The epistle to the Hebrews might be the most tightly reasoned book in the whole Bible.  Sentence by sentence, clause by clause, the Hebrews writer constructs intricate arguments that establish the superiority of Christ over Moses and the folly of Christians returning to Judaism.  The more closely we read Hebrews, the more we will learn.

The care with which Hebrews is written makes the apparent logical disconnect in Hebrews 3:18-19 all the more surprising.  In context, the writer is discussing the Israelites who died in the wilderness during the time of Moses.  He says, “And to whom did [God] swear that they would not enter His rest, if not to those who disobeyed?  So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.”  

Hold on here, Hebrews writer!  You’ve given us evidence that God kept the Israelites from entering Canaan because of their disobedience.  Why are you acting like you’ve shown us that they had an unbelief problem instead?

The writer, and indeed the Holy Spirit, make this logical jump because they want us to realize that they aren’t making a logical jump at all.  Once the writer has established that the Israelites had a disobedience problem, he doesn’t have to prove that they had an unbelief problem—because disobedience and unbelief are THE SAME THING.  If we don’t believe God’s promises, we will not obey His word.  If we don’t obey His word, fundamentally, it is because we do not believe His promises.  Faith and obedience are inseparable.

This understanding is vital to us for at least two reasons.  First, it answers the tedious argument that we are saved by faith, not by works, so we don’t have to be baptized to be saved.  In reality, baptism is not an attempt to justify ourselves at all.  Instead, it is an expression of faith in the promises of God.  We believe that when the Holy Spirit says that baptism saves, He means it.  Accordingly, we obey the gospel.

 Second, it shows the importance of preaching, teaching, and study that builds faith.  Some brethren are interested only in preaching that is practical.  They want to be told about some godly thing that they can go home and do.

Instruction in righteous living is invaluable, full stop.  However, if we’re not careful, too much focus on the nuts and bolts of practical discipleship can leave us short on the motivation to be disciples.  Obedience is not and cannot be a just-because thing.  If hearing is not united with faith in us, we will not obey.

Instead, if we want to be obedient, we must look too to the parts of the Bible that build faith.  However remote the stories of the righteous men of old may seem to us, they all proclaim the same lesson:  God is a God who keeps His promises, so if we rely on Him, we will not be disappointed.  So too, the stories of the miracles of Jesus and His apostles, particularly the story of His resurrection, assure us that what He has promised, He is able to perform.  When our minds are filled with these things, it becomes much easier to make the right choices—because we know how deeply they matter.

In 1 and 2 Corinthians, we encounter a young church full of new converts.  Some of these people have come out of gross immorality to draw near to God through Christ.  However, the Corinthians suffered from a predictable problem.  Rather than abandoning their former worldly thinking, they imported it into the church, so that even the Lord’s Supper became an opportunity for them to exalt themselves and shame others.

In Galatians 5:13-15, Paul condemns this worldly worldview.  He points out that in Christ, we have freedom.  We are freed from our sins; we are freed from the need to justify ourselves before God through works of merit.  However, he warns the Galatians that it is all too easy to use our freedom in Christ to express our fleshly desires.  Rather than loving and serving one another, we can find ourselves attacking and devouring one another.

Sad to say, this fleshly attitude is all too evident among God’s people 2000 years later, even among those who have been Christians for much longer than the Corinthians had.  Most of us have probably seen brethren who obeyed the gospel decades ago acting as though they had never come out of the world in the first place.  Contentiousness, self-will, and pride are fully as evident in them as they are in someone who never has set foot inside a church building.

If we are honest, each one of us will admit that this is a struggle for us.  All of us were toddlers once, and inside us all, that inner toddler remains.  We want what we want, we want it now, and if we don’t get what we want, we are inclined to pitch a fit. 

Sometimes, brethren cloak their personal outrage in doctrinal self-righteousness.  They will seize upon an obscure issue and insist that everyone follow their obscure position, or else.  Really, though, whether they realize it or not, the true problem is not their quirky interpretation of the Scriptures.  It is that they aren’t being honored in the way that they feel they deserve.

