The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Hebrews

by Thomas Charles Edwards

Let them imitate the trustfulness of their great leaders in the past, who had not given their time and thoughts to heaping up riches, but had devoted themselves to the work of witnessing and of speaking the word of God. Let them review with critical eye their manner of life, and observe how it ended. They all died in faith. Some of them suffered martyrdom, so complete and entirely unworldly was their self-surrender to Jesus Christ! But Jesus Christ is still the same One. If He was worthy that Stephen and James should die for His sake, He is worthy of our allegiance too. Yea, He will be the same for ever. When the world has passed away, with its fashion and its lust, when the earth and the works that are therein are burned up and dissolved, Jesus Christ abides. What He was yesterday to His martyr Stephen, that He is to all that follow Him in earth’s to-day, and that He will for ever be when He shall have appeared unto them who expect Him unto salvation. The antithesis, it will be seen, is not between the departed saints and the abiding Christ, but between the world, which the Hebrew Christians loved too well, and the Christ Whom the saints of their Church had loved better than the world and served by faith unto death.

If Jesus Christ abides, He is our anchorage, and the exhortation first given near the beginning of the Epistle once more suggests itself to the Apostle. “Permit not yourselves to drift and be carried past[396] the moorings by divers strange doctrines.” The word “doctrines” is itself emphatic, “Be not borne aside from the personal, abiding Jesus Christ by propositions, whether in reference to practice or to belief.” What these “doctrines” were in this particular case we learn from the next verse. They were the doubtful disputations about meats. The epithets “divers and strange” restrict the allusion still more nearly. He speaks not of the general and familiar injunctions of Jewish teachers respecting meats, the subject rather contemptuously dismissed by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: “One man hath faith to eat all things; but he that is weak eateth herbs.”[397] Our author could not have regarded these doctrines as “strange,” and he could scarcely have spoken of “strengthening the heart with meats” if he had meant abstinence from meats. A recent English expositor[398] has pointed out the direction in which we must seek the interpretation of this difficult passage. The Apostle brushes aside the novel teaching of the Essenes, who, without becoming Christians, “had broken away from the sacrificial system” of the Mosaic law and “substituted for it new ordinances of their own, according to which the daily meal became a sacrifice, and the president of the community took the place of the Levitical priest.” Such teaching was quite as inconsistent with Judaism as with Christianity. But the writer of this Epistle rejects it for precisely the same reason for which he repudiates Judaism. Both are inconsistent with the perfect separateness of Christ’s atonement.

It is well, as St. Paul said, for every man to be fully assured in his own mind.[399] A doubting conscience enfeebles a man’s spiritual vigour for work. The Essenes found a remedy for morbidness in strictness as to meats and minute directions for the employment of time. St. Paul taught that an unhealthy casuistry would be best counteracted by doing all things unto the Lord. “He that eateth eateth unto the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, unto the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks. For none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord.”[400] The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews considers that it betokens a littleness of soul to strengthen conscience by regulations as to various kinds of food. The noble thing[401] is that the heart—that is, the conscience—be stablished by thankfulness,[402] which will produce a strong, placid, courageous, and healthy moral perception. The moral code of the New Testament is direct and simple. It is entirely free from all casuistical crotchets and distinctions without a difference. Those who busy themselves[403] about such matters have never gained anything by it.

Do the Essenes repudiate the altar the sacrifice of which may not be eaten? Do they teach that the only sacrifice for sin is the daily meal? This is a fatal error. “We have” says the Apostle, “an altar of which the worshippers are not permitted to eat.”[404] All these expressions are metaphorical. By the altar we must understand the atoning sacrifice of Christ; by “those who serve the tabernacle” are meant believers in that sacrifice, prefigured, however, by the priests and worshippers under the old covenant; and by “eating of the altar” is meant participation in the sacredness that pertains to the death and atonement of Christ. The purpose of the writer is to teach the entire separateness of Christ’s atonement. It is true that Christians eat the body and drink the blood of Christ.[405] But the words of our Lord and of St. Paul[406] refer to the passover, whereas our author speaks of the sin-offering. In the former the lamb was eaten;[407] in the latter the carcases of the beasts whose blood was brought by the worshipper through his representative,[408] the high-priest, into the holiest place on the day of atonement, were carried forth without the camp and burned in the fire.[409] Both sacrifices, the passover and the sin-offering, were typical. The former typified our participation in Christ’s death, the latter the separateness of Christ’s death.

