Throne of Grace

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.

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

As we conclude Hebrews chapter 4 today, we see another one of the more well-known verses from this great book telling us to approach God’s throne of grace. The reason that we can do so is because of Christ’s sacrifice for us. Not only his dying on the cross, but his sacrifice of leaving the presence of the Father to come to the earth as a man.

We see again that Jesus is our great high priest. The author of Hebrews mentioned that in chapter 2:17-18. It is a common theme throughout this letter. Remember when we first started this book, I mentioned how the author of Hebrews talked about Jesus as our ultimate prophet, priest, and king. Today, we will see more of how Jesus fills that priestly role for us.

Jesus, being our high priest, walked in our shoes and experienced temptation just as we do. And because of that, our passage says that he can sympathize with us and help us in our time of need.

Big Idea: Jesus knows our struggles and helps us through them.

Hebrews 4:14

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.

Because our sins are laid bare before God to whom we must give an account, and since Jesus has passed through the heavens as our great high priest, the author is telling us to “hold fast” to our confession.

What does the author mean when he says Jesus passed through the heavens?

The author returns to the idea of Jesus as our great high priest. The earthly priests had to come through three areas as part of the sacrificial process on the Day of Atonement.

First, the priest came in through the outer court of the temple and into the Holy Place, where the candlestick and the incense altar were placed.

Then, once a year, the priest would enter the Holy of Holies. This was where the ark of the covenant was held.

The priest would go into this small room, separated from the Holy Place by a thick curtain, and sprinkle the blood of the animal sacrifice onto the ark as an offering to God. There was a lot more to the ceremony for the Day of Atonement, which you can read about in Leviticus 16. That chapter lays out everything that the high priest was supposed to do on the Day of Atonement, or as it is called now, Yom Kippur.

When the author says that Jesus has passed through the heavens (plural heavens), he is talking about the three levels of the heavens as the Jewish people would describe them. First is our earthly atmosphere. Second is the stellar heaven, where the sun, moon, and stars dwell. The third heaven is the dwelling place of God. The author of Hebrews is making a comparison of what the high priest of Israel would do to what Jesus did for us on a grander scale.

The earthly temple was just a “shadow” of the real Holy of Holies in heaven, the throneroom of God. Jesus entered the throneroom of heaven, having already died as a sacrifice offered for sins. Since Jesus has already given himself for our sins, we should hold firmly to our confession of Christ, continually repenting of our sin.

If we understand all of this, we should “hold fast” or “hold on tightly” to our confession of Jesus Christ. One of my study Bibles says this about our confession of Christ: “Jesus is the center of our confession of faith in the gospel, both in creed and public testimony. Surely the readers of this letter would not give up Christ, whom they had professed, and reject what He had done for them, if they could understand the superiority of his person and work.”

This goes right along with our sermon from a few weeks ago, where we talked about how constant disobedience is a sign of disbelief. If we believe what is said about Jesus, we should hold on to our hope and confession that Jesus Christ is Lord. Why should we hold so fast to this confession?

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.

In lifting up Christ, telling of how he passed through the heavens, the author contrasts Jesus’ deity and glory with how he lived on earth.

Due to his deity, it would seem impossible that God could sympathize with our weaknesses. God does not sin. God does not die. However, this great high priest we have did come to earth as a man, was tempted in every way as we are tempted.

We saw in Philippians 2 how Jesus is the preeminent example of humility in leaving the eternal, holy presence of God the Father, entering into time and human flesh, and experiencing the weaknesses and frailties of humanity.

Philippians 2:5-8

Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus,

who, existing in the form of God,did not consider equality with Godas something to be exploited.Instead he emptied himselfby assuming the form of a servant,taking on the likeness of humanity.And when he had come as a man,he humbled himself by becoming obedientto the point of death—even to death on a cross.

Jesus taking on the form and likeness of humanity means that he experienced the same temptations and struggles that we do. Jesus got physically tired and needed sleep. But he did not allow that tiredness to be an excuse for saying something unkind to someone else. (“I am sorry, I was tired. I shouldn’t have said that.” You actually knew you shouldn’t have said it but wanted to anyway and just used your tiredness to excuse yourself.)

Jesus got angry, but that anger did not lead him to sin. (Ps 4:4 “Be angry and do not sin”) When Jesus flipped the tables in the temple due to his anger against how the Passover had become a commercial enterprise, filling the pockets of those selling animals and filling the treasury of the temple, instead of being treated as a religious ceremony meant to bring worship to the God of the universe, offering sacrifices as a way of repentance for sins, Jesus was not sinning in his anger.

