Today I am beginning a new series of studies, working through my Bible book of the moment: Hebrews. I plan roughly weekly studies which will be posted here and if you subscribe to the blog you will get automatic notifications of new posts.

Consider Christ

Welcome to this new series of studies as we work our way through the book of Hebrews, and as we do so, I trust and pray that it will bless all our hearts as we hear God’s voice speaking to us through the pages of this New Testament book.

And I say hear God’s voice speaking to us very deliberately. I know full well that God can and does speak to us in and through every word of Scripture, and I don’t want to suggest otherwise for a moment. But you know, there is something almost unique about Hebrews, which I will share with you shortly, that should make us listen even more carefully for God’s voice to be heard as we turn the pages of this book.

So, as we begin, and before we get into the text itself, we do need to ask a few questions that I think we should always ask at the start of every new study of God’s Word, and certainly as we begin to explore a new Bible book. We need to ask the questions who, when, why, what, and how.

So first, Who? Who wrote Hebrews, and who was he writing to? Now as you may be aware, the authorship of Hebrews is one of the great mysteries of the New Testament canon.

And the simple answer is that we can’t be sure who wrote it. In fact, as Oregon, one of the early church fathers, famously put it, whoever wrote the epistle, ‘God only knows for sure’. For what it’s worth, I’m going to side with Martin Luther, who believed that Apollos wrote Hebrews, and he certainly fits the criteria. But there’s another reason that I think makes Apollos the ideal candidate, and I want to come back to that as we draw this first study to a close.

Secondly, to Whom was whoever wrote Hebrews writing to? Well, what we can say is that while we may not know for sure who the anonymous writer of the book is, it is clear that the author and the recipients knew each other well.

The letter itself doesn’t spell out who the intended recipients are, but it has always been known as ‘To the Hebrews’, and the contents of the letter clearly point in a certain direction. For example, there’s a very strong emphasis in the book on the Levitical priesthood and the Old Testament sacrificial system. They’re depicted as shadows which have now been fulfilled in the personal work of Jesus Christ.

And so, for those receiving this letter, a working knowledge of Leviticus would be indispensable to a proper understanding of Hebrews. There’s also, interestingly, a complete absence of any reference to Gentiles. So, putting those things together, along with a few other factors, we must surely come to the conclusion that the intended recipients of this letter were a community comprised mainly of Hebrew believers.

But we can’t be more precise than that. Now, the letter doesn’t tell us precisely where the members of this group were to be found. They seem to belong to a single congregation, but where are they? Where is that congregation situated? Do the many mentions of the temple and its rites and sacrifices suggest that they are in Jerusalem, as several commentators conclude? Or, intriguingly, and I think more likely, 13:24 suggests that they are in Italy, because the writer sends special greetings from, “those who come from Italy”.

So now we turn to the second vital question. When? When was Hebrews written? And on this subject, let me just say that there are some internal indicators that strongly point to a date in the mid to late AD 60s, and certainly before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, for the writing of the book.

Then the next question we ask is as important as any of those, and it’s Why? What was in the mind and heart of the writer as he wrote his message to these Hebrew believers? Now this is so important to grasp, not only because it helps us understand his message better, but as importantly, it helps us understand his message to us. You see, it’s a foundational principle of interpreting the Bible that the meaning of the Scripture to us will be the same as the meaning to the original hearers. The application drawn from the meaning may well be different, but the meaning itself will be the same.

So why did the writer to the Hebrews write to the Hebrews?   Most commentators stress the effect of persecution on those believers as being the primary burden of the letter, and there’s no doubt that clearly some of them appear to be suffering in that way, as a result of which they were tempted to go back to the supposedly easier and less dangerous life that they’d known in Judaism. But in many ways, I think that is a symptom, not the cause, of their problem. The more I read Hebrews, the more sure I am that all their problems can be traced back to an inadequate awareness and appreciation of who Jesus was and what he had accomplished for them.

And so our inspired writer wants to stress as clearly and earnestly as he possibly can that very point. Interestingly, twice in this letter, in 3:1 and 12:3, we’re called to consider Christ. And the Greek word means to think about very carefully, consider closely.

And that’s exactly what I hope we’ll be doing over the coming studies, considering Christ. So, we’ve thought about the who, the when, and the why, which leaves us with what and how. And actually, we’ve already inched our way to answering the what in just what we’ve been thinking about.

You see, the writer’s great burden is to so proclaim the superiority of Christ above everything and everyone that has gone before him, in order to ground these Hebrew believers more securely in their faith. As many have pointed out in their commentaries and other writings, one of the key words of Hebrews is the word better or superior. And that word comes 13 times in the letter.

So now our final question to ask before we get into the text of Hebrews itself is how? How has the author of Hebrews communicated his message to his original readers and through them to us? And this is where we come back to something I’ve already hinted at more than once, and which I find utterly fascinating as I have been studying Hebrews in more depth. We usually refer to Hebrews as one of the New Testament letters, and I’ve done that myself, even in this study, several times, mainly out of habit it has to be said. But you know, the reality is there’s very little about this book that is like the other letters of the New Testament.

In fact, it’s really only the last seven or eight verses of the last chapter that puts us in mind of other letters in the New Testament. Actually, what Hebrews is, is a sermon. There is an interesting phrase in 13:22 where the author of Hebrews says, “bear with my word of exhortation”.

It’s almost exactly the same words that are used in Acts 13:15 where the rulers of the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch ask Paul to, “bring a word of encouragement to the people”. And Paul responds by preaching to them. It’s also interesting to note that our author, or rather preacher, refers to his audience as hearers or listeners rather than readers.

And he speaks of himself as speaking or saying, not writing. Indeed, Hebrews is what we call an expository sermon. It expounds scripture.

Several scholars have commented that the sermon to Hebrews is really an expository sermon on Psalm 110, because that passage, which is about Christ, is either alluded to or explicitly mentioned in virtually every chapter of Hebrews. And this fact, that Hebrews is more sermon than letter, is one of the main factors that persuades me that the most likely candidate for its authorship is Apollos, as Martin Luther thought. We know that Apollos was a Jewish convert steeped in the Old Testament scriptures, and so he would have been more than capable of explaining and applying the Old Testament writings.

Added to that, we’re told in Acts, in 18:24-25, that Apollos was, “an eloquent man, and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus”. And a few verses later in that chapter, we read, “he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the scriptures that the Christ was Jesus”. Now all of that, to me, sounds very much like a gifted preacher.

So now we’re in a position to begin to read and study Hebrews, this great New Testament sermon in which God himself is the preacher, preaching through the human mouthpiece. So please join me for our next study, where we’ll dig into the opening verses of Hebrews, where our preacher lays out the main point of his sermon, just who is Jesus and what’s so great about it. And that sounds to me like the best subject possible for a sermon.