Many expositors see a reference in the Apostle’s words to the Lord’s Table, and some of them infer from the word “altar” that the Eucharist is a continual offering of a propitiatory sacrifice to God. It is not too much to say that this latter doctrine is the precise error which the Apostle is here combating.

Two other interpretations of these verses have been suggested. Both are, we think, untenable. The one is that we Christians have an altar of which we have a right to eat, but of which the Jewish priests and all who cling to Judaism have no right to eat; and, to prove that they have not, the Apostle mentions the fact that they were not permitted to eat the bodies of the beasts slain as a sin-offering under the old covenant. There are several weighty objections to this view, but the following one will be sufficient. The reference to the sin-offering in the eleventh verse is made in order to show that it was a type of Christ’s atoning death. As the bodies of the slain beasts were carried outside the camp and burned, so Christ suffered without the gate. But there is no real resemblance between the two things unless the Apostle intends to teach that the atonement of Christ stands apart and cannot be shared in by any other person, which implies that the tenth verse does not convey the notion that Christians have a right to eat of the altar.

The other interpretation is that we, Christians, have an altar of which we who serve the ideal tabernacle have no right to eat, inasmuch as the sacrifice is spiritual. “Our Christian altar supplies no flesh for carnal food.”[410] But if the reference is to carnal food, the expression “We have no right to eat” is not the appropriate one. The writer would surely have said, “of which we cannot eat.” Besides, this view misses the connection between the ninth and tenth verses. To say that Christ’s death procured spiritual blessings and that we do not eat His body after a carnal manner does not affect the question concerning meats, unless the doctrine concerning meats includes the notion that they are themselves an atoning sacrifice. Such was the doctrine of the Essenes. The argument of the Apostle is good and forcible if it means that Christ’s atonement is Christ’s alone. We share not in its sacredness, though we partake of its blessings. It resembles the sin-offering on the day of atonement, as well as the paschal lamb.

But it was not enough that the slain beasts should be burned without the camp. Their blood also must be brought into the holiest place. The former rite signified that the slain beast bore the sin of the people, the latter that the people themselves were sanctified. Similarly Jesus suffered without the gate of Jerusalem, in reproach and ignominy, as the Sin-bearer, and also entered into the true holiest place, in order to sanctify His people through His own blood.

We must not press the analogy. The author sees a quaint but touching resemblance between the burning of the slain beasts outside the camp and the crucifying of Jesus on Golgotha outside the city. The point of resemblance is in the ignominy symbolized in the one and in the other. Here too the writer finds the practical use of what he has said. Though the atonement of the Cross is Christ’s, and cannot be shared in by others, the reproach of that atoning death can. The thought leads the Apostle away from the divers strange doctrines of the Essenes, and brings him back to the main idea of the Epistle, which is to induce his readers to hold no more dalliance with Judaism, but to break away from it finally and for ever. “Let us come out,” he says. The word recalls St. Paul’s exhortation to the Christians of Corinth “to come out from among them, to be separate, and not to touch the unclean thing. For what concord can there be between Christ and Belial, between a believer and an unbeliever, between the sanctuary of God and idols?”[411] Our author tells the Hebrew Christians that on earth they have nothing better than reproach to expect. Quit, therefore, the camp of Judaism. Live, so to speak, in the desert. (He speaks metaphorically throughout.) You have no abiding city on earth. The fatal mistake of the Jews has been that they have turned what ought to be simply a camp into an abiding city. They have lost the feeling of the pilgrim; they seek not a better country and a city built by God. Shun ye this worldliness. Not only regard not your earthly life as a permanent dwelling in a city, but leave even the camp; be not only sojourners, but outcasts. Share in the reproach of Jesus, and look for your citizenship in heaven.

Reverting to the teaching of the Essenes, the writer proceeds: “Through Jesus let us offer a sacrifice of praise.”[412] The emphasis must rest on the words “through Jesus.” The daily meal is not a sacrifice, except in the sense of being a thanksgiving; and our thanksgiving is acceptable to God when it is offered through Him Whose death is a propitiation. Even then lip-worship only is not accepted. Share the meal with the poor. God is pleased with the sacrifices of doing good to all and contributing[413] to the necessities of the saints.