Hebrews Lesson 108
NKJ Isaiah 40:31 But those who wait on the LORD
Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.
We’re in a series on Hebrews,
but we won’t spend much time in Hebrews to begin with so don’t bother turning
there yet. In fact if you want to turn
somewhere, go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Ephesians 1:13 - Ephesians 1:13.
We started this sort of minor
digression here about two weeks ago in Hebrews 7:25 where we’re in the middle of
one of the most significant passages on the present ministry of Jesus Christ in
the book of Hebrews. Hebrews 7 begins to
introduce us to His current ministry which is referred to as His high priestly
ministry. Jesus is in session. That’s a term that theologians developed to
describe the fact that He is seated currently at the right hand of God the Father
based on the Latin word sessiona meaning to be
seated. He is not on the throne of David
right now. He is not reigning from
heaven. He is not in a position of
authority other than He is the High Priest who is interceding for us at the
right hand of God the Father. So chapter
7 goes through a lengthy analysis of His priesthood that it’s not based on the
Levitical priesthood which is based on genetics. It’s a Jewish priesthood that was based on
the Mosaic Law and God set aside one tribe of the 12 tribes of
So the Jewish priesthood was
a temporary priesthood. The priests were
fallen. They were sinners. They had to not only offer sacrifices for the
people, but they had to offer sacrifices for themselves. It was not a permanent fix to the sin problem,
but it was designed to teach about what needed to happen in order to solve the
sin problem. It was a picture of death
and that the penalty for sin was death. Back
in Genesis 2:7 God would provide the perfect solution. So we
studied in the Mosaic Law the fact that just about anything you did would cause
you to be ceremonially unclean which meant that you couldn’t come into the
presence of God and before fellowship could be restored there would have to be
some sort of offering, sacrifice.
Various different kinds of offerings were prescribed, but usually and
ultimately it was a blood sacrifice (the blood of the lamb) that was the
ceremonial element that secured that cleansing.
That was a picture of Jesus Christ and His death on the cross as the
Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world.
So the writer of Hebrews is
addressing a Jewish audience and he goes through in chapter 7 and in the latter
part of chapter 7 he is addressing the reason they has to be this shift to a
new kind of priesthood.
The old covenant which is
what we will get into a little bit in the next chapter was temporary. It was only designed to function for a short
period of time until a permanent solution would come into place. That permanent solution came into place when
Jesus Christ died on the cross and there He made a sacrifice for our sins and His
death actually establishes the basis for the New Covenant. The New Covenant is the subject of chapter
8. So here in chapter 7 it focuses on
what He has done as a High Priest.
In chapter 7 we read:
NKJ Hebrews
This is a fantastic truth
that very few Christians down through history have understood, especially if
you go back and have any understanding of the early church. By the early church I also include the medieval
church from approximately 100 AD with the death of the last apostle up through –
actually it was in the 1520’s – the early stage of the Reformation. No one really understands that they have a
secure salvation. They have got confused
thinking, muddy thinking. Every now and
then there is a light that seems to understand a few things, but for the most
part there is this thinking in the early church that baptism literally washed
away sins. It wasn’t just a symbolic
event. So people are terribly concerned about
what happens to them after they are saved if they commit sin. This is one reason if you read any of the
stuff in The Da Vinci Code that Constantine
who was the emperor who legalized Christianity in the
NKJ Matthew 27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus
cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"
that is, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"
He is crying to the Father,
but He calls Him God which indicates that there is a separation, a distinction. There is not that intimacy between Him and
the Father. Why? Because at that point in time the sins of the
world are being imputed to Him and He is being judged for our sins.
As Paul put it in 2
Corinthians:
NKJ 2 Corinthians
So there is this transfer on
to Him of our sins so that He takes the penalty upon Himself. This is what establishes the basis for
salvation. So, all sin is paid for. There is no sin that you can commit today that
wasn’t paid for by Jesus Christ on the cross. God the Father as the absolute and eternal
judge of the universe is omniscient. He knows every single sin that every single
person can commit and will commit in history.
