How Great A Salvation
Hebrews 2:1-4
The Niagara River plummets some 180 feet at the American and Horseshoe Falls. Before the falls, there are violent, turbulent rapids. Farther upstream, however, where the river’s current flows more gently, boats are able to navigate. Just before the Welland River empties into the Niagara, a pedestrian walkway spans the river. Posted on this bridge’s pylons is a warning sign for all boaters: “Do you have an anchor?” followed by, “Do you know how to use it?”
Let me ask you the same two questions this morning. Do YOU have an anchor? Do you know how to use it? If we don’t have an anchor in life, we’ll soon find ourselves adrift in a cultural sea with currents and tides that are constantly changing. Without an anchor, we’ll find ourselves blown first one way and then another by changing cultural trends and popular opinions. Without a good anchor, we’ll eventually find ourselves shipwrecked along the shores of power, prestige, pleasure, and wealth.
We live in a world driven by popular opinion. Before we take a stand on an issue, we want to know what everyone else thinks. Some of us are always checking the winds the opinions of others and adjusting our sails, and our beliefs, based on what’s popular in the moment.
And for the past several decades, popular opinion has been founded on the principle of relativity. Relativity simply says that more than one thing can be right at the same time, even if they make mutually exclusive claims. So I can believe that Jesus is the messiah, the Son of the living God, and the only way to return to a relationship with God, and you can believe that we are all gods seeking higher levels of divinity and perfection, and we both get to be right, even though our belief systems run counter to each other. All that matters is that we’re both sincere in our beliefs.
So it doesn’t matter what or who you anchor to. One anchor is just as good as any other. Here’s the thing: there IS an ultimate reality out there. And truth is that which aligns with reality. If what I believe doesn’t align with reality, then my belief is wrong.
What, or who, have you anchored your life to? Beauty eventually fades for us all. We can lose power and prestige quickly. Wealth can disappear. Pleasure is shallow. None of those things, in and of themselves, is inherently bad. Power and prestige and influence can do a lot of good in this world if applied in the right way. So can wealth. We are intended to find enjoyment in this life. But if those things are all that we’re living for – if we try to anchor our lives to them – they’ll eventually fade and fail us, and we’ll find ourselves shipwrecked. It DOES matter to what or whom you anchor your life.
Is there an anchor that will never fail, no matter how big the waves, how strong the winds, how deadly the storm that blows against us? The writer of Hebrews answers that questions with a resounding YES! Turn with me to Hebrews 2:1-4.
“Therefore.” Because of what he’s just written. Because of the superiority of Christ, because of the supremacy of Christ. Because of the unmatched, unparalleled glory of Christ, we need to pay much closer attention to what we have heard. He’s talking about the good news of Jesus there.
Jesus is God’s ultimate revelation of himself to the world. In Jesus, God spoke not through an intermediary, not through angels or prophets, but directly to us. In Matthew 21, Jesus told a story, a parable, about a man who planted a vineyard, installed a wine press, put a fence and a watchtower around the vineyard, and then leased the vineyard to tenant farmers and went away.
When the time came to collect his portion of the proceeds from the harvest, he sent servants to get his fruit. But the tenants beat them up and even killed one. So he sent more servants, and the tenants did the same. So he sent his son, thinking, if they won’t respect my servants, perhaps they’ll respect my son, for he is the most valuable person to me. Of course, the tenants kill the son, thinking they’ll just take over the vineyard. So the landowner exacts his vengeance on the wicked tenants.
Jesus told that story as an example of what would happen to him. We didn’t respect the servants God sent … neither the angels who brought the law to Moses nor the prophets who interpreted it and reminded the people of it. So he sent his most valuable son, the one “through whom and for whom everything was created” (Col. 1:16). God’s final, complete revelation was given in the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus. And we need to stop taking that truth lightly. We need to pay much closer attention to it.
Have you ever made a mistake because you weren’t really paying attention? I attended college at Asbury University in Wilmore, KY, just south of Lexington. At the time, it was about a 2½ hour drive from my home in southwest Ohio to Wilmore in central Kentucky. I made the drive often enough. Often enough for it to become almost automatic for me. I also spent my junior year working as the youth pastor at a small Methodist church in Flemingsburg, KY, up closer to the Ohio River. It was a 90 minute drive from Wilmore to Flemingsburg, and during my junior year of college, I made that drive pretty much every Sunday – over to Flemingsburg early in the morning, and back to campus in the evening.
