Anchored To Jesus

Hebrews 6:13-20

On a September afternoon in 1870, a party of nine explorers, eight army escorts, and two cooks made its way by horseback along the Firehole River in an untamed corner of Wyoming. Their task was to explore the mountains and valleys of an ancient volcano crater, an area known for geothermal activity. Nathaniel P. Langford, a member of the expedition, later recalled what met their gaze that September day:

Judge, then, what must have been our astonishment, as we entered the basin at mid-afternoon of our second day’s travel, to see in the clear sunlight, at no great distance, an immense volume of clear, sparkling water projected into the air to the height of 125 feet. “Geysers! Geysers!” exclaimed one of our company, and, spurring our jaded horses, we soon gathered around this wonderful [sight]. It was indeed a perfect geyser … It spouted at regular intervals nine times during our stay, the columns of boiling water being thrown from 90 to 125 feet at discharge, which lasted from 15 to 20 minutes. We gave it the name of “Old Faithful.”

Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park earned its name for the predictability of its eruptions. It’s still predictable today. In Langford’s day, the only way to witness Old Faithful was to travel to Wyoming, a trip requiring expense, difficulty, time, and danger. But today anyone with Internet access can watch the geyser erupt in real time.[i]

Faithful. Dependable. Constant. Steadfast. Trustworthy. Count-on-able. Is that even a word? Words we use to describe God.

We sing the hymn,

“Great is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father;

There is no shadow of turning with thee.

Thou changest not, thy compassions, they fail not;

As thou hast been, thou forever wilt be.

Great is thy faithfulness,

Great is thy faithfulness,

Morning by morning new mercies I see.

All I have needed thy hand hast provided;

Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.”

Or the words to He Will Hold Me Fast …

“When I fear my faith will fail,

Christ will hold me fast.

When the tempter would prevail,

He will hold me fast.”

And then we head out these doors and into a world where elementary aged children attending a Catholic school are shot at, two of them killed, WHILE THEY PRAYED in a church sanctuary. A world where a very mentally ill, broken man pulls out a knife and runs through Wal-Mart, stabbing innocent shoppers he’d never met, in a town that wasn’t his home.

When things like this happen, we seem to sense a disconnect between the words we profess and our experience out there in the world. How can we say “God is faithful” when things like this are happening? It feels like now more than ever. I’m not sure that it really is happening more. We just have access to more information in real time than ever before. We’re bombarded with tragic news from all around the world, and we want to know, will Christ hold me fast? Is God faithful?

That’s what the harried little band of Christ-followers to whom Hebrews was written wanted to know. Is God really faithful? Will Christ really hold me fast? Our families have rejected us. Those of us who own businesses are losing customers and income. Some of us are losing our property, our homes. We’re in danger of being jailed. Beaten and tortured. Even killed. All because of Christ. All because we’ve begun to follow him. Their faith hadn’t failed yet, but they weren’t sure if they could hold on.

And so a loving pastor who sees their struggle and wants to encourage them sends them this sermon in written form. The three most common pastors proposed are Apollos (another significant leader, on a level with St. Paul), Barnabas (who traveled with St. Paul), and Priscilla, a female Christian early church leader. That’s why I often say “he or she” when referring to this pastor.

Turn with me to Hebrews 6:13-20.

Hope, security, and patience. Those are the three things that loving pastor knew they needed. We need them too. And so he or she takes them all the way back to the beginning, to the book of Genesis, to the story of Abraham.

In Genesis 12, God made an initial promise to Abraham, who at the time was called Abram. “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (12:1-3). And the Bible says “So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.” In an initial, incredible show of faith, Abram and his family left their home to go to … they didn’t even know where.

And when Abram came to the land of Canaan, Genesis says,  “Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land” (12:7). The problem was, Abram didn’t have any offspring, and he was already getting up there. He was already 75 years old when He received this promise from God. And then, for 25 more years, he and his wife waited for God to fulfill his promise. And while they waited, they weren’t getting any younger. The aging process didn’t pause for them. Abraham was 100 and his wife Sarah was 90 when their son Isaac was finally born. Pat, Caroline, stand up for a second. I think you are the closest we have to 90 here at Christ Church right now, but neither of you are there yet. Are you ready to have a baby?