He knows every sin you are going to commit the rest of your life. He knows every sin you have committed. There are no secret sins. He took every single sin in human history and
imputed that to Jesus Christ so it was actually and truly paid for on the cross. Because God the Father’s knowledge is not
incomplete, you can’t have an incomplete payment for sin. There are no surprises.
You can’t go out tomorrow and
commit and sin and God goes, “Oops! I forgot about that one. That’s too big for
My grace.”
See, there is no sin that is
too big for the grace of God. There is
no sin that you can commit that is unknown by the omniscience of God and no sin
that you can commit that is more powerful or that can overpower the omnipotence
of God. God provided a perfect
solution. So when He sends His Son, the Eternal
Second Person of the Trinity to go to the cross and die for our sins, then He
is able to save us to the uttermost.
NKJ Hebrews
Again and again we see this
phraseology – those who come to God through Him. “Coming to God through Him” is a synonym in
the Scriptures.
In many places Jesus goes
back and forth with this verbiage where He says “Those who come to Me” or “those
who believe in Me”.
These are synonyms. So “coming to Christ” is synonymous with believing
on Him. That is how we come to Him, by believing that He died on the cross for
our sins – not by inviting Jesus in to our life, not by walking an aisle or
these other sort of cultural symptoms or results even that people emphasize in
a lot of churches today because they don’t look at what the Scripture
says. The Scripture are so very plain
that he who believes in Him has eternal life.
The operative verb again and again and again in John is “believe” –
believe in Him. So He is able to save us
because of who He is.
So in the last few weeks we’ve
gone through the whole doctrine of eternal security. We started off looking at what the doctrine
meant.
Definition: It is briefly defined. It’s the work of God toward the believer at
the instant of faith alone in Christ alone which guarantees that God’s free
gift of salvation is eternal and cannot be lost, eternal and cannot be
terminated, abrogated, nullified or reversed by any thought, act, or deed that
you can commit.
So you will be saved if you
put your faith in Jesus Christ. The
instant you trust in Him a number of things happen that secure that salvation for
you. Now we went on in the last couple
of weeks. We talked about the character
of God and how the character of God secures that salvation for us – that He is
able to secure that salvation for us.
Then we looked at the work of
Jesus Christ. In His work He has not
only promised that He’s the one who can save, but He has the power to keep us. You have the passage in the Gospel of John where
Jesus is talking about the fact that when we are in the Father’s hands that
nothing can be lost. In John 6:37-40
that everyone that comes to Jesus, Jesus will not lose. No one can snatch us out of the Father’s
hands.
NKJ John
Jesus is powerful enough to
keep us. The Father is powerful enough
to keep us. So we’ve gone through the
role of the Father, the role of the Son, the prayer of the Son last time which is
what intersects with this particular verse.
NKJ Hebrews
The focus here is on His post
resurrection eternal life. After the
resurrection He spent 40 days with His disciples. Then on the Day of Pentecost (or just before
the Day of Pentecost actually) He ascended into heaven about 10 days before the
Day of Pentecost and then sent the Holy Spirit to the church on the Day of
Pentecost.
So, in His present position having
ascended to the Father at the Father’s right hand, He continuously makes
intercession for us. Now that brings us
to the third member of the trinity which is God the Holy Spirit That takes us to a couple of key things that the
Holy Spirit does for us at the instant of salvation.
Now we all know that God does
about 40 things for us at the instant of salvation. He has redeemed us. He imputed righteousness to us. He has justified us. He has brought us into the body of
Christ. There are a variety of
ministries of the Holy Spirit that are accomplished at the instant of salvation. These
are all irreversible.
I pointed out last time that
one of the weaknesses in a rather anemic view of salvation is what happens when
people think they can lose their salvation because they don’t understand all
that God did to save you.
That whole process of being
converted from being unsaved (being an unbeliever, being spiritually dead) to being
spiritually alive is an extensive process that isn’t just saying, “Okay, now
you get to go to heaven when you die.”
There is much more involved
in it than that. We’ll look at it a
little bit tonight.
