In this episode, Pastor Kenan and Kel discuss the implications of the book of Hebrews and how it applies to the Christian life. The Old Covenant is about to come to its final cataclysmic end, and the only way to have access to the promises that God made is by joining the true Israel, Jesus Christ.
00:01:47.740I'm excited about this because, did you ever watch the Kenan and Kel Goodberger where he's like reading, Kel is reading like, he's like, I know some of these words.
00:02:29.860Almost every text of Hebrews was, a lot of it was the superiority of Christ to the angels, superiority of Christ to Moses, superiority of Christ to the temple, all these.
00:02:40.920But then there was also this constant sense of finality
00:02:45.360and this impending doom and all that remains is fire.
00:02:52.060And it's not just speaking of the fires of hell.0.95
00:02:54.080It's not just, if you go back to Judaism0.83
00:04:21.720Because you can imagine, I mean, that is now.
00:04:23.560Why can't we have Christ plus a little bit of.
00:04:26.100I mean, even today, we've talked about this in other episodes, but like Jewish people that come to Christ, right, they face enormous social pressure from their families and from their friends and from everyone that they've known in their life to reject that.0.72
00:04:41.080And that's part of the reason, I'd like to pick your brain on this.
00:04:44.040I know that you're not, you know, an expert and, you know, completely well-versed on the topic, but it's never sat well with me, the category, the label of Messianic Jew.
00:04:54.740So, the label that I prefer, and I'd like to hear your thought, is for a Jew who converts
00:05:00.540to Christianity and puts faith in Jesus, Christian.0.72
00:05:02.940Yeah, I think that's a pretty good term.0.54
00:05:05.260Yeah, I just, no, no, no, I'm not a Messianic Jew.
00:05:08.340Because it implies, you know, what we talked about in the Ephesians episode.0.71
00:06:10.800But it may not be intentional by those who, you know, every individual who applies it.
00:06:16.380But an individual Messianic Jew may not mean it.
00:06:19.080what I'm about to say by holding to that label. But I think that in some capacity, whether
00:06:25.800intentional or not, it does convey the very thing that Paul, and I believe it was Paul who wrote
00:06:31.480Hebrews, is warning against to the Hebrews. He's saying, no, no, no, don't go back. Don't go back.0.58
00:06:37.820And if you want Christ, here's the condition. He's free and without price, right? But
00:06:47.000But the cost of, one of my friends actually said this, great friend, been friends for almost 20
00:06:53.800years. I remember one time he said, you know, the cost of going north is that you don't get to go
00:06:59.200south. Simple as that. Well, Jesus is free, right? It's by free grace through faith in Christ alone.
00:07:05.900The gospel is free. You can have Christ for free without price. All who want the living water,
00:07:10.640come to me and drink, you know, milk without price, water without price. But the cost,
00:07:16.740there is a cost to discipleship. The cost of Jesus is, the cost is everything else.
00:07:23.580If you want Christ, that's fine, but you don't get to hedge your bets. You have to bet the house,
00:07:30.140the whole farm on Christ. And yet, I think that these Hebraic Christians were hedging their bets.1.00
00:07:38.280So they were denying, not that Christ was even God, but the sufficiency of Christ.0.96
00:07:43.440And I think the Messianic Jew at some level, whether consciously or subconsciously, it's hedging bets.
00:07:48.660And I think that even within evangelicals, this still carving out some kind of space for a special category for Israel, Zionism, is hedging bets.
00:08:02.260It keeps the bet hedging alive by doing that, right?
00:08:06.200And, yeah, I think when we approach this book, right, you need to think of it as Paul or whomever wrote Hebrews is writing to these Christians who are tempted to return to the Old Covenant, right?0.64
00:08:22.080He's writing to people that are going to go back to this city, Jerusalem, and there's this big, giant nuclear bomb, right, with a clock that's ticking.0.51
00:08:44.220And so, right, I mean, the verse that seals the deal, right, it's just one verse, right, is Hebrews 8.13, right, where he says, in speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete.
00:08:58.520But still not completely obsolete, right?
00:15:52.920he lost it, then it was forfeited to angels, in this case, fallen angels, Elohim, lowercase g,
00:15:58.280gods. But then the second Adam, who is a man, the God-man, he comes and takes it back. And now
00:16:05.520there is a man seated in heaven, administrating this new covenant.
