Jesus Sympathizes With Us

Introduction

I have said before Jesus did not come to be our second chance he came to be our second Adam

But He also came to be the truer and better everything God’s people had

He is the rest we need, the high priest we need, the Moses we need, the David we need, the Judge we need

He is the true and better everything

We get to see how much better

Mission Accomplished

Verse 14

Hebrews 4:14–16 “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus the Son of God—let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.”

Anytime we see a therefore the author is saying “because of what I have just said what I am about to say is a reality”

So what has he said that makes what he is about to say so astounding?

For 13 verses he has laid out that the rest we long for is only found through the wonderful person and work of Jesus

He has said all other ways we try to find what we ache for will fail us

He has talked about the rest God enjoys and that he offers to us

It isn’t the language of God taking a nap

It the language of working for long hours finally sitting back and looking at what you have done and saying “its perfect”

It needs no extra touches

And what is amazing is that it is the same language Jesus used on the cross before He died and said “It is finished”

That was not the exclamation of failure…it was the declaration that what was needed was accomplished perfectly

Nothing is lacking in the salvation Jesus purchased for you

So therefore…because that is the reality be in awe at the one who accomplished the impossible

He is the great High Priest who took the throne

We are mezmorized by nativity scenes and we should be when we think of the necesity of His birth

We are all dressed up and churches are packed at Easter when we think about the miracle of His rising from the dead

But we forget a moment just as important

The day he ascended to the throne still in his humanity

Daniel saw this coming

It was going to be the sign that God had come to save us

Daniel 7:13–14 “I continued watching in the night visions, and suddenly one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was escorted before him. He was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that those of every people, nation, and language should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will not be destroyed.”

The one who would rule over everything when he , looking like us as a person, went up to the Father

Mark 16:19 “So the Lord Jesus, after speaking to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.”

sounds like the one Daniel saw?

So it was at the ascension where the Lamb became the Lion again

He is there

His supremacy, His humanity, and His deity collide to make Him worthy as the one promised in Daniel to save His people

Hebrews is saying since He is there don’t lose hope cling to it

If He did that He will work all things together for good …you will be with Him and repeat His words…”perfect”

You may not get all the answers to suffering in this life but you will get the rest of God when you are with Him and look back at your life and He says to you “See I nailed it”

It was perfectly all you would ever need to get home

SO hold fast don’t let go of me

Cling to the corner of my garment like the woman in Mark 5 until i make everything sad come untrue

Erik Raymond says : Our hands of faith should be calloused from clinging to the rope of hope.

Verse 14 ends by saying:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 4

let us hold fast to our confession

The greek word for confession means hope and confidence

We hold to the hope that His humanity then…and His humanity now proves is ours

And that changes everything

One author says

The Message of Hebrews 1. A Victorious Priesthood (4:14)

in the light of this victor, this is no time for cowardice

Be the kind of Christian who happens to life NOT simply someone who life happens too

Raymond Brown said

The Message of Hebrews 1. A Victorious Priesthood (4:14)

This is not merely an appeal for endurance but an exhortation to fearless witness. Don’t be robbed of your faith; advertise it. Hold it fast and hold it forth. In order to become our effective and adequate priest, Jesus suffered ‘outside the gate’ and we must be prepared to go out into the alien or apathetic, Christ-rejecting or Christ-ignoring, world, ‘bearing abuse for him

Later in this letter he says Hebrews 10:23 “Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful.”

Because He is faithful…live a fearless faith

The Message of Hebrews 2. A Compassionate Priesthood (4:15–5:3)

If verse 14 tells us that, in a hostile world, we should not be ashamed of Christ, verse 15 assures us that we should not be lonely either

The High Priest We Need

Verse 15

Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”

We are pretty far removed from knowing who a High Priest was and what on earth he did and why on earth it matter for us today

Who was the High Priest in the Old Testament? What did he do that was so important but so insuffient we needed a better one

He was the main mediator between God and Us

Sin seperates us from God

Sin is a tearing apart of what was meant to be together

The High Priest went to God for the people to make a way back to Him

2. He made sacrafices and atonement for the peoples sin

It happened every year because we kept messing up

3. He was chosen by God not people

4. He would go to God in prayer and get guidance for the people

This is huge

The Message of Hebrews 2. A Compassionate Priesthood (4:15–5:3)

prayerlessness is the root of all sin. When we do not give time each day to earnest and believing prayer, we are saying that we can cope with life without divine aid. It is human arrogance at its worst

The Message of Hebrews 2. A Compassionate Priesthood (4:15–5:3)

To be prayerless is to be guilty of the worst form of practical atheism. We are saying that we believe in God but we can do without him

5. He had to be sympathetic

He had to deal gently with the ignorant and the repeat sinners who really tried but kept falling in the war against sin

But the human High Priest could never do enough

We kept needing atonement because what we could do even at our best was lacking and imcomplete

Jesus is the better High Priest we need

He was the better mediator between us and God

He is at the throne pleading for us right now

Hebrews 10:19 “Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus—”

We DO NOT need any earthly man to intercede for us we can go boldly to God through the better sacrafice of God himself

2. He made the perfect sacrafice to cleanse us from sin

Psalm 103:12 “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”

1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

3. He was chosen by God not us

He was the savior we needed not the savior we would choose

Isaiah knew this when he was speaking about Jesus thousands of years before He came to save us

Isaiah 53:3 “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was. He was like someone people turned away from; he was despised, and we didn’t value him.”

The Jews were waiting for a military ruler to make Israel great again

But here was the King come to make a new Kingdom not of this world but for the world we were made for

4. He would go to God in prayer

Jesus did everything in his earthly life through prayer

Desperate prayer was the daily rythem of Jesus’ life

In His humanity he did it and is doing it as the mediator for us right now

Romans 8:34 “Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the one who died, but even more, has been raised; he also is at the right hand of God and intercedes for us.”

