A Better Hope

So the previous command is annulled because it was weak and unprofitable (for the law perfected nothing), but a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.

None of this happened without an oath. For others became priests without an oath, but he became a priest with an oath made by the one who said to him:

The Lord has swornand will not change his mind,“You are a priest forever.”

Because of this oath, Jesus has also become the guarantee of a better covenant.

This is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Last week, we saw how the priesthood of Jesus is superior to the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament. The main reason given by the author of Hebrews is that the descendants of Aaron passed down the office of high priest through legal lineage. However, the book of Hebrews has told us over and over through references to Psalm 110 that the order of Melchizedek that Jesus belongs to is a priesthood that lasts forever because it is based on God’s specific choice and calling.

This week, we look a little more closely at why the law was not able to bring us closer to God, and how we needed Christ to come and establish a new and better covenant, one based on grace and not strict adherence to the law. That new covenant is what can give us hope today. We can put our hope in Christ and not in our own efforts or abilities to follow the law.

Big Idea: Christ initiated a better covenant.

Hebrews 7:18-19

So the previous command is annulled because it was weak and unprofitable (for the law perfected nothing), but a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.

The previous command that the author brings up is the Old Testament Law. He calls it weak and unprofitable. As I stated last week, this is not speaking to the morality of the Law, as it is perfect. There is nothing morally inadequate in God’s law.

The weakness of the law is that we cannot gain salvation through obedience to it. One of the things that I brought up last week was that the purpose of the Law was not to make us holy, but to show us our sin. The Law of God is a mirror, showing us how sinful we are. It exposes how our sinful nature has corrupted our hearts and minds.

Paul tells his readers in Rome about this in Romans 7. He said that he would not have known what coveting was if it were not for the law. But when he knew what coveting was and that the law commanded against it, the sinful desires within him jumped up and produced every type of coveting within his soul. And then he says this in Romans 7:9-12:

Romans 7:9-12

Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again and I died. The commandment that was meant for life resulted in death for me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.

What Paul is saying is that the law is good. The law shows us what it means to follow after God. The Law and the Prophets can all be summed up in “Love God” and “Love Your neighbor.” But sin sees that and automatically springs into action, saying, “That’s exactly the opposite of what I want.”

How many of us can admit that when we hear a rule or command, we feel this little gear inside us turn, we start to feel agitated, and we get this sense of indignation, like, “You can’t make me do that!”? That is the sin within us trying to seize an opportunity to defy God’s law.

When the author calls the law unprofitable, he is also speaking to the fact that righteousness is not gained through obedience to the law. We saw Paul speak about this as well in Romans 2:20:

Romans 2:20

For no one will be justified (or made righteous) in his sight by the works of the law, because the knowledge of sin comes through the law.

There is no righteousness to be gained by trying to obey the law. When we went through the book of Philippians, Paul spoke of how he could have more confidence in who he was as a follower of God’s law than anyone because of his ancestry and his zeal for the law as a Pharisee, even to the point of persecuting Christians whom he thought were preaching heresy against God because they believed in Jesus. And at the time of that letter to the Philippians, he calls all of that foolishness; he calls his deeds of following the law dung, human excrement, only good for being discarded as waste, because those things cannot save him and bring him closer to God.

This is why the author says that the law did not perfect anything. The translation team of the Christian Standard Bible that we use today put parentheses around that phrase of this verse to help us see that the weakness and unprofitability of the law has to do with its inability to perfect us.

This is why Paul told his readers in Philippians, after listing all of his accomplishments as a Jew and how zealous he was for obeying the law, that he considered those accomplishments as dung, human refuse, meant to be disposed of. Everything that he had gained in aspiring to the requirements of the law, he realized, could do nothing to bring him closer to God.

Paul called the attempt to gain righteousness through the law the equivalent of slavery. In his letter to the Galatians, the apostle showed his frustration with these Gentile believers because they had fallen for the teachings of the Judaizers. These false teachers were telling the Galatian Christians that they had to obey aspects of the Jewish law to be part of the family of believers. One of the main aspects of the law that the Judaizers emphasized was male circumcision. These Judaizers were not pushing all of the law onto the Gentiles, but just some major, external things that the law required. However, if you try to gain righteousness by the law, you need to obey EVERY, SINGLE, ASPECT of the law.

