04.10 | A Crack in the Door
Hebrews 13
‘I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly.’
Hebrews 13:22
I’ve only really scratched the surface…
If we only we had more time, I could explain…
This has just been a brief overview…
We’re used to such phrases. Some of us are used to giving them. It’s that feeling that we have covered material that is so significant, so weighty, so widely-encompassing, that most attempts to reduce it down to something succinct will always feel deficient. Anyone who has written a university thesis usually has the experience of feeling daunted by the word count at the beginning, but then, by the end, feeling like they’ve had to leave so much material out.
The author of Hebrews, as he closes today, has the same feeling. He rapidly touches on some massive areas of church and personal life — love and hospitality and marriage and money and leadership and orthodoxy and a little more teaching on the cross and worship and generosity and prayer. And then, as he closes, he feels the deficit felt by every master teacher:
Bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly.
Thirteen chapters. Nearly 7000 words (or 5000 in Greek). For a handwritten letter, this is no telegram. If it was an email, it’s definitely in TL;DR1 territory. It’s quoted no less than eleven Old Testament books, and has covered topics from the tabernacle to the priesthood, from sacrifices to suffering, from endurance to inheritance.
And yet, the author’s feeling as he finishes is that there is so much more to say. These truths can be taken so much deeper. This understanding of the Old Testament images can be extended into a far broader horizon, and these places of application — of faith and suffering and endurance and perspective — are so enormous that this letter feels tiny in contrast.
And yet, there is something in this feeling that draws out a deeper truth.
For the danger of the Scriptures is always that it in itself becomes our focus. That we become so concerned about learning and defending biblical doctrine, that we miss the greater matters of biblical reality. For the Scriptures open to us a world that is wider than themselves. They are not the reality, but the invitation. They are not the meal, but the menu. They are not the mountains, but the map. They urge us to recognise that, through their pages and perspective, there is a way of doing and being and walking and seeing that is vastly beyond all that we know. That even the wisest scholar and the greatest minds that have ever opened the Scriptures, have only ever dabbled their toes into the oceans of the world of God.
And so we finish our time in Hebrews, similarly aware of the larger world. For we’ve caught a glimpse of the daylight in these pages — a tiny shaft of light slanting through a dusty crack in the door. And yet, my friends, the realities beyond are beyond imagining. And these words and themes and images and commands, in the depths of their truth, are the beginning invitations for how to enter this world.
Further up and further in, my friends. The world of God is greater than you can imagine.
Reflect:
What truth has most impacted you from Hebrews. Rest with this. What does it teach you about the larger world of God?
Pray:
Father,
Teach me to see,
Yet not in the tidy sight of the intellectual,
Or the fussy boxes of the analyst.
Teach me to see
With eyes that know
The deeper art of wonder.
Teach me to see
That this horizon I have glimpsed
Goes further,
And this starlight I see
Shines from galaxies beyond reckoning.
Teach me to see
That your invitation
Is never to the dry and clinical,
The shrivelled and the shallow —
For you, Father,
Have made us for yourself.
You have set eternity in our hearts,
And have set glories beyond reckoning before us.
And so, Father,
Teach me to see,
That my every thought, and my every way
Be animated
From the immeasurable reality
Of You.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
2 Chronicles 13-15 | Proverbs 24:23-34
Too long; didn’t read.