lived in Jerusalem. So according to the law, the Levites received tithes, 7-5. Now Melchizedek, well he goes on to explain that the law requires the descendants of Levi who become priests to collect a tenth from the people, that is from their brothers, even though their brothers are descended from Abraham. I am. This also calls for a little bit of an explanation because not all the descendants of Levi were priests. Some were what we call Levites. The Levites assisted in the secular work around the temple, carrying out ashes, carrying in the sacrifices and all that kind of thing. And the priests did the actual offering of the sacrifices. The priests were descendants of Aaron. [00:08:05] of the family of Levi. The other Levites were the non-Aaronic descendants of Levi. So he says in 6, this man, that's Melchizedek, did not trace his descent from Levi, yet he collected a tenth from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. And without doubt, Now, this has been assumed all along in the discussion. Without doubt, the lesser person is blessed by the greater. [00:08:40] So, both these actions indicate that Melchizedek was greater than Abraham. Melchizedek blessed Abraham. Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek. And they both show the superiority and the inferiority of the two people. Now he says in 7.8, in the one case, the tenth is collected by men who die. The Levitical priests only served from 30 to 50, 20 years. [00:09:17] They started at 30, and at 50 they were retired. And that's a short time. About the time a given Israelite got acquainted with his priest, the man died or disappeared as a priest. So in the Levitical priesthood, mortal men received tithes. But a living Melchizedek, that is to say, one whose death is not recorded, he's making much of the literary form of the story. [00:09:49] it's not it's not theologically true or historically true that he didn't die but in the record he just appears as a living person a living Melchizedek got his tithes from Abraham in a sense 9 and 10 Levi tithed to Melchizedek Levi wasn't born yet for several generations but he looks upon this [00:10:19] is somewhat figurative he looks upon Levi as being in the loins of his father Abraham his ancestor and although he was not yet in existence he says well as a matter of fact he did pay tithes to Melchizedek because Abraham did who was his ancestor one might even say verse 9 in other words I'm going to use a figure of speech here [00:10:49] That Levi, who collects the tenth, the tithe, paid the tenth through Abraham because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor. That is to say, there was no Levi, but the seed which carried on from generation to generation. Did you ever think about that? That in the humans, in any species, there are two things passed on to the next generation. [00:11:20] The seed for the following generation is in the body of the child which is to be born, and the body is generated by the parents. Do you understand me? The parents generate the body and they pass on the seed from all the ancestors to the next generation also. And this, the Bible says, to the pure all things are pure. And the writer here can make a point out of this, this miracle. [00:11:53] B.F. Westcott, who wrote a tremendous commentary on Hebrews. He lived 1825 to 1901 and was a great British scholar. B.F. Westcott says, The act of Abraham determined the relation of Levi to Melchizedek. The priests of Levi are seen to be mortal, fallible, serving only a short time, whereas Melchizedek, in the record, stands there as eternal. [00:12:27] He's just there. Genesis 14. Is there anyone who doesn't understand what I'm trying to explain? Therefore Melchizedek is greater than the Levites. Now the second topic for tonight is Christ and the Aaronic Priests or Christ is our High Priest. And this runs the rest of the chapter, 711 to 728. He tells us in 7.11 that there is no real deliverance through the Levitical priests. [00:13:08] If perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood, for on the basis of the law it was given to the people, why was there still need for another priest to come, one like Melchizedek and not like Aaron? Perfection does not mean that you and I are as perfect as our Lord and that we don't need grace, but Christianity does lift people up. The man who has been a drunkard becomes sober. [00:13:39] The man who has been immoral gets straightened out. The man who has been a drug addict ceases to use drugs. There's a power in the living Christ which the Israelites did not experience through their priesthood. Is this clear to everybody? It's a tremendous thought. We have in Christianity a great power which can deliver people from anything. Do you believe that? When I was a student at Goshen College, no, a young teacher, I guess. [00:14:15] This