Galatians 3:10-11

For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, because it is written, Everyone who does not do everything written in the book of the law is cursed. Now it is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous will live by faith.

Paul quotes from Deuteronomy and Habakkuk to tell the Galatians that if they want to go the route of trying to obey the law, even as Gentiles, they better be ready to go the whole way and obey everything.

But just a little bit later, Paul tells these Galatian believers at the beginning of Chapter 5, to stand as free men and women in Christ, that the law cannot bring them closer to God.

Galatians 5:1-4

For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery. Take note! I, Paul, am telling you that if you get yourselves circumcised, Christ will not benefit you at all. Again I testify to every man who gets himself circumcised that he is obligated to do the entire law. You who are trying to be justified by the law are alienated from Christ; you have fallen from grace.

Following the law became something that was forced upon the Jewish people. The people, especially the religious leaders, did not obey God’s law because they loved God and wanted to serve and obey him out of devotion to their creator. People obeyed God’s laws out of fear. If one of the religious leaders saw them not obeying how the traditions of the elders interpreted the law, they knew they were in for public scolding and humiliation.

One of the best examples of this is when Jesus healed the man at the pool of Bethsaida. This man had been paralyzed for 38 years. Jesus tells him to get up, walk, pick up his mat, and go home. The man stands up, having life in his legs for the first time in 38 years. He is so excited that he does what Jesus asks, picks up his mat to go home, and tells all of his friends and family what God has done for him.

There were religious leaders there who saw the man pick up his mat and yelled at him, because carrying a mat, which would have been like a little rolled-up rug, was considered work by the traditions of the elders. And since it was the Sabbath, the religious leaders yelled at him for working on the Sabbath. Let’s just forget that this man was lame for 38 years and now can walk. Forget that miracle. He was working on the Sabbath.

This is part of the reason why Paul called following the law slavery. It was a chain. Paul calls it a yoke. This is the heavy, wooden beam that would be mounted to a pair of oxen to pull a cart together.

The reason that being yoked to the law is so difficult and burdensome is that you are putting in all the effort. The law does not pull you along toward righteousness. If you have a yoke mounted to you that is connected to those stone tablets, all the law will do is put more weight for you to pull on your own. The law only shows us our sin and cannot lead us to righteousness.

This is why people who see Christianity as just a bunch of rules feel so burdened. There are people in the church who only show up because they feel an obligation to be there. I have known people who only showed up at church when they were serving on a ministry team. If they weren’t serving, they weren’t showing. That is a burdensome, law-based mentality. There is no hope in that.

Instead, a better hope comes along in the form of Christ Jesus.

Matthew 11:28-30

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Next Step: Memorize Matthew 11:28-30

Jesus is speaking to those who are weary and burdened by the struggles of life, burdened by the weight of performative religiosity. He says that we can find rest in him. How do we get that rest? Jesus tells us to take HIS yoke upon us. He tells us that his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

The burden of the law is a yoke that drags us down. But the yoke of Christ is easy, it is light on our shoulders. This is because Jesus has taken all of the weight. He is the stronger of the pair hooked to that yoke. He is there to walk alongside us, carrying the load with us and for us. He has already borne the true weight of our sin through his death on the cross.

If you have been carrying the weight of your own expectations, trying to depend on your own strength to get through the day, thinking that everything depends on you. It is time to let that go.

Next Step: I will trade my yoke for Christ’s.

Identify one area in your life where you’ve been striving in your own strength, and intentionally surrender it to Christ, trusting Him to carry the weight with you.

Through Jesus, through this better hope that the author of Hebrews is describing, we “have access” to the Father and can draw near to him. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul is again writing to a group of Gentiles who were likely being persecuted by the Jews around them concerning what they believed about God. But he tells them this in Ephesians 2:13 & 18:

Ephesians 2:13 & 18

But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ…For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

Our sin separates us from God, but through repentance and belief in Christ, we can approach the Father. Through the work of Jesus Christ, we can have communion with God that humanity lost when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. How good it is to know that we can draw near to God.

