Lecture 30: Hebrews' Warnings and the Lamb on the Throne

The lecture, section by section

1. Hebrews is a sermon

   Hebrews calls itself a word of exhortation, the same phrase used when Paul is invited to preach in the synagogue in Acts 13, and that identifies the book: Hebrews is fundamentally a sermon. Its main point fits in three words: don't fall away. All the magnificent theology, the Melchizedekian priest, the better covenant, the fulfillment of everything in Christ, serves that exhortation, because the biblical writers never issue imperatives without indicatives; imperatives alone are legalism. The theology is the foundation; the sermon's burden is perseverance.

2. Five warnings, one kaleidoscope

   The warnings punctuate the whole book: chapter 2, chapters 3 and 4, chapters 5 and 6, chapter 10, chapter 12, their exact edges sometimes hard to draw. Schreiner argues they should be read synoptically: they mutually interpret one another; they are all saying the same thing. His image is a kaleidoscope: shake it and the picture changes, but it is the same kaleidoscope; or think of a good preacher circling back to his one main point in fresh words. Two encouragements follow: Hebrews is a pastoral book, not an abstract treatise about sacrifices no one wants to offer; and its main point is easy to see, a simplicity on the other side of complexity, plain enough that Schreiner, preaching it, would stop and address the children.

3. Hebrews 6 describes Christians

   Who is warned in the famous passage? People once enlightened, and the author uses enlightened elsewhere of the readers' own conversion, after which they endured suffering. People who tasted the heavenly gift and the good word of God and the powers of the coming age, and tasted in this book does not mean sipped: its one other use says Jesus tasted death for everyone, and he did not sip it; taste means fully experience. People who shared in the Holy Spirit, and sharing in Hebrews is always real partaking, as of milk actually drunk, as of the flesh and blood Jesus fully assumed. The descriptions are descriptions of believers, and so the warning is addressed to believers.

4. Spurgeon's child and Grudem's list

   This puts Schreiner against the traditional Reformed reading, in good company. Spurgeon, in a judgment Schreiner paraphrases with delight, honored Gill and Owen and the reformers while saying their judgments on this passage were a little warped, for even a child would see these people are Christians: they have the Spirit. The finest modern defense of the traditional view, Wayne Grudem's essay, appears in Still Sovereign, the volume Schreiner edited with Bruce Ware; Schreiner commissioned it knowing he disagreed, calls it brilliant, and calls it wrong, a candid disagreement between dear friends. Grudem lists many marks the passage never mentions, forgiveness, sanctification, and concludes the people are almost Christians. Schreiner's reply: that is setting criteria in advance rather than dealing with what the author does say, and sharing in the Holy Spirit is the mark of a believer. Moreover the parallel warning does say sanctified: the apostate has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and that is the blood of Christ; to read it as a merely external, animal-blood sanctification reverses the book's entire argument that Christ's blood is nothing like the blood of animals.

5. Not rewards, and not Arminianism

   One escape route reads the warnings as addressed to Christians but threatening only loss of rewards; Schreiner notes that its advocates are nearly alone in the history of the church, and the language, trampling the Son of God underfoot, falling into the hands of the avenging God, will not shrink to forfeited rewards. It is can't-lose exegesis again. But neither does the passage teach that salvation can be lost. The argument Schreiner develops with Caneday, and finds in Spurgeon and others, is that the warnings are always effective in the lives of the elect: those who are truly saved always heed them. The warnings are not evidence against preservation; they are the means by which God preserves. And to the objection that the preserved should not need warnings, the answer is simply that the Bible says we need the means.

6. The promise and the warning on one ship

   Acts 27 shows the mechanism. In the storm, Paul the prisoner stands up like the captain and delivers a promise straight from an angel of the God to whom he belongs: take courage, there will be no loss of life among you, only the ship, and in the end all two hundred seventy-six aboard live, as Luke carefully counts. Yet Paul does not treat the promise as permission to go below and wait it out. When the sailors try to slip away in the skiff, he warns: unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved. A promise, and a warning, and no contradiction: the warning is the means by which the promise is secured. That is exactly how Hebrews works.