is getting a little bit fuzzy in my memory. I can't always tell what happened when I was a student and what happened after I began to teach. It was only a few years difference. We had a chapel speaker one time, and he was dressed very nicely. And his first words were, I'm a drunkard. And he didn't look any more like a drunkard than any of us do. and then he said I went through college and I was in med school and was drinking more and more [00:14:48] and he said I didn't believe that I was an alcoholic until one day the professor in the medical school described alcoholism and he said I saw myself for the first time and I realized I I was a drunkard. And the awful thing was the professor said at the end of the lecture, now there's no hope for a person like this. There's nothing to be done for an individual who's an alcoholic. We now know that's a lie. Jesus Christ can deliver people from alcoholism. [00:15:24] And 20 years ago, the literature said that there's no hope for the drug addict because the very brain cells which he needs to break loose from drug addiction are destroyed by the drug. So the person is hopeless who's a drug addict. And that isn't true either. We now know that Jesus Christ can deliver drug addicts. In fact, I don't know anything that Christ can't deliver from. Do you? Do you know anything that Christ can't deliver people from? [00:15:59] That is to say, if they want to be delivered. That's always true. If a person doesn't want deliverance, why there's no deliverance? Well, the Israelite system took care of transgressions. The person came to the priest and put his hands over the head of the sacrificial animal and confessed his sins, and then the animal was slain, and the priest pronounced him forgiven. All is forgiven. That was tremendous. But there was no power to break from sin. [00:16:32] The same transgressions went on every year and the same sacrifices for sin went on every year. So he says in 712, the entire Mosaic economy, that means the sacrificial system, had to be done away. 712. and he says this is the way it's put here for when there's a change of the priesthood there must also be a change of the law and that's that's a an obvious thing and yet it's it's a something that really strikes us with great power when there's a change of law change in the economy the old sacrificial system has to go and then in 13 and [00:17:21] 14, he says, he of whom these things are said belong to a different tribe, and no one from that tribe has ever served at the altar. What tribe did Christ come from? Judah. And the Aaronic priests came from Levi. For it is clear that our Lord descended from Judah, and in regard to that tribe, Moses said nothing about priests. That's the plain [00:17:51] 7.15. What we have said is even more clear if another priest like Melchizedek appears, the one who became a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry, but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life. The Lord Jesus Christ is our ever-living Savior and High Priest. Christ was in that sense the perfect fulfillment of what in the narrative Melchizedek rather feebly portrayed. [00:18:27] Melchizedek's birth and death are not recorded, and so he is a symbol of the Lord Jesus Christ who really did live forever and shall live forever. 7, 16, and 17. He says the Levites had a physical succession. That is to say a man was a priest because his father was a priest. And his son became a priest because he was a priest. But Christ has an eternal priesthood. He has an inherent immortality. [00:19:02] Christ doesn't come and go like human priests do or like human ministers do. By the time you're my age in the middle 70s and you look back, it's amazing how many patriarchs are gone. People that we used to think of as the leading ministers in the church are now gone. That's just the way life is. And young men are coming on. That's also a part of life. But the Lord Jesus Christ goes on and on and on. He does not have a limited life. [00:19:41] 18 and 19, the weak and unfruitful Levitical priesthood must give way before Christ's powerful and effective ministry. I had to think of a South American minister in our church. His name was Ernesto Suarez, S-U-A-R-E-Z. He was born, I think, in Spain, and he went back and forth between Spain and Argentina. [00:20:14] For a few years, his parents would live in Argentina, then they moved back to Spain, and this went on over the years. He was not a believer. He was a nominal Catholic, but not a really on-fire believer. And he got a hold of some communist literature one day, which attacked the Bible, and listed all the, what the communists thought were unworthy things in the Bible, and he said, I didn't believe it. He told me about this himself. [00:20:45] He said, I didn't believe it. So I got myself a Bible, and looked these things