Hebrews 7:20-21

None of this happened without an oath. For others became priests without an oath, but he became a priest with an oath made by the one who said to him:

The Lord has swornand will not change his mind,“You are a priest forever.”

The author now gets back to this verse in Psalm 110 that he has now addressed 3 or 4 different times so far in this letter.

Psalm 110:4

The Lord has sworn an oath and will not take it back:

“You are a priest foreveraccording to the pattern of Melchizedek.”

In many translations of the Bible that have section titles to help give reference to what is being said in that part of Scripture, Psalm 110 is called “The Priestly King.” This is a prophetic psalm of David in which he tells of the coming messiah who would rule over his enemies as a king, but throws in this part of the messiah also being a priest after Melchizedek into the middle of the psalm. Remember that the offices of priest and king were separate offices with separate duties. But we also saw last week that this “order of Melchizedek” combines the offices of priest and king.

In this psalm, we see David proclaim that God gives this oath to the priestly king that he would be a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. When God makes promises, he doesn’t go back on his word.

God’s oaths do not change. There are no take-backs when God says he is going to do something. When God speaks, it will happen.

In Romans, when Paul is telling the Gentile believers in the church at Rome that God still has a plan for Israel, there is a reason for it. We see throughout Scripture that Israel holds a special place in God’s heart. Paul says that when Gentiles were added to God’s covenant family, there were some branches of this tree, parts of the people of Israel, that were pruned off so the Gentiles could be grafted into the tree. However, he warns his readers that it doesn’t mean that God is done with Israel. He says in Romans 11:29:

Romans 11:29

…God’s gracious gifts and calling are irrevocable.

The word irrevocable means that God does not take it back. When God makes a promise, that is it. It’s going to happen. We already saw how the author of Hebrews addressed this idea of God not going back on his promises in Hebrews chapter 6.

Hebrews 6:17-18

Because God wanted to show his unchangeable (or irrevocable) purpose even more clearly to the heirs of the promise, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us.

The two unchangeable things the author is talking about are God’s promise and his oath. When God makes a promise, he keeps it. When God makes an oath, he will fulfill it.

When we went over this section of Hebrews in December, we looked at what God’s immutability, or unchangeableness, looked like. The Puritan Stephen Charnock described God’s unchangeable nature in this way:

“If God were changeable, He would not be infinite and almighty. All change ends in addition or diminution. If anything be added, He was not infinite before; if anything be diminished, He is not infinite after. All change implies bounds and limits to that which is changed, but God is infinite; His greatness is unsearchable. We can add number to number without any end and can conceive an infinite number, yet the greatness of God is beyond all our conceptions.”

Stephen Charnock

As soon as God changes, he is no longer God. If God needs to change, he never was God in the first place.

This passage in Hebrews is the only place where we see that God has sworn an oath about a priesthood. God did not swear an oath to the Levitical priests. They gained their position through inheritance. They were simply going through with what the law required. However, there was no promise made to the Levitical priests about their priesthood lasting any specific period of time.

Hebrews 7:22

Because of this oath, Jesus has also become the guarantee of a better covenant.

The oath that God made to Christ established Jesus as a guarantee, or surety, of a better covenant. When God makes an oath, he follows through. This oath started with Adam and Eve after the fall. God told Adam and Eve that their sin had consequences. When he told the consequences to the serpent, he said the offspring of the woman, a child born of a woman, would crush the head of the serpent, even though the serpent would strike the heel of this promised snake crusher.

The artist who created the graphic we use for this sermon series did a picture about Genesis 3:15, where God made this promise to the serpent.

It took thousands of years for that oath to come to pass…but it came to pass. We get bent out of shape when our wifi causes a movie on our phone to have one little hiccup. If that spinning circle on our screens lasts for longer than half a second, we start to feel this rage inside of us. What a lack of patience we have.

Good things take time. Better things take even longer. A good marriage does not just appear. If you get married and think that everything will be sunshine and roses from now on, you have been lied to. Its the same with when people say that once you give your life to Christ, everything should be health, wealth, and prosperity. That is a lie.

It takes work from both the husband and the wife. A good marriage works through differences, has both husband and wife admitting faults, both asking the other for forgiveness, both sacrificing for the good of the other, and both pointing each other to Christ for strength when life seems to be beating you both down. A good marriage can figure out how do this for a little while.