7. If possible, the elect

   Mark 13 runs the same pattern. The days are cut short for the sake of the elect, and false messiahs will arise with signs and wonders to lead astray, if possible, the elect; and it is not possible, for whoever finally believes in a false messiah never belonged to the true one. Yet in the same breath: watch, be alert, I have told you everything in advance. The certainty and the command arrive together, and the certainty works through the command. So the preacher can say plainly what the Bible says, that whoever fully and finally denies Jesus will be denied, and can add what the Bible also shows, in Peter's denial and Peter's tears, that the truly saved will finally repent.

8. Coming soon, two days in

   Revelation says Jesus is coming soon, and critics conclude the book was simply wrong. Schreiner answers from the whole New Testament, which contains both soon texts and delay texts: every generation has rightly said Jesus may come in our generation, and it has never been locked down; he may not. Eschatology is written to keep the church ready, not to be calculated. And by Peter's arithmetic, one day with the Lord being as a thousand years, it has been about two days; perhaps we can wait three or four.

9. Grace from the Three

   The greeting of Revelation 1 is quietly Trinitarian. Grace and peace come from him who is and who was and who is to come, the Father in context, the I AM who reigns forever. They come from the seven spirits before the throne, and this cannot be an angel, whatever some commentators suggest, for grace and peace in the New Testament come from God alone: no letter ever greets a church from God the Father and the archangel Michael. The seven, in apocalyptic idiom, signifies the perfection of the one Holy Spirit. And they come from Jesus Christ: the faithful witness, which the suffering churches are called to be; the firstborn from the dead, for those who may die for their faith; the ruler of the kings of the earth, whatever Rome imagines; the one who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood. The cross stands at the center of the greeting.

10. The throne over the suffering church

    Revelation's God is the Alpha and the Omega, and the book's constant word to a church being persecuted, even killed, is that God reigns and God rules. Do you feel that he is reigning while you are being put to death? Revelation insists on it, which is why suffering churches through the ages have loved this book, and rightly so.

11. The throne room and the right key

    After the letters to the churches, John is taken straight into the throne room: one seated on the throne with the appearance of jasper and carnelian, a rainbow like an emerald, and anyone who has read the Old Testament hears Ezekiel 1. That is the hermeneutical key to Revelation: the Old Testament, never the newspaper. The history of newspaper eschatology is a batting average of zero, with the Antichrist confidently identified as one statesman after another, and Schreiner keeps a running joke about a president whose three names have six letters each. Around the throne sit twenty-four elders in white and the four living creatures, the angelic court of Ezekiel's and Isaiah's visions; lightning and thunder proceed from the throne over a sea of glass. Entering God's presence is awesome, and the indescribable God is described in beautiful stones, for God is awesomely beautiful, a key to the whole book. The living creatures sing what Isaiah heard: holy, holy, holy; and the chapter ends with God worshiped as Creator.

12. The Lion who is the Lamb

    In chapter 5 a scroll sealed with seven seals stands at the right hand of the throne, and the question rings out: who is worthy to open it? No one in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, and John weeps, until an elder says: weep no more; the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered. The promises are fulfilled; the Davidic covenant has become reality. Then John turns to see the Lion, and sees a Lamb standing as slain. Lion or Lamb? Both, in apocalyptic vision, for the Lion conquers precisely by being the slaughtered Lamb: the victory is won through the cross, not by ravaging. The new song says it: worthy are you, for you were slain, and by your blood you purchased for God people from every tribe and language and people and nation, a purchase Schreiner reads as supporting definite atonement, and you made them a kingdom. And the Lamb is worshiped.

13. It was given

    One phrase carries Revelation's doctrine of providence: it was given. Again and again authority is given to the beast, and the divine passive means God gives it. Satan hands the beast its power, and over Satan stands God, as in the book of Job: no king, no ruler, finally does to God's people anything God has not allowed. At the end of the day, the beast rages on a leash, and the throne stands.

1. Hebrews preaches one point five ways: do not fall away. Where is drift most real in your life right now, and which of the book's glories, the great high priest, the better sacrifice, the promised rest, anchors you against it?

2. The warnings are means of perseverance, not threats against assurance. How do you hear hard biblical warnings: as condemnation, or as the voice that keeps you on the ship, and what would change if you heard them the second way?

3. Revelation was first loved by churches under the sword. When circumstances insist the beast is winning, what would it look like this week to worship the One on the throne anyway?