We have become a people who want what we want, and we want it RIGHT NOW. We don’t handle having to wait very well. Waiting in line at the grocery store? We mutter under our breath about slow cashiers. Waiting too long for our food at a restaurant? We fuss about the obvious incompetence of the cook and wait staff. Stuck in traffic? We fume, or drive miles out of our way so that we’ll feel like we’re moving, even though the detour takes just as long as if we’d just waited. Or we drive aggressively. Road rage.

We can’t even wait for ketchup to flow out of a glass bottle. And let’s be honest, ketchup tastes better out of a glass bottle. The problem is, you can’t squeeze a glass bottle to make it come out faster. We hate slow ketchup so much that engineers have actually clocked the speed of ketchup coming out of a glass bottle. Ketchup flows out of a glass bottle at a rate of .028 miles per hour. That’s slower than a Galapagos tortoise, which, according to the San Diego Zoo, zips along at a blazing 0.16 miles per hour, or almost six times faster than ketchup.

But impatiently tapping your ketchup bottle soon might be a thing of the past. Dave Smith, a PhD candidate at MIT, and a team of MIT mechanical engineers and nano-technologists have offered a possible solution to this ketchup flow problem. After months of research, Smith and his team developed LiquiGlide, which they define as a “kind of structured liquid [that’s] rigid like a solid, but lubricated like a liquid.” The researchers say that coating the inside of a bottle with LiquiGlide will cause ketchup and other sauces to slide out faster than a Galapagos tortoise. Smith claims that the sauce industry, which rakes in $17 billion a year, would love to get their hands on the invention.

An article on Time.com article concludes its report on LiquiGlide by saying: “Let’s hope some big [ketchup] companies bite. I’m tired of waiting five minutes for ketchup to land on my cheeseburger.”[ii]

How many of us actually buy ketchup in glass bottles? We don’t! Why? We want to be able to squeeze it out of a plastic bottle faster. We can’t even wait a few extra seconds for ketchup to flow at it’s own pace. Abraham and Sarah waited 25 years for God to BEGIN to fulfill his promise to them. Many of us want God to transform us, to fill us with love and joy and peace and patience. And we want him to do it RIGHT NOW.

But mature followers of Jesus aren’t formed overnight, just like the huge oaks outside this building didn’t grow to their massive stature overnight. God isn’t programming robots. He’s shaping disciples, and that takes time. When God seems to be moving at ketchup speed when we’d rather he be moving at light speed, we have to remember that there’s growth happening even in the wait, because patience and forbearance is one of the fruits he is growing in us.

After twenty five years of learning to trust God and be patient, Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah. The first of what God has promised will be descendants too numerous to count. But as Isaac grew, God had another lesson and more shaping for Abraham. In Genesis 22, God asks Abraham to trust him with the son of promise, his currently only heir, Isaac. “He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (22:2).

Can you imagine the confusion Abraham must have been experiencing? He’d aged to 75 years with no children, no heir. And then God promised him an heir. And then he’d waited another 25 years for that promise to come to fruition. He finally had the promised heir. God had, in God’s time, honored his promise. God was faithful. The path was open for the descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky that God had promised. And now God was seemingly asking him to give up that son.

Now, there’s something I want you to notice in this story. Abraham and Isaac and two of his servants had traveled to the place God asked for the offering of Isaac to happen. And Abraham turns to the two servants and says, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you” (22:5).

Abraham didn’t know how, but he knew that God would be just as faithful here as he had been in the 25 years that passed between promise the promise of Isaac and the fulfillment in Isaac’s birth. “I AND THE BOY will go over there and worship and come again to you.” WE’LL be back. We’ll BOTH be back. Abraham didn’t know how he was going to obey God and still come back with Isaac, but he knew God was faithful, and so he knew that God would make a way for two seemingly incompatible outcomes to happen.

A few moments later, Isaac himself asked Abraham what they would offer. “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (22:7). To which Abraham replied, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (22:8). And of course that’s exactly what happened.