up, and sure enough, what the communists said was there. So he he really then was not no longer even a nominal Catholic. He just wasn't anything Now how do people become believers How do they get this man Jesus Christ as their priest? Well, he had a Mennonite roommate in South America, Argentina that he admired so much and [00:21:17] And one night the young man said to Ernesto Suarez, would you like to come along to church tonight? And Suarez had no interest whatsoever in going to church, but he thought so much of the young man who invited him that he went along. And following the service, this was during World War II, following the service, he went forward and attacked the pastor, a North American, whether he really hates the Germans and so on. [00:21:53] No, the pastor was relaxed. He said he didn't hate anybody, and Suarez couldn't believe it, and he pressed him pretty hard. Well, Suarez kept going Sunday by Sunday with the young man until he himself was overcome by the Holy Spirit and he became a real believer and became a minister in our church and the editor of our church paper down there and when I was in Argentina some years ago, he translated my messages from English to Spanish [00:22:25] He had studied here. Was he here the same time you were, Alan? I didn't know. I think he came later than Brother Alan had been a student here. Now, we go back to Psalm 110. It says, it was not without an oath. Others became priests without an oath. But he became a priest, Christ, with an oath when God said to him, the Lord has sworn and will not change his mind or the King James says repent you are a priest forever [00:23:00] and some of the manuscripts I think add after the order of Melchizedek you are a priest forever because of this oath Jesus has become the guarantee of a better covenant Now that's the theme of verses of chapters 7 and 8. The better covenant that we now have in Jesus Christ. The better covenant. The new covenant, verse 22, is better than the old. [00:23:34] More is going to come out on this later. Our eternal priest saves people completely. Look at 23 to 25. because Jesus lives forever verse 24 in contrast with the priests that served only 20 years he has a permanent priesthood therefore he is able to save the King James says to the uttermost but the Greek scholars tell us that that phrase really means completely I have a an interlinear [00:24:05] John Heinrich, a minister of the Church in North Carolina, I'm very much a big fan of him. And he says, look, he says, the NIV says, he saves completely those who come to God through him because he ever lives to make intercession for them. Verse 27 indicates that Christ has no need to offer sacrifices daily for sin and the Old Testament high priest first sprinkled blood on the mercy seat for his own sins and then for the sins of the people. [00:24:54] Do you remember that? He went in once a year into the high priest, into the Holy of Holies, and he sprinkled blood on the mercy seat, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. But Jesus Christ offered one sacrifice, and the Greek word means once for all. He did it once for all. and therefore we have a high priest. We do not re-offer Jesus Christ in any kind of a ceremony whatsoever [00:25:28] because that sacrifice was eternally valid and was offered once for all when Jesus Christ died on Golgotha. The thing I want us to see tonight is this. The price of sin has been paid. Sometimes I use an illustration like this, that let's suppose that a certain pastor is highly appreciated by his people, [00:25:58] and they are so glad that they have him as their minister, and then he gets into a bad automobile accident, and his insurance has run out, and he wasn't aware of it, and he now has a huge debt, which he can't pay. And at the same time, a big corporation comes to him and offers him a job to manage their public relations. So he stands up in the church on a Sunday morning and with tears running, he tells the people, [00:26:32] the only thing I can see to get out of my debt is to resign as pastor and accept this job with the big corporation because the pay is about ten times what I get here. And there's a millionaire in the congregation and the millionaire says, By the way, pastor, I forgot to tell you, I stopped at the bank on Friday and I paid that debt in full. Well, then there is some tears shed. Debts are paid only once. [00:27:07] Debts are paid once. And the Lord Jesus Christ paid our debt in full. It has been paid. It was paid on an instrument called the cross. It was paid on a day called Good Friday. It was paid outside of an actual city called Jerusalem. Do you see how definite this is? It's just as real as a man stopping at Salem Bank and paying off somebody's debt. That's how Jesus Christ paid our debt in full. [00:27:40] Thank you. She was a woman. She