One Sunday, I was driving back to campus after a spring break spent at home. As I neared Lexington and hit the bypass, I saw the signs for the interstate I took over to Flemingsburg most Sundays, and I just sort of naturally went that way. I was over halfway to Flemingsburg, and had gone almost an hour out of my way, before I realized my mistake. I was safely navigating traffic the entire time, but I was on the wrong road, going away from campus. Why? Because I wasn’t paying attention.
The word translated as “pay much closer attention to” here normally means just that – “pay close attention.” But it can also have another meaning, a nautical meaning: “to moor a ship.” Remember, Hebrews is a sermon, written down and sent to Christians struggling under persecution. And the writer is a brilliant preacher. In English, “tie off a boat” and “pay close attention to” are very different phrases. In the common Greek of the time this sermon was written, they could be the same word, and he carefully chooses this word because of it’s double meaning.
He wants us to pay much more careful attention to the good news of Jesus, and he’s at the same time using the imagery of a ship. A ship that can either be securely moored or left adrift. Because what will happen if we don’t anchor ourselves securely to Christ? We’ll “drift away.”
“Gimme the beat boys to free my soul I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n roll and drift away.” That might sound good on an enclosed lazy river in a water park, or on a small lake on a warm summer day. But on the ocean? On open water? Not so much.
The opposite of anchoring ourselves securely to Christ is to drift away by “neglecting such a great salvation.” Look at V. 3. The danger comes when we neglect or ignore God’s great salvation in Christ. Remember, this sermon wasn’t written for nonbelievers. He’s writing to a church, to people who already identify with Christ, who already follow Christ. And his concern is our attitude of over familiarity with the good news of Jesus. Of taking God’s grace for granted. He isn’t talking about an outright rejection of faith but of slowly drifting away without even noticing. Both the anchored and the adrift are a part of the church. But one group is safe, and the other is in danger of shipwreck, of losing it all.
Like the word for “pay close attention to,” the word translated as “drift away” here can have two meanings. It can mean “slip away,” like a ring slipping off your finger unnoticed. You look down and notice that it’s gone, but you don’t know where it slipped off. You’ve lost something precious. And you don’t know if it slipped off in the toilet and you flushed it, or if it fell off while you were wrangling groceries into your car earlier in the day, or if it slipped into the brownie batter as you were baking. Regardless, you’ve lost something precious, and you didn’t notice until it was too late.
The word can also be used of a ship that has been carelessly allowed to slip past a harbor or haven because the mariner has carelessly forgotten to account for the wind or the current or the tide. And this pastor, who every scholar of Hebrews says is a brilliant orator and writer, means for us to have both meanings in our minds as we listen to him. He’s using the imagery of a ship, either well anchored or adrift.
And the difference between an anchored life and a life dangerously adrift is our willingness to pay careful attention to the Gospel, anchoring ourselves to it, instead of taking God’s grace and the message of forgiveness for granted. He’s talking about a people who, if the topic of the sermon each week at church was simply “grace,” would be there, eager to hear the message again, and more deeply. Never tiring of hearing how much God loves us and the precious nature of his forgiveness.
God gave the most precious thing inside or outside the cosmos, the most precious thing to ever be – the eternal Son – for you and for me. And the Son, Jesus, endured life in this world filled with sin, endured his betrayal by one of his closest friends, endured torture and then the cross, for you and me.
And he did that so that we wouldn’t have to experience the eternal, just retribution for our sin. Look at Vv. 2-3. We all have sin in our lives. I know that isn’t a popular thing to say these days. But it’s truth. It’s reality. Some of us have more sin than others, but we all have sin in our lives. If we don’t understand that, we’ll never truly understand the beauty of grace.
For some of us, like Saint Joy here, it might just be a little bit. For others of us, like Gregg and I, it’s a whole lot. But the amount doesn’t matter. Let’s say I go out into our backyard and get some of our new dog “June Bug’s” poop and I make a couple of brownies. One brownie is pretty much just dog poop. The other has all of the other ingredients of a normal brownie, but has a little bit of dog poop baked in. Would you eat either one? No! Of course not. Come to think of it, that might be a pretty good youth group game. Which brownie is bad? Truth is, they both are. No sane person would eat either. Both are tainted.
Some lives are more tainted, some less, but all are tainted by sin. And sin leads to punishment. It’s “just retribution,” as the writer of Hebrews says. Sin has consequences in this life, consequences that even the most faithful follower of Christ may have to endure. But it also has eternal consequences. Ignoring Jesus has consequences. So does slowly drifting away. It isn’t popular to talk about the consequences of sin these days. But those consequences are evidence of the love of God.