A great marriage has figured out how to do this well and do it longer. These couples have learned to have some patience with each other, knowing that the marriage oath was not taken lightly.

The better marriages, the best marriages endure with patience that can truly only come from God, doing this in a way that not only builds up both the husband and wife in the strength, trust, and truth of Christ, but it also shows an example to others around them for generations.

Both of my sets of grandparents exemplified this in that they were willing to stick it out, have patience with each other, and work through the difficulties of marriage and children, children rebelling against their upbringing and later coming back, military service, their children getting married, having grandchildren, cancer diagnoses, kidney failure, hearing loss, and even alzheimers and dementia. My Stewart grandparents were married for 52 years before grandpa Bud died in 2008. My Skolrud grandparents were married for 65 years before grandma Dorothy died in 2020. Both sets of grandparents were still in love with each other when God decided to take them home. That faithfulness and patience have provided amazing examples to their children and grandchildren of what marriage really takes.

The author says that Jesus is the guarantee of a better covenant. Better has been a common theme throughout Hebrews. In Hebrews 1 & 2, we saw how Jesus is better and superior to the angels. In chapter 2, we saw the implication that Jesus is better than Adam. In chapter 3, we saw that Jesus is better and superior to Moses. In chapter 4, we see Jesus as better than Joshua. In chapter 5, Jesus is described as better than Aaron the high priest. In chapters 6 & 7, we saw that the priesthood of Jesus is greater than that of the Levitical priests of the Old Testament, and that he is the better Melchizedek.

This is why our series going through Hebrews is called “The Supremacy of Christ.” Jesus is superior. All of those characters in the Old Testament were hints, or shadows, pointing toward the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises in Jesus Christ.

The covenant that is instituted in Christ is better than the covenant instituted through the law. The law was not deficient in its morality. It was deficient in that humanity could not live up to its end of the covenant. Israel’s disobedience of the covenant is what caused their exile to Assyria and Babylon. It was God’s grace that allowed them to come back to their homeland.

We saw earlier in Galatians 3:10-11 that if you try to gain righteousness through obeying the law, you have to do everything in the law. If you don’t obey every part of the law, you are cursed. But Jesus obeyed every aspect of the law, fulfilling the covenant and earning righteousness from God that the rest of humanity could not.

Paul then continued to tell the Galatians in the next two verses that the law is based on action, not faith. And that if we fail to do the actions, we are cursed, deserving of death for rebellion against God. But that is where Christ came in.

Galatians 3:12-13

But the law is not based on faith; instead, the one who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, because it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.

Christ was righteous according to the law. He did not deserve death. He did not deserve to be cursed for disobedience to the law. However, he offered himself, as our high priest, the perfect human being who was completely righteous according to the law, taking the punishment that you and I deserved for our rebellion against the law of God. He became that cursed man, hung on a tree, taking the wrath of God against the sins that you and I have committed against the Father. Jesus endured that punishment, dying on that cross for you and me.

My sinfulness would not allow me to keep all the statutes of the law required to gain righteousness. My life has no hope if my obedience to the law was required for me to get to heaven. But because Jesus earned that righteousness through obedience to the law, and because he took the punishment I deserved for my rebellion against God, I have a better hope.

When I repented of my sins, when I believed that the work of Jesus Christ was the only thing that could save me from the punishment, when I made Christ the Lord of my life, submitting to him, taking up my cross to follow him, I was given life by the grace of God. That life cannot be taken away. And now, through the work of the Holy Spirit, who works in me, changing my thoughts and the desires of my heart to better reflect the heart and mind of the King who saved me, I know what true freedom actually is.

You can have that freedom today. You can know freedom. You can have eternal life that no thing and no one can ever take away from you. But it takes sacrifice. Like the marriage example we used earlier, Jesus has already given his life for you in this relationship. He paid off all your debt. This isn’t monetary debt, but the debt you owed to God because of your disobedience. Jesus is telling you that he will love you, support you, carry you, and guide you to the truth.

Are you willing to give up your life for him? Are you willing to sacrifice everything in return for the one who gave everything he had for you?

Next Step: I will repent and submit my life to Christ.

Let us pray.

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