Ephesians
NKJ Ephesians 1:13 In Him you also trusted, after
you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having
believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,
So let’s look at a couple of
things there just to pick up the significance of what he is saying. This is all part of that introduction that
Paul has. It’s a very lengthy sentence from
verse 3 down to verse 14. Now he is talking
about the significance of having trusted in Christ. Verse 12 picks up a little bit of the
context.
NKJ Ephesians
There we have the key to
salvation – trusting in Christ. It
doesn’t say trust in Christ and go to church, trust in Christ and get baptized,
trust in Christ and do works. It will
contradict that in the second chapter that faith and works don’t go together at
all.
He says:
should be
to the praise of His glory.
NKJ Ephesians
It picks up the verb from the
previous sentence.
after you
heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having
believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,
It’s an adverbial participle
of time there so you could translate it “when you heard” or “after you heard”. The idea is first you have to hear and then
you believe. Faith is based on content. You have to understand the gospel.
Paul says in Romans 10:
NKJ Romans
First you have to hear the
message and then you believe the message.
NKJ Ephesians 1:13 In Him you also trusted, after
you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having
believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,
So once again we have an
emphasis here on the exclusivity of the Christian message. This is not something that you should ever
feel you have to apologize for. We live
in an era today when you are considered to be some sort of enemy of society if you
believe that you have a handle on truth and that you know what absolute Truth
is. If you think if you know what
absolute Truth is you can only know it if you base it on the Word of God.
Jesus said:
NKJ John 14:6 Jesus said to him, "I am the
way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
So when He said “I am the
truth” he is claiming the position of exclusivity that there is only one
truth. There is not something that is
true for the Russians and something that is true for the Arabs and something
that is true for the Muslims and something else that is true for the Buddhists
and we all worship the same God, because we don’t. There are too many differences and these are
categorical differences.
The god that Muslims worship
is a solitary god. He is not a
Trinitarian god. He is a solitary
god. So therefore even though they claim
that he is loving - and the word “love” is never ascribed to Allah in the Koran. But, they claim that; but he can’t be truly a
loving god because if he is eternal and he is alone then he can’t be loving
because he doesn’t have an object for his love.
He has to wade through eternity until he gets some creature that he can
love. If he is god he can’t be loving. If he is loving, then he is dependent on his
creatures in order to have an object for his love. So this solitary god of Islam doesn’t
work.
That’s why the Trinitarian
God of the Bible works. It fits the
message that God is love. The Father
loves the Son. The Son loves the
Spirit. The Spirit loves the
Father. This is an eternal society. But
there is no society in the godhead of Islam which is why the mirror image in
their religion often gets messed up because they don’t have an ultimate reality
that has a perfect society. So they
never quite get it right in creation.
The other problem with the god
of Islam is that he hates the Jews. The
god of the Bible is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Allah of Islam is the god of Abraham and
Ishmael. Those are two different
gods. The way to get into heaven if you
are a Moslem is either through jihad (which is an act of violence in support of
Islam) which will guarantee that you go immediately into paradise. Other than that you have to go through
various works and ultimately you never know because it is up to the whimsical
arbitrary will of Allah as to whether or not you actually make it into heaven.
In contrast to that the Bible
says that…
NKJ Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward
us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
So there is a salvation that
solves the problem. The problem is
sin. Jesus Christ died on the
cross. So we have a message of absolute
truth – one that is exclusive. It is
exclusive in that those who don’t believe it are excluded. But, everybody has the opportunity to believe
because God gives a non-verbal witness in the creation. He gives a non-verbal witness so that the heavens
as the psalmist said in Psalm 19 – the heavens declare the glory of God.
NKJ Psalm 19:1 To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of
David. The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His
handiwork.
So anyone can observe
creation and recognize that there must be a God. If they desire to know God and God being
omniscient knows the innermost thoughts of the heart, then God will make
Himself known to them and no matter where they are on the planet God ultimately
gets the gospel to people.