This is not how we have learned Christ.  As Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 3:22, all things belong to us.  Our exaltation in Christ is so extraordinary that any of our attempts to exalt ourselves cannot change our position in any meaningful way.  It would be like me trying to make a meaningful contribution to the gold in Ft. Knox by tossing my wedding ring on the pile!

All things belong to us, so the affronts that matter so much to the world should be insignificant to us.  Brother X is a jerk.  Who cares?  We have Christ.  Sister Y insisted on her way.  Who cares?  We have Christ.  They are not rivals for the esteem that rightfully should be ours.  They are fellow heirs in Christ who offer us opportunities for service and love.  We must not bite and devour one another, but more importantly, we don’t need to bite and devour one another.  We already have been filled with Him.

When visitors from denominational backgrounds come to our assemblies, they are often puzzled by our tradition of a-cappella singing.  “Why don’t they use instruments?” they wonder.  If we explain that the Scriptures do not authorize the use of instruments in worship, they may be Biblically savvy enough to point to passages, usually from the Psalms, that contain commands to worship God with instrumental music.  Psalm 150:3-5 is the most prominent such passage, but there are others.

However, there’s a significant problem with assuming that what God bound on the ancient Jews is still binding on us today.  They served Him under a different law than we do.  They were bound by covenant to obey the Law of Moses, but we follow the law of Christ.

There are a number of passages in Scripture that make this point, but perhaps the clearest of them all is Galatians 3:24-25.  In this text, Paul compares the Law to a guardian.  Other translations here will say “schoolmaster” or “tutor”.  Colloquially, the English word that best captures the sense of the Greek original (paidagōgos) may be “crossing guard”—somebody whose job it is to make sure that a student arrives safely at school.

However, just as the guardian’s authority terminated when the student reached his destination, Paul reveals that the authority of the Law has ceased now that faith in Christ has arrived.  He tells the Galatians, “We are no longer under a guardian.” 

In context, Paul is particularly concerned with the Mosaic rite of circumcision, but his words have a much broader reach than that.  Some denominational commentators will attempt to divide the Law into two parts:  the ceremonial Law, which was nailed to the cross, and the moral Law, which continues.  This distinction was originally proposed by the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas about 1000 years ago. 

Aside from the difficulty of applying this scheme (Is tithing part of the ceremonial Law or the moral Law?), I’ve never been able to find any Scriptural justification for it.  Rather, we should take Paul at his word.  Nothing in the Law of Moses continues in effect.

This does not mean that the Old Testament is valueless.  It gives us precious insight into the prophecies concerning Jesus, the nature of God, and the application of moral precepts that are repeated in the ordinances that govern us.  However, for a law to fall into that category, it must have been repeated by Jesus or His apostles and prophets as a rule for Christians to follow.

Thus, when it comes to instruments of music in Psalm 150, we must acknowledge that even though the psalm contains a stirring call to worship, those verses have nothing to do with us.  The only instrument authorized by the New Testament, according to Ephesians 5:19, is the instrument that we all must play when we worship—the heart.

As much as the devil delights in anything, he delights in deception.  We have it on excellent authority that he is both a liar and the father of them.  Indeed, the fruits of his deceitfulness are evident everywhere around us; indeed, even in our own lives.  Sin is never good for us, yet he presents it as always good for us.  He holds forth good as evil and evil as good.  Perhaps most cruelly, he loves to convince unsaved people that they, in fact, have been saved.

In particular, he seeks to persuade people that baptism is unnecessary for salvation, despite abundant Scriptural evidence to the contrary.  Here, his preferred strategy is pitting the word against itself.  He points to the many passages that say that we are saved by faith, not works, claims that baptism is a work, and demands that we reject the baptism passages in favor of the faith passages.