was born in 1818, died in 1895, and in 1848, she was a Presbyterian, she wrote a catechetical hymn for the young people who were getting ready for church membership. [00:28:25] In the first stanza, she said, there's a green hill far away without a city wall, that's Jerusalem, where our dear Lord was crucified, who died to save us all. We may not know, we cannot tell what pains he had to bear, but we believe it was for us he hung and suffered there. That's the mystery of the atonement and it's the substitutionary character of that atonement. He died that we might be forgiven. He died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven saved by his precious blood. [00:29:05] Isn't that beautiful? There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in. In other words, he's the only one who could have done it. And then our response. Oh dearly, dearly has he loved, and we must love him too. And try and trust in his redeeming blood. There's faith. and try his works to do. [00:29:36] That's Christian service. It's a marvelous hymn. I heard a sermon on that at Grand Rapids, Michigan one time about 1933 and I could still repeat some of the good things that the speaker said. So the Levitical priests, 728, were weak and mortal men. but our high priest is a divine son son of God who is eternal now I think it would be a good thing if we'd stand [00:30:10] for a little while if some of you may want to go get a swallow of water and then we'll continue with our studies and he's particularly zeroing in on the heavenly sanctuary the true The point of what we're saying is this. [00:30:53] We do have such a high priest. who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens, the Greek says, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man. Then he goes on in 3 and 4 to say that earthly priests, Levitical priests, serve with a copy and a shadow. That's the literal translation of the Greek. [00:31:24] The tabernacle that they had was a copy of eternal realities, but it was also just a shadow of those eternal realities. The eternal realities are substantive. They endure, whereas the earthly tabernacle is gone forever. It was a copy and shadow of the equipment of the heavenly tabernacle. He said, maybe I can give an illustration here, 8.5, when Moses was about to construct the tabernacle in the wilderness, God showed him a pattern on the mountain. [00:32:02] What mountain was that? Sinai, Mount Sinai. And God said, you see that pattern? I want you to build an earthly tabernacle exactly like that pattern. I had a great grandfather who was a construction man and he told my father one time he said if you can see a building before you start you can build it and this is a real insight and I read recently about an Amishman they were building a barn for a widow I believe and the Amishman said I have this as a gift from God he said I can see the barn before I start [00:32:47] There, the thing stands there, and then I proceed to build according to that pattern which is in the mind. Well, here Moses built the old tabernacle like the pattern shown him on the mountain. Now we come to the fourth reality, which is the last section of our chapters, chapters for tonight, but a very rich section. The Superior New Covenant 8.6-13 [00:33:19] The Superior New Covenant I don't want to be negative at all in this discussion but let me just say this is a major point of theological confusion in contemporary Christendom people can't see the relationship of the Old Testament to the New. One of the books that influenced me a great deal [00:33:51] was written by a Catholic and is called Uffenbarung, Revelation, and the author is Werner Bust, B-U-L-S-T, a German. And Bust says, The Old Testament sacrifices, the Old Testament as a whole, was God's will for his people at that time but he says the full and final and definitive revelation of God comes only in Jesus Christ right that's excellent I don't know whether the safest thing would be to pass over this not use any illustrations but I'm going to use a few without any [00:34:38] and I hope I can smile while I say it. Some people are in bondage on the Sabbath question. They can't understand that we Christians are not under the Jewish Sabbath. The Jewish Sabbath had 39 classes of things that you couldn't do on the Sabbath. You couldn't start a fire on the Sabbath. Wouldn't that be an awful thing if it would be 20 below and your fire would go out and you couldn't start it on the Sabbath. [00:35:09] Well, we're not under the Sabbath. You and I are not trying to keep the Jewish Sabbath. We keep the Lord's Day in memory of the resurrection of our Lord. And that's different than the Jewish Sabbath. I don't think we ought to call it the Sabbath. We ought to call it the Lord's Day because that's the way the New Testament does. Or many Christians justify war and