To Encourage You

Hebrews 7:18-19 “For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.”

I recall an interesting conversation I had with one of our former neighbors. She is Amish.  Somehow, we got involved in a discussion on spiritual things, and in particular we were discussing the subject of heaven. I asked her if the Amish believe they can know that they will go to heaven after they die. Her answer surprised me. She said that that was something they believed you couldn’t know. She said that they just hoped that heaven would be the result of them living a good life, i.e., following all the dos and don’ts of the Amish way of life. To this I asked her, “Well, how good do you have to be?”  Her response, (which was a question to herself), was “Yes, how good do you have to be?” In other words, she had no answer.  That’s not surprising, for if anyone believes that the way to heaven is by way of adherence to some law, down deep inside who of us thinks they can obey any law perfectly?  And if not, how close to perfection do we need to be?  Is the answer one violation, two, ten, a hundred?  As God looks at humanity with all their varied levels of understanding and systems of belief, will He grade it all on a curve in the end?  Maybe heaven’s just a matter of sincerity?  If we are at least “true to ourselves,” will that be enough? 

Well, the Word of God answers all this.  As the apostle John told us about all he had written, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). You see, God, in His grace, never intended for us to be uncertain about our eternal destiny.  He never intended for us to live in a condition of wondering if we’ll be good enough to enter His presence.  So, what has He told us?  Well, for one, we know that God is perfectly holy and “of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong” (Habakkuk 1:13). Furthermore, the Bible tells us to “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). So how holy is this?  Again, the Bible tells us with these words, “As He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct,since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1:15-16).  So, we are to be as perfectly holy as God?  Yes, just as holy!  So, how is that possible?  Who could ever hope to be perfectly holy? 

It’s to this very thing that the passage above from Hebrews 7 speaks.  It tells us that “the former commandment,” which is a reference to the Old Testament Law, i.e., the Ten Commandments and related laws that God had set down for the Jews, were weak and useless.  What this means is that the Law was weak and useless for making anyone perfect.  It was given to man not as a means to holiness, but as a means by which God could expose our utter unholiness.  That’s why any effort to earn our way into God’s good standing by keeping some system of laws is so frustrating.  No matter who we are, if we are truthful, we know how poor we are at compliance with God’s perfect Law. We find that “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6).  We find that rather than showing how good we are, any attempt at keeping the Law always reveals that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). 

But then the Bible gives us the good news.  As we are told in the passage above from Hebrews 7, “a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.” And what is that hope?  As we are told in Colossians 1:27, it is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” It is as we receive the perfect holiness of Christ as a gift, something that comes to us freely when we confess our sins and accept Jesus’ perfect sacrifice of His own body on the cross for those sins, that we are made perfectly holy, not because of anything we have done but because of what He has done.  That’s why Paul goes on to say in Colossians 1 that it is “him (i.e., Christ) we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature (i.e., perfect) in Christ.” That’s the marvelous message of the gospel. That’s the wondrous truth of the Word of God.  It’s the gracious message that “For our sake He (i.e., God the Father) made Him (i.e., God the Son) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). 

So, what about you? Have you ever received the forgiveness and perfect holiness that is the free gift of God, or are you trusting your own efforts, however futile, to achieve this on your own?