This argument should make us suspicious, especially when we realize that Paul, one of the great New Testament defenders of the importance of baptism, also insisted that we are saved by faith apart from works.  This leaves us with two alternatives.  Either Paul is divided against himself, or there is something wrong with the proposition that baptism is a work!

It is, of course, the latter that is true, and nowhere is this more obvious than in his discussion of the spiritual problems in the Antiochene church in Galatians 2.  Some men who belonged to “the party of the circumcision” came to Antioch and pressured the Jewish Christians there into shunning their Gentile brethren.  The goal of this division was to compel the Gentiles to live like Jews by adopting the regulations of the Law of Moses.

In Galatians 2:16, Paul points out the crucial problem with this behavior.  Jewish Christians had become Christians in the first place because they knew they could not justify themselves by observing the works of the Law.  Rather than being justified by those Mosaic works, they sought justification through faith in Christ.  If those dead works didn’t help the Jews, then why in the world would the Jews want to bind them on the Gentiles?

Every time in Scripture that Paul contrasts faith versus works, this is what he is talking about: justification by faith in Jesus versus justification through works by perfectly keeping the Law of Moses.  Every time!  He’s not talking about Johann Tetzel and the sale of indulgences by the Catholic Church; still less is he talking about baptism.  Whenever we stop using “works” in the Pauline sense and define it in a non-Biblical way instead, we’re opening a door for the devil. 

In real life, there is no contradiction between baptism and salvation by grace through faith.  Baptism doesn’t earn salvation.  It’s an expression of faith in Jesus and the Bible’s promise that He will save us when we are baptized.  When we do what He has asked, He will keep His pledge every time.  When we don’t because we have been deceived into believing that we don’t have to, the devil rejoices.

Humility is everybody’s favorite virtue. . . for everybody else.  Everywhere we go, we are struck by how highly everyone else thinks of their own thoughts and conclusions.  My elders are stuck in the past, but they’re so sure of themselves that they don’t realize it!  My friend thinks they’ve got it all figured out, and they keep on telling me how I need to do my business!  My spouse thinks they’re God’s gift to marriage!  And so on.

Of course, something else is lurking underneath all this, and it becomes clearer once we focus on our solution to all these perceived problems.  How can the elders become savvier?  By listening to me.  How can my friend become less overbearing?  By acknowledging that I understand things better than they do.  How can my spouse stop being so arrogant?  By admitting that I am the truly wonderful partner in the marriage.

That reveals a pride problem, all right.  However, it’s probably not the pride problem that we think it is.  If we are honest, to our lists of all those we think are arrogant, we probably should add our own. 

Really, that’s just as well.  We’re not called to make anybody else be humble, so whatever pride problems they have aren’t our problems anyway.  We’re called to humble ourselves.  In 1 Peter 5:5, Peter is quite clear.  Humility is an outfit that all of us are expected to put on.

This means first of all not being quite so certain of ourselves.  The fate of the congregation probably does not hinge on the elders doing things our way.  Our friends probably will not end up dead in a ditch if they don’t listen to us.  Our vision for our marriages probably is not the only godly way for them to be.

Second, we need to engage in some soul-searching.  Why is it that it is sooo important to me to get my way in everything?  Sometimes, the answer is that we’re simply that confident.  More often, though, it is that we aren’t.  The words and actions of others bother us because they make us doubt ourselves even more, and we want them to stop so we can feel better about ourselves.

Just as God calls on us to rein in our pride, so too He helps us to conquer our fears.  As Peter observes just a chapter earlier, if we are devoted to what is good, who will harm us?  Indeed, who can harm us?  Not the people who ignore us.  Not the people who call our judgment into question.  Our security is not based on ourselves.  It is based on Christ.

Once we recognize that, rather than sweating everything, we don’t have to sweat anything.  No one can diminish us; no one can tarnish the eternal glory that soon will be ours.  When we have put on the gentle and quiet spirit of 1 Peter 3:4, it doesn’t matter what storms rage outside because Christ is inside.