capital punishment For example, if a couple had a rebellious child in the Old Testament, they would go to the judges and say, [00:35:46] we can't do anything with this boy. And the judge would say, according to the law, he has to be stoned to death. And the parents are to throw the first stones. My, that would be hard. That's the Old Testament. We're not under the Old Testament. Is this clear to us? The Old Testament as a religious system has been done away, and it's not fair to push Christ out of the way and then go back to the preparatory institutions of the Old Covenant, sacrifices, circumcision, clean and unclean foods, and all that business, because that's done away in Christ. [00:36:25] or many people say that infant baptism mirrors circumcision and because circumcision was given to the boys, not the girls, to the boys in Israel as a sign of the covenant when they were eight days old therefore we shall observe baptism with there the analogy breaks down because we baptize the girls too but in the Old Testament circumcision applied only to the boys Well, the whole thing is a wrong approach. [00:36:59] The Old Testament has value preparatory in character. Preparatory in character. There are many illustrations of faithfulness and trust and purity. Our Amish friends call Joseph Derkoisha Yingling. You understand it? The pure young man, the kaisa, they say kaisa, the kaisa yingling, the pure young man. [00:37:31] The Old Testament has many illustrations of faithfulness, of perseverance, of holiness, and it's endless. But we are not under the Old Covenant. We are under the higher standards of Christ and his apostles. Now he tells us in 8.6 that the ministry of Christ is vastly superior to that of the Levitical priests. [00:38:04] How is that? The new covenant in itself is immensely superior to the old covenant. and the New Covenant has better promises. I didn't say that. The text says that. The New Testament is, the New Covenant has better promises than the Old Testament. The Old Covenant, 8-7, lacked Christian perfection. One of my favorite illustrations is the great Greek scholar, Bengal. [00:38:38] John Wesley in 1752 got out a new testament with 6,000 changes in many of these changes the modern versions support him and John Wesley quotes Bengal almost every page Bengal Bengal Bengal he was a great German scholar and a very devout man of God and he had occasion to be [00:39:08] I thought I saw the word Ewigkeit on his forehead. Isn't that beautiful? Eternity. I thought I saw the word eternity on his forehead in other words you and I are to be that filled with goodness filled with the Holy Spirit so that the lower things of this life which our society makes so much of you'd think that real love is in Hollywood it is not [00:40:00] My grandparents and my wife's grandparents and our parents knew far more about love than the Hollywood people do. They knew what it was like to stand at a grave and bury a child together. They knew what it was like to commune together and so on. God predicted, 8.8, the old covenant. This is Jeremiah, pardon me, the new covenant. This is Jeremiah 31.31 [00:40:31] Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I took when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, and so on. It will be a much different covenant than the new covenant is compared to the old. The Old Covenant was made of former slaves at Sinai. They had been slaves in Egypt. And God built the Old Covenant out of those slaves. [00:41:05] Now God says, the days will come, Jeremiah 31, 31, when I will build a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. And the Israelites were not faithful, 8, 9, to God. They turned away from him. Now let's look in some detail at this New Covenant, 8.10. I'm going to try to invent four words which are used here by implication of this New Covenant. [00:41:44] These four words are internalized, realized, universalized, and actualized. The only point to these I's is it makes it easier to remember. Let's look at these four points. First, the law is internalized. God says, I'm going to write my law on their hearts and on their minds. [00:42:15] In other words, people are going to be filled with a love for God God, which tries to please him in every respect so that they don't even have to look up in the Bible whether a thing is right or wrong. They simply know a thing is right or wrong. Am I making myself clear here? God has written his law in the hearts and minds of his people. This is a miracle. I remember one time in eastern Ohio, I was in a community, and the pastor said to me, [00:42:55] there's a Quaker meeting this afternoon in this community, would you like to go? And I said, yes, I would. So we went, and it was a very plain Quaker meeting. Some of the older men wore plain coats and stuff like that, and it was a silent meeting. and