Time for some openness and honesty from your pastor. I let my anger lead me to sin this last week, and I will tell you exactly how. I am a diehard Mariners fan. When the Mariners lost in game 7 on Monday night, I was less angry about the fact that they lost than I was about who on the Blue Jays hit the home run to beat them. If the Blue Jays' best player, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., or one of their other good players like Alejandro Kirk or Dalton Varsho had hit that game-winning home run, it still would have been crushing. I would have been upset. I would have been frustrated. But none of them hit that home run. It was George Springer.

George Springer was on the Houston Astros, a division rival of the Mariners, who won the World Series in 2017. That team was proven to have been cheating during the 2017 season, but only 3 of the coaches received any punishment, and the team had to pay a $5 million fine. They didn’t take away the World Series championship, and none of the players were punished in exchange for information on the coaches.

When Springer hit that home run, I said out loud, “Why him? Anyone could have hit that homerun, but no, it had to be Springer. Why?” I allowed my resentment over his past mistakes and my feelings of a lack of justice to rule over my reactions about the Mariners losing.

And while we are being honest…I did the same thing when the Seahawks lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl. “Why does someone like Tom Brady keep getting all of the credit for winning all these Super Bowls when Adam Vinatieri, the kicker, is responsible for two of those wins by kicking the game-winning field goal, and when a rookie cornerback made a good read to intercept the ball in the endzone at the end of another Super Bowl to defeat the Seahawks? But Brady gets to be lauded for the win? After this team had been caught filming the other team’s practices a few years before, and then got caught playing with footballs that were under-inflated so that they would be easier to throw and catch in a cold weather game?”

Yes, I have a tendency to allow my anger to take over, especially in instances of a perceived injustice on my part, and lead me to the sin of resentment. Your pastor is human. And your pastor sometimes lets his anger lead him to sin. That is what makes Jesus so great. Because he never let his situation, his feelings, or his exhaustion lead him to sin.

Hebrews 2:17-18

Therefore, he had to be like his brothers and sisters in every way, so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in matters pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people. For since he himself has suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.

Jesus suffered in his temptations. When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, there are scholars who believe that Satan was tempting him the entire 40 days that Jesus was fasting in the wilderness. Jesus was constantly being berated by the religious leaders of Israel, who were twisting the commands of Scripture away from God’s design.

Jesus had to explain that he would die and be raised again over and over and over to his own closest friends, and they still didn’t get it until after his death and resurrection actually took place. How many of us get irritated when our kids or family members don’t understand the FIRST time we tell them something?

Jesus dealt with such severe anxiety in the garden that the capillaries in his skin were bursting and mixing into his sweat glands so that he was actually sweating blood. In his humanity, he asked the Father if the cup of wrath could pass from being poured out on him on the cross. And yet, in submission to the Father’s will, said, “Not my will but yours be done.”

Jesus became fully capable of understanding and sympathizing with his human brethren. He felt the full force of temptation. Though we often yield to temptation before we feel its full force, Jesus resisted temptation even when the greatest enticement for yielding became evident.

John MacArthur

What MacArthur is saying is that Jesus has felt temptation in the fullest sense. He had Satan himself, face to face, in the process of a 40-day fast, trying to offer Jesus these wondrous promises. And still, Jesus never sinned. He never gave in to the temptation. We give in before the full weight of temptation hits us.

I have heard many try to excuse their sin by saying, “The devil made me do it.” Or, instead of the devil himself, we blame the spirit/demon of lust for our wandering eyes. We blame the spirit/demon of deceit for our lying tongues. We blame the spirit of disunity for infighting in the church. What we really need to blame is our own deceitful heart that needs surgical repair with the scalpel of the Word of God, being wielded by the Great Physician. We do not face the full force of temptation because we are too eager to jump at the opportunities to sin when our hearts present the evil idea.

Jesus did not yield. Even in the garden when sweating blood, Jesus did not jump at the idea of not going to the cross, saving him from the death he was to die, but instead, submitted to the Father’s will, taking the wrath of the Father for the sins of all who call upon him for salvation.