It is amazing the things you
tend to uncover here and there that’s just not generally known about how many
people, how many Christians, how many of the early disciples made it to
NKJ Ephesians
Gospel means good news. It is the good news that rather than being
dead in your trespasses and sin, you have eternal life. This eternal life is not based on who you are
but on who Jesus Christ is and what He did on the cross.
in whom
also,
That is in Jesus Christ –
that is position in Christ. Hold on to
that thought because that’s where we are headed before we finish tonight.
having believed,
An aorist participle takes
the action into the past.
you were
sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise.
Aorist tense verb. In the Greek grammar that is referring to the
fact that when they believed they were sealed.
The believing was in the past and the sealing took place at the time
that they believed.
Now the Greek word for sealing
(which is the verb here) is the Greek word sphragizo. Sphragizo has
the meaning of taking (originally) a signet ring perhaps or some sort of
emblem. You would melt wax on a document
and then you would put an impression on that document. It was like a signature. It was done to authenticate legal
documents. So sealing was an
object. It’s like going to a notary
today. It is something that made a
document official. It was a sign of
ownership. It was a sign that something was
secure and that it showed legal ownership.
Seals were widely used very
early after the time of the Noahic flood.
We have evidence going back to early Mesopotamian civilizations in
Now if you are a Texan that means
branding. That is the best analogy. You get branded by the Holy Spirit. I always liked that analogy because back in
the Old West when you would have rustlers who would go out and they would steal
a bunch of cattle. Then they would sit
out and take a cinch ring off of a saddle and they would use that with a pair
of pliers and heat that up in a fire and then they would use that to change the
brand. If they were a good branding
artist (a good cinchering artist), then they could
change the brand. If you looked at it from the outside, you would never know
that the brand had been changed.
See, this is what happens
with a lot of Christians. They trust
Christ as their savior. They get sealed
by the Spirit. They are now branded or
owned by God as a member of the family. He has put His seal on them. They have been branded. What happens due to their negative volition,
their rejection of truth, they become distracted by the cares of the world and
the details of life and they no longer care about the fact that they are child
of God and are supposed to live for Him in this world. So what happens is they start living like everybody
else. They become what the Bible calls a
worldly Christian. They are also a
carnal Christian. They are living on
their sin nature. They don’t look any
different from all those unbelievers who are still under the domain of Satan
(the Bible says).
The only way you are going to
know the difference is the same way you knew the difference back in the Old
West. You would have to kill the cow or
the steer and then you would have to skin it and turn the hide inside out. You could always see what the original brand was
once you turned it inside out.
So there are a lot of people
who were Christians. They trust Christ
as their Savior. They get sealed by the
Spirit then they get distracted and forget about their spiritual identity. They get off track and live in a way that’s
no different from any unbeliever. Nobody
can tell the difference between them and an unbeliever. The last ting that you would think is that
person is going to heaven. You look at
their life and they look as bad as anybody else. But when they die, the true brand will be
revealed and it will be clear that they were sealed by the Spirit and that
cannot be lost. So this idea of marking
– tattooing was another way they did it in the ancient world. It was the idea that an individual would
guarantee his ownership or guarantee his signature by this legal act.
It was often applied to wills. It was applied to deeds of sale. It was applied when there was any kind of
finance involved or any contract was entered into. There was always a sealing. Of course when a person gets saved in the
Church Age that’s an application of the New Covenant as we’ll see when we get
into it next time. So with the
application of that covenant there is a seal that goes with it that guarantees
it.
So sphragizo
is that act of physical sealing and guaranteeing that the individual is indeed a child of God. So sealing is a legal concept which
references a person’s seal or signature guarantee of a contract or a
treaty. Once again it takes us back to something
I emphasized over and over again is that God is a God of law. Now what I mean by that is not the Mosaic Law,
but that He operates within a revealed legal framework. So when you go from Genesis to Revelation, God
always reveals His will and He always reveals what the stipulations are and He limits
Himself in human relationships to these contracts. The Bible calls them covenants. It is the same idea as a contract. As man understands those various contracts
down through history – the original creation covenant (the Edenic Covenant),
then the Adamic Covenant, then the Noahic Covenant, then the Abrahamic Covenant, then the Mosaic Covenant,
the Davidic Covenant, the New Covenant. All of these are the basic covenants we
have studied in the past. This tells us how
God deals with people at different times in history.