we sat in absolute silence for quite a while and the children sat quiet this surprised me they had been taught that they must not make noise in the house of God and so after sitting silently for [00:43:30] 30 minutes I suppose an old man up front said pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall well none of us had to ask is that in the bible or isn't it in the bible We just knew that that was a part of the law. The law is internalized so that many Christians, I don't know how to say this, many Christians take positions which they couldn't justify logically, [00:44:02] but which are in line with the law of God. Are you understanding me? And what he says is that we know that God is our God and we are his people. Twenty years ago, twenty-two years ago, a man named Harold Stauffer Bender died and he had written in 1943 a very unusual address for his presidential address at the American Society of Church History [00:44:34] and it was called the Anabaptist Vision. What I'd like to refer to is a book that he wrote on the church. What did he call it? These are my people. And here we have God is our God and we are his people. Beautiful. We belong to God. We are his people. So that law is internalized and secondly, the covenant is realized. [00:45:07] and here we have this fatherhood of God and peoplehood of the saints the covenant is realized these two points are in 810 now in 11 he has two more points he says faith is universalized in a sense this is the hardest one to explain because all of us can learn from one another but we are not pitiably dependent upon one another we are not pitiably dependent you understand [00:45:45] what I mean by that there there's a certain independence which Christians have by virtue of having the Holy Spirit they they can get far more out of Bible reading out of meditation out of sermons and so on than mere human teaching the law of God is internalized and the faith is universalized he says we'll have no need of brotherly instruction because we'll all know the Lord now that doesn't mean [00:46:19] in an absolute sense we can't learn from one another but it means we're not pitiably dependent on one another for further instruction and the The fourth point is that salvation is actualized. This means that God forgives and, using a very earthly figure, God forgets our transgressions. Did you ever hear somebody say, well, I can forgive him for what he did, but I can never forget what he did. Well, that's not total forgiveness. [00:46:55] Total forgiveness wipes out what the individual has done so that we don't think about it anymore. This is a part of our humanity that we find that hard to do. If somebody has committed an awful sin, we tend to think about it when we see that individual. We shouldn't do that. I thought about this when I was preparing this lesson, and I still don't quite know whether it's the right thing to do to mention it or not. [00:47:27] But a long time ago there was a girl in the school of nursing at Goshen College who came to see me in my office for spiritual help. And she recited a bunch of trivia that didn't amount to anything of adolescent nature and I just sat there with my arms folded and listened and didn't say anything and when I when she was finished I said well let's have a word of prayer and then you can go and a number of months [00:47:58] went by and she came back and she said you have no idea how you helped me the joke was I hadn't said anything I just listened and she said the fact that you could I sit there and not seem to be impressed with my shortcomings. Well, by this time, I have forgotten completely. I couldn't tell anybody what they were anymore. I've forgotten all about it. Well, that's a poor picture of how gracious God is. [00:48:30] God totally forgives. He buries our sins in the sea of forgetfulness. He has forgotten, humanly speaking, what those sins are. Now, he says, I don't have the verse written down. By calling this covenant new, he has made the first one old or obsolete. That's 8.13. [00:49:02] The Greek says old. The NIV thinks that we would get the point better if we'd use the word obsolete. In other words, the old covenant is about to vanish. The Jewish system was probably destroyed very soon after this letter was written. Let me tell you a little story in closing tonight. In 1937, Ruth and I were married, and then I went to University of Zurich in Switzerland, and alone, and she stayed here and earned the Ph.D. degree. [00:49:43] Do you know what that is? Put husband through. And then she came over to me, and when I was over there alone, I did a lot of reading and studying and walking around the city, and I learned that there was in Switzerland a German periodical published called the Zeon's Pilger, the Zion's Pilgrim. And I read this story which impressed me so much. I think it must