Jesus understands our temptations. He understands our suffering. I think Charles Spurgeon put it so well in his commentary on this verse when he said:

Many men can be touched by the sorrow of another, but they are not touched with that sorrow. It is one thing to see pain but another thing to be touched with the feeling of it. Our pain, our depression, our trembling, our sensitiveness— Jesus was touched with these though he did not fall into the sin that so often comes of them. We must treasure this view of our Lord’s sympathy, for it may be a great support in the hour of agony and weakness.

Charles Spurgeon

Jesus’ dealing with temptation allows him to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. Many would describe this sympathy that we see from Jesus as, what our culture and society today would call “empathy”.

In his book, Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund describes Christ’s ability to sympathize with us in this way:

“Our sinless high priest is not one who needs rescue but who provides it…His sinlessness is our salvation…Not only can he alone pull us out of the hole of sin; he alone desires to climb in and bear our burdens. Jesus is able to sympathize. He ‘co-suffers’ with us. As (Thomas) Goodwin’s contemporary John Owen put it, Christ ‘is inclined from his own heart and affections to give…us help and relief…and he is inwardly moved during our sufferings and trials with a sense and fellow-feeling of them.’”

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly

Christ has entered into our sufferings through his humanity. He understands the pain, the torment, and the struggle that we face when we are tempted. Jesus faced it to a greater extent than we ever could realize ourselves. And so we have a Savior, a high priest, who can sympathize with us in our struggles.

In many ways, this is what we try to do with our friends, neighbors, and family members. When they are struggling, we do our best to sympathize with them. Perhaps we have gone through the same situation that they now find themselves in. In a sense, we can put ourselves in their shoes, using our own experiences to offer encouragement and grace. We are told in Scripture to carry each other’s burdens.

We must be careful, though, not to allow our sympathy and attempts at understanding the pain of others to turn into us enabling them in their sin. This is where our culture’s version of “empathy” becomes problematic. We can understand and even feel the pain and suffering that others are going through in this life, especially if we have had to endure the same pain and suffering ourselves. What we cannot do is then use our understanding as a license to tell others to sin in their pain.

Here are some examples of problematic empathy:

“He has dealt with severe poverty in his life. He has a right to steal from that store so he can feed his family.” And then to justify it even further, “That is why the store has insurance. They will get that money back anyway.”

Another one -

“Her husband is so obsessed with his job and works all the time, not making any time for her. She should be able to go out, have fun, let loose, and find some companionship for herself if that’s what she wants to do.”

These are things that even those who claim Christ will say to justify sinful behavior. And then, when those they encouraged start to reap the negative consequences of their actions, like getting arrested for stealing, or getting pulled over for a DUI because they were encouraged to let loose and have some fun, and afterward thought they were okay to drive home, those who encouraged the actions will say the consequences or punishments are not fair.

This is the epitome of what Paul said at the end of Romans 1. He lists off all of these different sins that are a result of our turning away from God and then talks about those who encourage such behaviors.

Romans 1:28-32

And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. Although they know God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die—they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.

We should absolutely show compassion to those who are hurting and struggling. If we have the means to help, then in some way, especially other Christians, it should be an automatic response for us to desire to help them. That is what Christ has done for us in living his life on earth, facing temptation, never sinning, and then giving his life for us.

What Christ does not do is encourage us to sin because of our circumstances. Those are the temptations of the heart that we allow to feed our desires to sin. And friends that tell you that it is okay to do something sinful because you are dealing with a hard circumstance, they are actually your enemy. Friends point you to the truth in Christ, no matter how hard it may be to hear.

I do want to say one more thing about empathy. We can look at how our world pushes empathy, that we should enter into other people’s feelings and experiences, so that we can understand why they do what they do. However, with this emphasis on having empathy with everyone, and how we are so connected through technology, we are overloaded with all of the evil in the world and cannot function properly.

After remaining relatively stable throughout the early 2000s, rates of depression and anxiety began climbing noticeably in the early 2010s—the same period when smartphones and social media became widespread. In the United States, adolescent depression, self-harm, and suicide rates surged after 2012, especially among girls and young women, coinciding with the normalization of constant digital connectivity and social media use. Similar increases have been documented internationally, suggesting a consistent cross-cultural trend. - According to the National Library of Medicine and the World Economic Forum.

We know more than we were designed to handle. Our hearts and minds were not made to take in so much information, so much hate, so much despair.

Next Step: I will take planned time to “unplug” from the world.

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.

Having this great high priest allows us the opportunity to approach his throne of grace, his amazing grace, with boldness. We can have this boldness, not because of our own works, but because of the work of Christ himself.