In the New Testament the
concept of sealing is applied to the ministry of the Holy Spirit when a person
is saved. This is one of the 40 things
that happens to every person at the instant of salvation. It’s not experiential. You didn’t know you got branded when you
trusted in Christ, but you did. You only
learn about it afterward when you read the Scripture. So sealing is the guarantee of eternal salvation. It is a grace gift to us to teach us and help
us understand that we don’t have to worry about sin after salvation. Sin was paid for. We’re saved.
Christ paid the penalty. It’s His
righteousness that is the basis of salvation, not our righteousness.
Paul said in Titus 3:5:
NKJ Titus 3:5 not by works of righteousness which
we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of
regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
So sealing is the guarantee
of our salvation that no matter what we do, it can’t reverse the brand. It is ours until the Lord takes us home.
Now this isn’t just mentioned
in one verse. This is mentioned
again. Paul wants to remind the
Ephesians before he finishes with them of this principle again. So turn over two or three pages to Ephesians
4:30.
NKJ Ephesians
He gives them a command not
to grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. See the reminder is that this is one of those
great things that God did for you when you got saved. He gave you eternal life. He adopted you into the royal family. He blesses you with all the spiritual
blessings in the heavenlies – Paul said in Ephesians 1:3. Now He has sealed you.
But whenever you sin as a believer,
you grieve the Holy Spirit. Grieving the
Holy Spirit in context is related to when we sin. It’s just like when you were a child and you
would do something that disobeyed your parents and violated their standards in
one way or another. They would be grieved
and they would be disappointed. You weren’t
out of the family, but you knew that you had done something that interfered
with that relationship that you had with your parents. So there would have be something that would
have to happen in order to get passed that.
For the believer that is what we mentioned earlier in 1 John 1:9.
NKJ 1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So Paul reminds them of the
sealing of the Spirit because that’s a permanent thing. It goes along with the indwelling of the
Spirit. It goes along with the presence
of the Spirit in our lives. We are made
a temple for the indwelling of Jesus Christ and because we have that permanent relationship
with the Spirit and all of these ministries of the Spirit that we should not
grieve the Holy Spirit but when we do sin we should recover.
Another passage that also
mentions the sealing of the Spirit is found in II Corinthians 1:22. These are the three key passages that deal
with the sealing of the Spirit.
Then we come to another passage,
another doctrine that is very important to understand because it also relates
to our eternal security. We find this in
I Corinthians 12:13. This is called the
baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now people
get all confused about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. If you go to a charismatic church, they will
ask you if you have ever been baptized by the Holy Spirit.
“Have you spoken in tongues?”
That would be a Pentecostal
charismatic church. They misunderstand
what it is. They want to make the filling
of the Holy Spirit an experiential thing.
But it is not experiential. It is
an identification. That’s the essence of
the word baptism.
People get all confused about
baptism. Every time you hear the word
baptism in some churches, you hear the word baptism they immediately want to
take you out and get you baptized in the local river or swimming pool or baptistery
of whatever. There are as we have
studied in the past 8 different baptisms in the Scripture. There are some baptisms that are dry and some
baptisms that are wet.
Believers’ baptism that is
your personal testimony of what has already happened in the spiritual realm
when you put your faith alone in Christ alone is a wet baptism. But the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a dry
baptism because it has to do with our union with Christ. The essence of the meaning of the word
baptize is to dip or plunge or immerse. That’s the literal meaning. But, it came to signify an initiation into something
where something was identified in a new way with something else.
So a good word to use to
substitute with baptism to get a sense of what it’s talking about is the word
identification.
In our passage in 1
Corinthians
NKJ 1 Corinthians
Or, we were all identified.
into one body -- whether Jews or
Greeks, whether slaves or free -- and have all been made to drink into one
Spirit.
The focus in 1 Corinthians 12
is talking about the unity of the body of Christ. But, the focus is
understanding what that identification did.