have been somewhere around 1700 in Europe. [00:50:18] There was a great artist on the street one day and he saw a little girl, maybe 10 years old, Anabaptist, Anabaptist, Anabaptist, Anabaptist [00:50:55] And she looked around the walls and they were all hanging full of paintings and so on and suddenly she saw something that arrested her attention and she said, who's that man? And he looked and he said, oh, that's Jesus Christ. She said, what are they doing to him? And the artist said, they're killing him. She said, why are they killing him? Was he a bad man? No, he said he was the best man that ever lived. Well, she said, why are they killing him? [00:51:26] And by this time the artist was getting tired of all these questions and he said, now listen, if you'll just sit quiet until I'm finished, I'll tell you the whole story. Then he told the story of creation and the fall and the lost condition of mankind and how God and his love would not allow the human race to be lost but sent his own son into the world to die as a sacrifice for sin and that's the painting which she saw on the wall the crucified savior [00:51:56] and the little girl was so impressed with this story but she didn't know it applied to her and she said to the artist if he did all that for you how you must love him and the plain fact was he didn't love the savior He was just nominally a believer, but he didn't really love the Savior. And the little girl went on her way, and for the next two weeks, from time to time, this thing would come into his mind, [00:52:30] if he did all that for you, how you must love him. and finally he looked up a group of believers and got converted really converted and united with them in a local congregation and then he said I believe I can paint a more moving picture now of the crucifixion now that I know the Savior than I ever painted before and so he did paint a tremendous picture of Christ on the cross [00:53:04] and the cross and it hung in a great museum, an art museum in Germany. Now we come to Count Zinzendorf. He was born in 1700, died in 1760. He was in the, what do you call it in German, in English, in Latin it was the Unitas Fratrum, Society of brothers, I guess. Society of unity, literally. And he founded the Moravian Church after this thing happened. And he was a count. He belonged to the nobility and had lots of money. And in those days, poor people walked wherever they went. Rich people rode in carriages. And they would go from one city to the next. And then they'd change horses. [00:54:02] the new horses like we rent a U-Haul to take things a certain distance they would rent horses to go to the next city and then they'd put them in the livery station and get new fresh horses and go to the next city. Am I making the story clear? So while they were changing his horses, he walked into the very museum where this painting hung of Christ. And he was just transfixed. And he sat down on a bench and looked at that painting. [00:54:36] And then he saw that the artist had written something at the bottom of the picture. And in German it said, all this I did for thee what hast thou done for me and he was deeply impressed by that statement after a bit he felt a tap on the shoulder and the keeper of the museum said I'm sorry sir it's time to close up you'll have to leave now and he went out of that place changed for life and he came [00:55:10] Pennsylvania, the end of 1741, and held seven conferences in a vain attempt to merge all the German-speaking Christians of Pennsylvania. The Church of the Brethren, the Schweinfelders, the German Baptists, well that's the same as the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, the Lutherans, the Reformed, I think there were something like seven or so groups that he tried The Lutherans decided to merge. Well, it worked the wrong way. They all developed greater self-consciousness as a result of trying to merge them than they had before. Do you understand me? They got along pretty decently beforehand, but now the Lutherans said, do you think we want to become German Baptists? And the Schweigfellers said, do you think we want to become Reformed? And so on down the line. [00:56:07] But this is something of the testimony of what this artist's painting did for Zinzendorf. Have you any questions that you would like to raise? I promise this every time and then forget to do it. I'll try to repeat the question so it gets on the tape. Anything you'd like to raise of what we have covered tonight on the wonderful blessings of the new covenant? Next Tuesday night, the Lord willing, we'll take up the nature of saving faith and we'll look at 9, 10, and 11. [00:56:51] 11, as you know, is the faith chapter. We have one illustration after the other of faith. Any questions? Anyone? Thank you very much for your good attention. Thank you for watching!