Hebrews 7:25 “Therefore, he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, since he always lives to intercede for them.”

Puritan Robert Murray M’Cheyne saidn :I f I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies. Yet distance makes no difference. He is praying for me. “

5. He was the ultimate sympathizer with us

Raymond Brown said:

The Message of Hebrews 2. A Compassionate Priesthood (4:15–5:3)

‘His whole life was one of temptation, and the very fact that he had powers and abilities which we do not possess only added to the stress. He was the fullest and most vivid personality that this world has ever known, and the very richness of His human nature exposed Him all the more fully to the assaults of temptation.’ No-one on earth, before or since, has ever been through such spiritual desolation and human anguish. For this reason he can help us in our moments of temptation. He is aware of our needs because he has experienced to the full the pressures and testings of life in this godless world.

Our verse again- Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”

The Epistle to the Hebrews 4:15. Christ and Temptation

the author is thinking, not of physical weakness, but of the intellectual and moral weakness which leads to failure to do God’s will

What does it mean that he was tempted in every way we are?

The Message of Hebrews 2. A Compassionate Priesthood (4:15–5:3)

at the root of the different temptations encountered by men and women throughout the wide range of human experience there are a number of basic trials or tests

Temptation no matter what it is - can lead to the same self defeating choices

Despair, selfishness, rebellion against God, a self focused faith, destruction to the church through divisiveness, on and on and on

He had the self destructive outcomes before Him we do

John 14:30 says something very interesting

 You remember how He once said, “Satan is coming, but he has nothing in Me” (John 14:30), meaning:

“There’s nothing in Me he can land on—no fifth column within Me, no loose thread of sin that he can pull on to unravel Me.”

We have threads the enemy and sinful self can pull on and unravel us

We have places sin can land on

Jesus never did even when every circumstance said God was failing Him, His friends were failing Him, those He came to save were failing Him

The Epistle to the Hebrews 4:15. Christ and Temptation

Christ’s earthly life gives him inner understanding of human experience, and thus makes him ready and able to give active help

His whole life was suffering school…and how to be a better High Priest school

Justin Dillehay said: For Jesus to become a sympathetic high priest, it was first necessary for him to become like us. Stated plainly, “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest” (Heb. 2:17). This is one of the reasons the incarnation was necessary—not just so that he could die for us, but so that he could relate to us from the inside.

Jesus’s high-priest training was Jim learning to submit his natural desires to his Father’s will.

This is what his training involved: learning to submit his natural desires to his Father’s will, even when it meant pain and hardship and self-denial—as it often did.

His learning to sympathize makes hard to understand passages make sense like Hebrews 5:9 “After he was perfected, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him,”

he was always perfect so how was he perfected

It was in His suffering to sympthize that was being perfected

He was prepared to have the cup of God’s wrath placed before Him through a lifetime of learning through daily suffering

DIllehay says “Gethsemane didn’t happen in kindergarten.”

He had to learn the discipline of obedience so that when the ultimate tempation came he had a doctorate in obedience

It was His masterpiece

How We Approach Our Gracious God

Verse 16

Hebrews 4:16 “Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.”

Here is the word therefore again

He is saying because we have the High Priest we need do something

Approach the throne boldly

Every word of this verse builds on itself in an incredible way

Draw Near- means actively coming before God. If we were to enter the throne room of a king, we would have to deliberately and physically bring our bodies before the king because we had a request to make of him. I can’t say how many times I lament my ineffective prayer life without failing to see how many times I fail to physically bring my body before God in prayer.Drawing near 

Draw Near With Confidence - is no small matter. For subjects of the kings of old, to approach the throne without being summoned was to invite certain death.  You may recall Queen Esther’s boldness: “I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish” (). Of course, Esther’s confidence came from her trust in the sovereignty of God over life and death, and our confidence comes because we rest in the advocacy of a great High Priest who is perfect and is sovereign over life and death.Drawing near with confidence Esther 4:16

Draw Near With Confidence To The Throne means drawing near a throne. Where God is seated. God. Who created and upholds all things by the power of His word. And we are approaching His throne to stand in the immediacy of His glory-filled presence, and all of His attention is on our lips to hear a request He already knows. This is stunning.Drawing near with confidence to the throne 

Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace this throne is unlike any other kind of throne. Many kings have been vicious tyrants; some others have been benefactors. But there is no throne upon which a mortal king has sat that can be called a throne of grace. Our God is so bent towards grace that He seats Himself upon it and surrounds Himself by it. His throne alone is a throne of grace.Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace 

Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace to receive mercy seems like a paradox. A guilty man coming before a king to beg for mercy does not come with confidence; he comes with wobbly knees and a trembling voice. But the promise we have in drawing near the throne of grace with the advocacy of our perfect High Priest allows us the freedom to expect mercy when we come.Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace to receive mercy 

Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace means the God who seats himself upon a throne of grace offers grace to us as well. He is the source of this grace but does not hoard it. He means not only to give us grace but for us to find it as well.  When we seek at the throne of grace, we find what we are seeking.Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace 

Drawing near with confidence to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need the grace we find when we approach the throne of God, with confidence, finding mercy, is the kind of grace that is meant to help us. His grace not only forgives; it enables. It not only absolves sin; it sustains. And this kind of grace is the kind of grace that addresses all kinds of needs because it is a grace from a God who is sovereign over all things.

Because he died and rose then, and ascended Jesus represents us in heaven now, able and willing to save us to the uttermost.

This is the effect in our daily lives that His humanity has on us

Hebrews 4:14–16 “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus the Son of God—let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.”