It identified us and placed us into one body. It happens at the instant of salvation for every
believer. Just like the fact that you
didn’t know you got branded when you got saved, you also got baptized by the
Holy Spirit the instant you got saved. It’s
not experiential and it’s not until you come back and read the Bible that you begin
to understand what this means.
Not only have we got the
confusion that has come about because of the Pentecostal charismatic movement
because of their failure to understand that there is only one baptism of the
Holy Spirit in the New Testament, but there have been others who are not
charismatic who have not necessarily picked up on some of the nuances of the
Greek here. (These are good men.) I discovered this as a result of one of my
teachers in seminary.
Once somebody shows it to you
it is sort of like, “Well, it is just so obvious.”
Part of the problem is that
so many people just study the Bible in English and in the King James Version (which
of course was the dominant translation up until the late ‘60’s), the phrase
that you find in the Greek which is this phrase that I’ve got in English here (en
pneumati). The Greek preposition is en. The dative of the word pneuma for
spirit is pneumati. That phrase (en pneumati)
is found in every single passage that talks about the baptism by the Holy
Spirit. In fact it occurs in almost
every passage that talks about baptism.
You are always baptized by means of something, whatever it is.
If you were a Greek Hoplite
back in the days of classical Greek and you were in the army of
So there are different
baptisms like that. Baptism was that initiation right. It’s the same kind of thing that you have in
the Church Age that when you first enter the body of Christ, you’re
initiated. There is a change that is taking place. This is baptism. It’s done by means of something. It can be done by means of blood like when
the Hoplites dipped their spears into the blood. Or, it can be done by means of water which is
what John the Baptist did when he was out at the
Now the phrase that we have
back in Matthew 3:11 is this phrase. John
said:
NKJ Matthew
See, it’s en hudati. The en
is the same preposition you have with baptism.
That’s the parallel.
“I baptize you with water.”
The state into which they are
going into (the new position) is repentance.
Then John said:
NKJ John
Now that’s Jesus Christ, the
Messiah.
He is the forerunner of the
Messiah and he is announcing that “I have a mission here to prepare people and
my message is repent for the
NKJ Matthew
Notice it is that same phrase
again – en pneumati.
Now John baptized with water -
was the instrument that he used. Jesus
he says is going to use another instrument.
That is the Holy Spirit. He also
says this is something in the future.
He will
baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
So at the beginning of Jesus
ministry in about 30 AD this baptism by means of the Holy Spirit hadn’t
happened yet. It was still a future
event. But who’s the one who is going to
perform that future baptism by means of the Holy Spirit? The question I am asking is who is the
subject of the verb baptize. He (Jesus
Christ) is the one who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
En pneumati is not expressing the one who performs the action of
the verb. It’s expressing what the
baptizer is using. Now that’s real
important. We are going to get into a
little technical grammar here in a minute to help solve a problem.
NKJ Acts 1:5 "for John truly baptized with
water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from
now."
Jesus is speaking. So we have gone through three years of Jesus’
public ministry on the earth. Jesus has
been crucified on the cross. He’s been
in the grave for three days, three nights.
He has been raised from the grave and now He is about to ascend to
heaven. He is giving his final
instructions to the disciples. In Acts 1 before He ascends to heaven, He
reminds them of what John said.
He said, “For John baptized.”
Now let’s go back to basic 6th
grade grammar. Baptism here is an active
voice verb. That means the subject
performs the action. John is the one who
is performing the action of baptism.
So he says, “John baptized
with water.”
En hudati. There is our
key phrase. I want you to keep noticing
the pattern here. We have a template in all these baptism
statements. Somebody is the subject of
an active voice verb. The instrument
that they use is expressed with an “en” clause. The new state is usually expressed in an “eis” clause.
Sometimes it’s not there, but if it is there it is expressed with an eis clause. This
is in almost every instance.
So John baptized you with
water but you will – is that future tense or is that present tense? (I have taken everybody back to basic grammar
here.) Future tense. See it still hasn’t happened yet. John said it was in the future when he began
this about 28-29- 30 AD. Now Jesus in 33
is saying it’s still future.
He said, “You will be
baptized by means of the Holy Spirit.”
En pneumati. The Spirit is
the means.
