#DailyDevotion Some Concluding Instructions For Christians
Hebrews:7Remember your leaders who told you God’s Word. Consider how their lives ended, and imitate their faith. 8Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. 9Don’t get carried away with different kinds of strange teachings. It is good to be inwardly strengthened by God’s grace, not by foods, which haven’t helped those who make so much of them in their lives. 10We have an altar, and those who still worship at the Jewish tabernacle have no right to eat from this altar. 11The high priest brings the blood of animals into the holy place for sin, but the bodies of those animals are burned outside the camp. 12And so Jesus suffered outside the gate to make the people holy by His own blood. 13Then let us go out to join Him outside the camp and bear the abuse He suffered. 14You see, we don’t have a permanent city here but look for the one that’s coming.
Like many epistles in the New Testament this one also ends with general instruction on how to live one’s life in the faith. So we have this exhortation to remember how our leaders have died and to imitate their faith. No doubt we are to look to Jesus, Stephen, the apostles and other leaders of the church who died by execution, were starved, and were even thrown to wild animals and still remained faithful to Jesus until the end.
We have a confession of the divinity of Jesus here when he says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” It is written, Psa 102:27 “but you are the same, and your years have no end.” It is also written, Isa 41:4 “I, the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he.” And again it is written, Mal 3:6 “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” Jesus is the LORD. He does not change therefore we are not consumed. His promise of never leaving us or forsaking us always stands. Like Jesus who never changes, let our confession of him never change or falter, but let us boldly make it unto death.
As always we have a responsibility not to get carried away by different doctrines. We have the New Testament. We have the creeds. We are to test all teachings according to these things. Many people get carried away with false teachers who over emphasize on one teaching of the Church to the point of error or say the Church has erred on a another place or they have something that has been revealed to them from God the Church doesn’t have. Check it according to the Scriptures. Check it against the ancient Creeds. He gives an example of those who make much ado about the sacrificial laws of the Old Testament, the clean and unclean foods (and that error continues to this day). But Christ Jesus has fulfilled the Mosaic Law. The moral law, “Lover the Lord your God with all your strength, heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself” always stands. But the Mosaic Law with its precepts, statutes and the life were for the Israelites and even they, as the apostles testify didn’t keep it and are freed from it by the blood of Jesus. Those who continued in the Old Testament sacrifices have no fellowship with us who eat at the altar of Christ and receive his body and his blood for the forgiveness of sins, the New Testament.
As Jesus suffered outside the camp like the animals sacrificed and we have been purified by his blood, let us also suffer with him the contempt of the world. We may have to suffer even to the point of blood like our Savior Jesus Christ. May we stand firm with him to join him in glory. We do not look to the cities or comforts of this world as our gain but rather we look to settle in the city of God, the New Jerusalem, the city whose foundation was laid by God, Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone and the teaching of the apostles. This is what we are looking to inhabit and receive as our inheritance for our faith in Jesus Christ who was sacrificed for us.
Heavenly Father, always give us your Holy Spirit that we many cast aside the cares and worries of this world and look to Jesus who remained faithful to us, even to death on the cross, and enter the holy city on the day of his revelation to dwell with you and him for all eternity. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.