Now, there’s something we need to see in God’s interaction with Abraham after all of this happened. In Genesis 22:16-17, the Bible says, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” So Abraham returned to his young men (as he’d said would happen), and they arose and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham lived at Beersheba.”

Let’s go back to Hebrews 6. Look at Vv. 13-18. God swore on himself that the promises made to Abraham were true, even though Abraham wouldn’t live to see it fully fulfilled. An oath is always sworn by one greater than oneself. When a dispute is taken to a court of law to be decided, oaths are sworn that what is being testified is true. Sworn testimony is given great weight. If the sworn testimony is worn to be false, in a civil trial the witness is impeached, caught in the lie, and shown to be an unreliable witness. They aren’t arrested or fined or anything, but the judge or jury can be greatly swayed against the witness. In a criminal trial, the witness can be charged with perjury, which is a crime in itself.

I’ve had to be a witness in court a few times, and when that happens, I’m asked to swear or affirm that the testimony I’m about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I swear an oath to be honest by one greater than me, namely God. But God can’t swear an oath by any being greater than himself, because that being doesn’t exist, so God swears by himself that he will be faithful to Abraham and fulfill his promises to Abraham in their fullness.

In fact, God wants to “show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise” that he is faithful. And so he does it by swearing by himself. Not because God’s integrity needs to be defended – it doesn’t – but so that we’ll know we can trust God, regardless of what is happening around us. God meets us in ways we can comprehend, and shows himself faithful.

And so we can flee to him for refuge. Why? Look at Vv. 19-20. Jesus IS our high priest, the one who stands before God on our behalf. He is the one who goes before us into the presence of God. For the ancient Jew, a thick curtain hung over the entrance to the holy of holies, where the ark of the covenant, symbolic of God’s presence on earth, was kept. That curtain was there to protect a sinful people from the consuming holiness of God. Only the high priest could go behind the curtain, and then only once a year, and only after having made atonement for himself and his family first.

When Jesus died on the cross, that thick curtain was torn in two from top to bottom. It wasn’t needed anymore. Why? Because our sin was punished. It was dealt with. Justice has been served. Christ took that punishment on himself. And the image he wants us to have in our hearts and minds now is of Christ, standing at the entrance to the throne room of God, holding the door open, holding the curtain back, inviting us to enter with him. We can run into the loving embrace of God, no longer fearing that his holiness will destroy us, because of what Christ has done on the cross.

The cross of Christ is the ultimate proof of the faithfulness of God. At the cross, every Old Testament covenant – God’s covenant with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, with David – they are all fulfilled. At the cross, every promise of God becomes a reality, and the future hope is secured.

In the cross, you and I become both a part of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham AND heirs of that promise. In Galatians 3, St. Paul says to Gentile believers in the region of Galatia, “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”

God is faithful. Whether we see the full fruition of his promises or not in our lifetimes. God is faithful, and God is bringing this cosmos to his desired conclusion in his time. And because of that, we can live as people of hope, solidly anchored to Christ, no matter what we face in this life.

This world equates hope with wishful thinking. Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas More: “But what is hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got ahold of.” But that isn’t the kind of hope we have in Christ. Our hope isn’t a straw man, or a house of cards. It is grounded solidly in the cross of Christ, where the love and faithfulness of God were put on full display, and where justice was served and sin dealt with.

And so we can keep going, keep holding on to Christ, keep holding on in hope – even when our lives are at risk. Even as poverty and injustice and evil seem to be growing. We can keep working to help those who are the victims of this worlds evils, even though it sometimes feel like no matter how many we help, there are two or three more to take their place. Even though it feels like this world and its evil is winning. We can keep going in hope, KNOWING that God is faithful, and so we can run to him for refuge and security, patiently knowing that God will do what God is going to do, in God’s time. Let’s pray.

[i] Adapted from Jen Wilkins, In His Image (Crossway, 2018), pages 97-98

[ii] Keith Wagstaff, “MIT Scientists Figure Out How to Get Ketchup Out of the Bottle,” Time.com (5-22-12)