ALTHOUGH no information is given in Scripture as to the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, it has ever held a chief place in the minds of the Christian Assembly, in spite of the fact that the especial class of people to whom it was written has long since disappeared as a known company. Converted Jews there are, and have been from time to time throughout the whole period of the Church’s sojourn here below, and such there will be till we are caught up to meet the Lord; but no longer does there exist among Christians a body of persons still called by the name of Jews, occupying as such an important and distinguished place, but maintaining Jewish customs and observances, zealous of the law, and, while it stood, following the Temple worship, in spite of persecution and contempt from their unbelieving Jewish brethren.
To such as these was the Hebrew Epistle addressed, as also, and more particularly so, was the Epistle of James, though the latter no doubt at an earlier period when the state of things among the Jews, and even among the believing part of the nation, was not so fully ripe for judgment as when this Epistle to the Hebrews was written. This judgment was consummated in the destruction by the Romans of the city and the Temple, together with the whole Jewish national polity, and the scattering of the people abroad, as to-day, throughout the whole earth.
It cannot be doubted that God would have preserved governmentally, and in grace towards His earthly people, a confession of the name and faith of Christ among them, as even among Gentiles to-day, but when in willful obstinacy and hardness of heart they rejected a heavenly gospel, as they had already done a Christ on earth, then they were smitten as a people with judicial blindness, fulfilling thus the Scripture; so that now to be a Jew is to be an antagonist of Christ.
The Epistle to the Hebrews was written to the Hebrew Christians when this sentence had been pronounced against the people in the heavenly courts, and was about to be executed in their overthrow and destruction of the city and Temple. The believers among them were warned of this (Heb. 10:25-31), and that henceforth their connection with the earthly and Jewish system must be severed, since there was no link, according to God, between a legal Christ-rejecting Judaism and the truth of the Christian position — a position which, while it had been always theirs as believers, was now to be taken in its practical results (Heb. 13:10-15).
This epistle was therefore written so that this might be done in faith and with a conscience divinely instructed with respect to the mind of God and the present position of Christ. The place of Christ determines that of His saints, and the revelation of it is given in order that we may now enter in our consciences by faith into the divine understanding of it in order that the state of our souls and communion accordingly may be governed by that revelation, and thus a testimony be maintained for God as a present thing in doctrine and manner of life. It is mere carnal indifference to say that because I believe in Christ the complete result of all that He is and has done belongs to me, so that I need not to occupy myself so earnestly with what is revealed in the Scriptures. It is sufficient to know that I am saved from wrath, and shall spend eternity in heaven. Not so; God has revealed in the sacred Scriptures all that concerns His glory, as far as it can be known by us now, not only what is necessary for our salvation; and the Christian is left here in the place of Christ rejected to carry on the testimony of what God is: of course, morally only, not in his person, as God was in Christ (Eph. 5:1, 2). Moreover, he is the witness in life and word of the accomplishment, so far as a heavenly and exalted Christ is concerned, of God’s eternal purposes for man, the Christian being in Him by the new life and the Holy Spirit. Besides this, there is the special relationship of the Assembly to Christ in life and love as His body and His bride.
These things are all revealed in the New Testament for faith to receive, so that the life may be governed accordingly, and a living testimony produced similar to Christ’s, only in those who have been redeemed and born again, and, having sin still in them, bear about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. With us, too, this testimony is imperfect, though it ought not to be, whereas Christ was personally and perfectly what He testified of.
Now for us to bear this testimony it is necessary that the Word of God which reveals it should have entered our consciences in the love of it; though the sovereign grace of God has made true in every one of His children that which was divinely true in Christ Himself, so that the darkness is passing, not putting out the light as in the rejection of Christ, and the true light now shineth for eternity in those who are His (1 John 2:8). The declaration of the Father in the person and ministry of the only-begotten Son finds its counterpart and perpetuation among Christians in that we love one another.
This is true of every believer in Christ, not measured by their varying degrees of apprehension of divine truth, but by the sovereign communication to them on God’s part of eternal life. Yet as in the place of testimony to what God has wrought, and as holding forth the word of life, this can only be according as our souls have received the revelation of God in the power of the Spirit (Phil. 3:15). Otherwise the written Word would have been purposeless and in vain.
The great point of the Epistle to the Hebrews is to bring in divine power by the Word to the hearts and consciences of the saints, the cardinal fact that Christ is now set down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; and thus as the effect of this to separate them absolutely from all association with the legal system to which they belonged as God’s earthly people with its ineffectual ceremonies and sacrifices. In four different ways is this supreme and glorious position of Christ presented in the epistle. First, in respect of the divine dignity of His Person; He sets Himself down on the right hand of the greatness on high (1:3), His manhood in which He suffered being that in which He is crowned and is to be set in supremacy over all things (2:7-9). Secondly, in assuming the office of, heavenly High Priest He has set Himself down on the right hand of the throne of the greatness in the heavens, Mediator of a better covenant founded on better promises than those which related to earth and a legal covenant (8.).
Also in purifying the heavenly things He is presented, for the third time, as setting Himself down in perpetuity at the right hand of God (10:10-14), a proof of the perpetual virtue of His sacrifice to sanctify and perfect those who come by Him to God. Lastly, as our pattern, the great Leader and Completer of faith, having endured the cross, He sets Himself down at the right hand of the throne of God.