We cannot do anything to bring ourselves closer to Jesus. Our works do nothing towards our salvation. We have the opportunity for salvation because Jesus, as our high priest, did not offer a bull or a goat as the sacrifice for sins, but instead offered his own sinless life, pouring out his own blood for us on the altar of God’s throne, so that we can receive the righteousness that he earned through his gift of salvation.

We can be confident in our salvation because it did not require our work to attain it. Jesus attained our salvation and is the one who keeps us. If it depended upon me to keep my salvation, I would have lost it many times over! But we can approach his throne with boldness when we understand that it is because of his own work that we can approach him at all.

The idea that God is approachable seems so foreign to our world. The president of the United States always has a mass of Secret Service agents around him. You need to be vetted before you can have a meeting with the president in his office.

We see a similar circumstance in the story of Esther. If you know the story, you may recall that it takes place during the time Israel had been exiled from the Promised Land into Persia. Haman, the king’s top advisor, had put a plan into motion to eradicate all of the Hebrews in Persia. Queen Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, discovered the plan and went to Esther, proposing that she ask the king for help since they were both Hebrews. We find the response that Esther gave to Mordecai in Esther 4:11 -

Esther 4:11

“All the royal officials and the people of the royal provinces know that one law applies to every man or woman who approaches the king in the inner courtyard and who has not been summoned—the death penalty—unless the king extends the gold scepter, allowing that person to live. I have not been summoned to appear before the king for the last thirty days.”

In Esther’s time, if you approached the king without specifically being summoned, you could be put to death. The only thing that could save you was if the king extended his scepter toward you as you approached. Any boldness that you have when approaching that king could more closely be called foolishness.

However, our King, the King of kings, does not have a fickle temper that would cast us to our death if we approached him “at the wrong time.” Jesus is ready to receive us and hear from us. As we approach Christ with boldness, seeking our Lord through prayer and humility, we can receive God’s mercy as he gives us the grace to endure trials.

We can approach Christ through prayer.

When we went through the book of Philippians, we saw Paul instruct his readers on how to come to the Lord with our prayers.

Philippians 4:6-7

Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Paul tells his readers to approach the Lord in prayer, bringing their petitions and requests to God. In response, Paul says that we will receive a peace that is beyond human understanding of this world. That peace that Paul mentions to the Philippians is one aspect of God’s grace that he provides for us in our time of need. Other aspects of that grace that God provides are positive answers to those prayers, like receiving healing from illness. It is also a grace from God when you receive an answer of “no” from God. It is in those times that we learn that what God has in store for us is greater than any plan that we can devise ourselves.

One of the prayers that I think the Lord is most honored to grant is when we pray for the message of his gospel to be spoken to the people who need to hear it. Paul asked the Ephesian church to pray for this very thing at the end of his letter to them.

Ephesians 6:18-20

Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints. Pray also for me, that the message may be given to me when I open my mouth to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. For this I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I might be bold enough to speak about it as I should.

Paul was asking the Ephesians to pray that he would be bold enough to preach the gospel. Imagine, with all of the stories that we see of Paul declaring the truth of the gospel throughout the book of Acts, he wrote to the Ephesians, asking them to pray that we would be bold in preaching the gospel.

This is something I want to ask from this church as well. I need your prayers. I cannot do this job on my own strength. My strength will only carry me and this church so far…and that is not very far at all. I ask that you would pray for wisdom and boldness for me in speaking the truth of Scripture. I would also ask that you pray for the spiritual protection of my family. The enemy does not like it when we proclaim the truth, and he will find ways to attack those who try to come against him.

Next Step: I will pray for my pastor.

I know that may seem like a very self-promoting next step. However, I know that I cannot do this job without the prayer and support of this church.

We have seen today that we can come to the Lord, approaching his throne to present our requests and petitions to him. But the most important request that you can ever ask of him is that of salvation. To ask God to save you from your sins through repentance and acknowledgement of Christ’s work on the cross is the most important request you could ever bring to him.

If you have never submitted your life to Christ through the prayer of repentance, admitting your sins, asking God to forgive you, and following after him with your whole life, today is the day to do so. Today’s passage told us that we can approach God’s throne of grace with boldness, seeking his mercy, asking for grace in our time of need. There is no greater need that you will ever have than that of needing a Savior. God has mercy and grace for those who seek him. Accept that mercy and grace today.

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

Let’s pray.

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