It is difficult to understand why our translators have rendered the original of this scripture, "Let us hold fast the profession of our faith." There is no question of any difference of reading, and yet the word "faith" has been substituted for "hope," and thereby the whole sense of the scripture altered. It should be then "the confession of the hope" which we are urged to hold fast. What then is "the hope" to which the writer refers? It is mentioned first in chapter 3:6: "If we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end." Passing on to chapter 6, we read of those "who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us" (v. 18). And the next two verses explain that the hope, which we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil, is Jesus, who has entered there as our forerunner, made a high priest forever after the order of Melchisedec. In chapter 9, we further read that Christ will appear the second time, unto them that look for Him, without sin unto salvation (v. 28). If we now combine these scriptures, it seems evident that "the hope" of this epistle is Christ coming out of the heavenly sanctuary for the salvation-salvation final and complete-of His people. This hope, as so explained, would carry with it a peculiar force for the Hebrew saints, to whom this epistle was primarily written, accustomed as they had been, especially on the great day of atonement, to await the coming out of the high priest from the holiest, in evidence that all the rites of that day had been efficaciously accomplished.
An illustration of this is found in the Gospel of Luke. Zacharias (the priest) had gone into the temple of the Lord to burn incense, "And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense." Again, "And the people... marveled that he tarried so long in the temple" (chap. 1:10-21). So in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
Jesus, the Son of God, has, as the great High Priest, passed "through" the heavens into the heavenly sanctuary; and His people are waiting outside, down here, for His reappearing; and this constitutes their hope. Well might the Holy Ghost exhort us to hold it fast, for there is no part of the truth which believers are so liable to surrender as the hope of their Lord's return; for it is bound up with the very essence of Christianity, and with the nature of the heavenly calling.