Then we skip over to our
passage that we began with. We go back
to that – I Corinthians 12:13.
NKJ 1 Corinthians
Past tense or future
tense? Past tense! Ah! It
has happened now. When did it
happen? It happened on the Day of
Pentecost when the disciples were going to the
NKJ 1 Corinthians
Here the verb baptize is a
passive voice verb. That means the subject
receives the action. We (being every
believer in the Lord Jesus Christ) receive the action of being baptized. Does it state here who performs the
action? Actually, it doesn’t. In English in a passive voice construction
you express the performer of the action with the preposition “by”. This caused many people to think that “by the
one Spirit” in 1 Corinthians
So they went, “Ah! We’ve got
two different baptisms. We have one by
the Spirit and one with the Spirit.”
Everybody gets the “by the
Spirit” when they are saved and “with the Spirit” later on. Then
they start speaking in tongues. But they
didn’t look at the Greek. The Greek uses
the same language all the way through.
So now let’s go back and pull
all of this together. In 1 Corinthians
10:2 we have a different baptism. This
is a baptism with Moses. (I am going to
this verse just to show you how the template works.)
NKJ 1 Corinthians 10:2 all were
All being the Jews.
baptized
They received the action of
baptism.
into Moses
There is that eis preposition indicating they were being
identified with Moses.
in the
cloud and in the sea,
By means of the cloud and by
means of the sea. The cloud was the Shekinah
Glory that during the day it was a pillar of cloud and at night it was a pillar
of fire. It was the Lord leading them
through the wilderness and across and through the
Now let me go back review
this in terms of English. When we have a
sentence that reads:
John
hit the ball with (or by) means of the bat.
what we are saying that John
is the subject. He performs the action
of hitting. The object is the ball and
the instrument is the bat.
But if we switch it around to
the passive verb we will say:
The ball
was hit by John with the bat.
The “by” preposition in the
English indicates the one who performs the action. So it
can become a bit confusing. Now in Greek
they make it real clear what the instrument is.
The instrument is going to be expressed by the Greek preposition en
over here. To express the performer of the
action of a passive construction the Greek is going to use either the preposition
hupa or dia. It’s very clear. So the Greek makes it very clear. Sometimes the Greek doesn’t make it
clear. Trust me. But, here it does.
What we have in all these
passages is the same pattern that you have with John’s original statement. You have the one who performs the action of
baptism, the instrument that is used and the ultimate state.
So that is compared to Jesus who
uses the Holy Spirit to enter us into a new state. It’s not stated in Matthew
3:11. Jesus isn’t stated – actually the one who performs
the action isn’t stated in 1 Corinthians 10:2. The cloud and the sea are mentioned. Moses, the new state is mentioned.
Now when we get to I
Corinthians 12:13, it doesn’t tell us who performs the baptism. But who performs the baptism if you are
consistent with everything John said?
Jesus performs the baptism. He
uses the Holy Spirit just as John used the water to identify us with
Himself. So the Holy Spirit is analogous
to water. It is a cleansing aspect of
that ministry. So the baptism by means
of the spirit positionally cleanses us from all sin. You can certainly see how this overlaps with
and relates to the fact that we received the imputed righteousness of Christ
and the aspect of regeneration – that we are made a new creature in
Christ. So what happens at the instant
of salvation when you are trusting Christ as your Savior is that you get
identified with Christ.
Galatians 3:27-28 says:
NKJ Galatians
NKJ Galatians
That is the picture of
righteousness in cleansing that is ours.
Titus 3:5 says
NKJ Titus 3:5 not by works of righteousness which
we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of
regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
So you have that same imagery
that follows all of these phrases through all the way through Scripture to help
us understand the tremendous things, the dynamics of our salvation making us a
new creature in Christ. We have been
identified with Him. It’s His
righteousness. We are positionally
cleansed. There is nothing we can do to lose
that salvation. So we define the baptism
by means of the Holy Spirit as the work of Christ whereby at the moment of
faith alone in Christ alone Christ uses the Holy Spirit in the act of
regeneration to identify the believer with His own death, burial, and
resurrection so that we enter into a new life.