If I hit my brother when I was a kid, and my mom didn’t give me a consequence for it, she loves neither me nor my brother. Consequences show her love for my brother, because she stops me from hurting him, but they also show love for me, because they invite me into a better way of living that isn’t violent. Here’s the thing: if your sin impacts me in a negative way, I’m fine with you getting punished. I just don’t think MY sin, even my big sin, needs to be punished.
In Fleming Rutledge’s new book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, she acknowledges the difficulty that modern people have with the concept of God’s wrath. Nevertheless, she writes, “there can be no turning away from this prominent biblical theme.” But forget the Bible for a moment: don’t we have wrath, too? Rutledge writes:
A slogan of our times is “Where’s the outrage?” It has been applied to everything from Big Pharma’s market manipulation to CEOs’ astronomical wealth to police officers’ stonewalling. “Where the outrage?” inquire many commentators, wondering why congressmen, officials, and ordinary voters seem so indifferent. Why has the gap between rich and poor become so huge? Why are so many mentally ill people slipping through the cracks? Why does gun violence continue to be a hallmark of American culture? Why are there so many innocent people on death row? Why are our prisons filled with such a preponderance of black and Hispanic men? Where’s the outrage? The public is outraged all over cyberspace about all kinds of things that annoy us personally – the NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome – but outrages in the heart of God go unnoticed and unaddressed.
If we are resistant to the idea of the wrath of God, we might pause to reflect the next time we are outraged about something – about our property values being threatened, or our children’s educational opportunities being limited, or our tax breaks being eliminated. All of us are capable of anger about something. God’s anger, however, is pure. It does not have the maintenance of privilege as its object, but goes out on behalf of those who have no privileges. the wrath of God is not an emotion that flares up from time to time, as though God had temper tantrums; it is a way of describing his absolute enmity against all wrong and his come to set matters right.[i]
Punishment for sin is about God setting matters right, once and for all. That’s justice. Jesus allowed that punishment to be meted out on him on the cross so that I wouldn’t have to experience it myself. That’s grace. Justice and grace together are love. Ultimate love. Love that doesn’t let sin go unpunished but offers me forgiveness while still punishing sin. That’s this great salvation that we so often take for granted, ignore, don’t care about.
Do you have an anchor? Do you know how to use it? God offers you an anchor in Christ. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t allow over familiarity to steal your wonder at it all. It is the most precious thing in the universe. It is more precious than gold, more precious than diamonds, more precious even than air or water. Anchor yourself to Christ, and no matter how strong the current, no matter where public opinion tries to sway you, no matter how violent the storm, you will be held fast. Anchor to something else – acceptance and popularity, influence and power, wealth and pleasure – and you’ll soon find yourself adrift.
The Hibernia oil platform in the North Atlantic is 189 miles (315 kilometers) east-southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. The total structure, from the ocean floor to the top of the derrick, is 738 feet high and cost over $6 billion to build.
Unlike the fated Ocean Ranger, a platform that sank in 1982 with all 84 men aboard lost at sea, the Hibernia’s design incorporates a GBS (gravity based structure) which anchors it to the seabed. It is fastened to the ocean floor in 265 feet of water.
The structure does not move. It is stationary because it sits in the middle of “iceberg alley,” where icebergs can be as large as ocean liners. Sixteen huge concrete teeth surround the Hibernia. These teeth were an expensive addition, designed to distribute the force of an iceberg over the entire structure and into the seabed, should one ever get close.
But Hibernia’s owners take no chances. Radio operators plot and monitor all icebergs within 27 miles (45 kilometers). Any that come close are “lassoed” and towed away from the platform by powerful supply ships. Smaller ones are simply diverted using the ship’s high-pressure water cannons or with propeller wash. As rugged and as strong as this platform is, and as prepared as it is for icebergs to strike it, the owners have no intention of allowing an iceberg to even come close.
But the big one will come, and Hibernia is designed accordingly. It is built to withstand a million ton iceberg, with designers claiming it can actually withstand a 6 million ton iceberg with reparable damage.[ii]
The north Atlantic throws a lot at Hibernia, but she still stands, because she is solidly anchored. Do you have an anchor? Do you know how to use it? Let’s pray.
[i] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015), 130
[ii] Robert Kiener, “Marvel of the North Atlantic,” Reader’s Digest (December 1998)