We have become a new creature in Christ.
We have new assets, new blessings, new privileges, and new position
because we are in Christ.
Now it has always been one of
my favorite diagrams because it always made good sense. It’s amazing how many
people never understand this principle that when the Bible talks about
salvation it talks about two different realities that are ours. One the left side of the screen we picture the
eternal reality that is ours at the instant of salvation. When we trust in
Christ as savior we’re baptized by the Holy Spirit and we’re placed in Christ
in the light. That’s why it’s a white
circle against a dark background. We are
also indwelt by the Holy Spirit. But at
the same time in terms of our temporal experience we are filled by the Spirit
we begin walking by the Spirit but we can still sin. When we sin we are out of fellowship. We’re
no longer walking by the Spirit. We’re
no longer walking in the light. We’re
still positionally clean. We’re
positionally in Christ. But
experientially we’re out of fellowship.
The sin nature is in control.
Then when we confess our sin then we’re back in fellowship and we’re
back under the control of the Holy Spirit and the influence of the Holy Spirit
as He uses His word in our lives.
So this concludes our little
study of eternal security.
So let’s go back to Hebrews
7.
NKJ Hebrews
Why? Because there is this master plan of salvation
that was set forth in eternity past and it handled every possibility – every exsidancy. There is
nothing left out.
to save to
the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make
intercession for them
Because He is eternally and because
He will live eternally He will eternally secure our salvation. He always lives to make intercession for
them.
NKJ Hebrews
Verses 26 to 28 is going to
summarize what He is doing.
Then it describes Him.
who is holy,
That means hagios is the Greek word meaning set apart. He is set apart. He is distinct. He is unique.
harmless,
undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens;
That verse takes us back to
the ascension. He is unique. He is distinct. He is separate from sinners. He is at the Father’s right hand.
This next qualification (He
is summarizing what we have studied so far.) who does not need daily as those high
priests to offer up sacrifices. Levitical priests needed to always have a
sacrifice for themselves when they went to the
But Christ is not.
NKJ Hebrews
The key word there is the
word “for” because that indicates substitution in the Greek. It indicates that He did it for or in place
of the lost sinner. He did it once, for
all. It can’t be repeated. He did it. It was a sufficient death. He paid the price for every sin. He did it once for all when He offered up
Himself. Then, the conclusion in verse
28.
NKJ Hebrews
The Law there being the
Mosaic Law.
appoints as
high priests men who have weakness,
Those who entered the human priesthood
under the Mosaic Law were sinners.
but the
word of the oath,
Now what’s the word of the
oath? That’s the word that we heard mentioned
back in verse 21, the quote from Psalm 110:4.
NKJ Psalm 110:4 The LORD has sworn
He has made an oath.
And will not relent,”
You being a reference to
Jesus Christ.
You are a
priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek."
So there was a covenant that
was the basis for the Levitical priesthood.
But, that doesn’t establish Christ’s priesthood. That’s established by a second act, this
legal oath. Remember I made the point
that everything that God does is wrapped up in this legality. That becomes a pattern for human law.
NKJ Hebrews
That takes us back to verse 10
of chapter 2.
NKJ Hebrews
That is the plan of the
Father.
to make the
captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
So He is made complete through
His life on the earth. Therefore He can
be our pioneer. He is the forerunner, the pathfinder. He is the one who set the precedent for the
spiritual life of the Church Age and He did that in His high priestly
ministry. So now in the Church Age every
believer is a priest so we are to follow His pattern.
That takes us up to the end
of chapter 7. Next time we will start
into chapter 8 where we start making the transition from His high
priesthood. We are going to deal with
again there is an allusion to Psalm 110 and 8:1 reference to the session of
Christ at the right hand of the Father and what He is doing. It’s a short chapter, 13 verses, and it
focuses on the New Covenant. So we get
into this whole thing about the significance of the New Covenant. I have already been asked one question
related to whether there was one New Covenant or two New Covenants. You’ve probably heard both before so we will
straighten that out. There’s only one
New Covenant and that’s between God and the house of
Okay. Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.