00:16:10.880Yeah. And so right at the get-go of Hebrews, it starts out, long ago at many times in many ways,
00:16:16.660God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, right, the last days, not the end of the world, but the end of that world, the old covenant, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he has appointed the heir of all things, right?
00:16:31.320When is he appointed heir of all things?
00:17:57.320What's happening to the old creation, the old covenant, right?
00:18:00.580That right there in Hebrews 1, it's being rolled up like a garment and Jesus is the one that is doing it and it's happening in the ascension.
00:21:45.040Well, Diocletian wants to go to battle.0.83
00:21:49.700And, right, well, if you want to go to battle and you're a pagan Rome, right, you need to talk to the gods.0.87
00:21:56.060You need to talk to the gods and you go to the oracles or you have, you do divination with looking, having your priests look at the entrails.0.87
00:22:03.800And this was like, it's like a magic eight ball, right?
00:22:07.100And every time they'd sacrifice a bull,
00:23:22.580And they're by a Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, who was a Christian.
00:23:29.000So ironically, they're like, oh, you got to, we're going to have all these kids read like this dignified African author because we want diversity.
00:23:38.140It was all DEI kind of stuff in college.
00:23:41.100Little did they know or care, I guess, but this guy's a Christian.
00:23:45.820He's describing Africa where the Christian missionaries would come and they'd say, all right, you can set up your church, your clinic, or whatever you're doing.
00:23:58.020over there in that space over there. And they wouldn't tell them, right, that's where all the
00:24:02.780demons are, right? That's where all the evil spirits are. And the evil spirits are going to
00:24:07.200torment them. And what happens? They're surprised. Nothing, right? Nothing happens to them at all,
00:24:16.380right? And in fact, right, they're greatly blessed despite the evil spirits and the witch doctors0.99
00:24:23.640all over the place, all the stuff,1.00
00:24:27.060all their divination, all the things they were doing,
00:24:29.160all their incantations, those stop working too.
00:25:29.780Yeah, they're constantly discovering, you know, thousands of mass graves of bodies in these temples that are constructed out of tens of thousands of human skulls and skulls of children.
00:25:41.060And you think, well, that stuff is gone now.1.00
00:26:32.320And, right, what is the answer to that?
00:26:34.340It's the church growing and preaching more faithfully and expanding and the kingdom growing and putting all of that down.
00:26:41.980But it doesn't mean that Satan is loosed now and he's deceiving all of the nations all at once, like he once did in the Old Covenant.
00:26:49.720Not to the same degree, not even close.
00:26:52.140But you do have still demonic activity.
00:26:54.680You still do have degrees of deception.
00:26:58.600And I think of what Christ himself said in terms of that when a demon is cast out, the person, the house is swept clean and put into order.
00:27:08.960and the demon then goes into waterless places, arid places.
00:27:15.120But eventually, we'll come back if the house is swept clean
00:27:18.680and put in order, but it's not filled.
00:29:49.400Right. And so, of course, it would be bad. Yeah. Of course, it would be. Right. And yeah, I think the power of the ancient world and paganism in the ancient world, it's interesting because those places were powerful and orderly.
00:30:08.400You have these pagan empires that would have tremendous stability, and they have it because of the Girardian function that paganism serves.
00:30:20.140You have this constant scapegoat mechanism which provides stability to a people, and the Christian era is different because we have the scapegoat, the true and final one that is paid for all sin.0.63
00:30:33.260And the city, instead of a city like Cain, building on the blood of Abel, or a city like Rome, built on the blood of Remus, we have a city built on the blood of Christ.0.58
00:30:46.380And the stability aspect of it, it's not the same.
00:30:49.400It's not this fixed, stable thing where it's very powerful and very strong, right?
00:30:59.260He gives Christian society strength and power and stability through families and through living in accord with the way that God made the world.0.60
00:31:10.240And yeah, Israel doesn't have that at all.0.71
00:31:14.840And so, going further into Hebrews, we went along the rabbit trail on this, but the rabbit trail, of course, is always the point.0.93
00:31:23.480So, you know, going through Hebrews, right, the writer of this, he's talking about this salvation and he's showing that in the Old Covenant, it's deficient, right?
00:31:35.300You have the system of sacrifice, you have priests, but you don't have a high priest that can complete the system of sacrifice because Christ is sinless.
00:31:46.640He's the high priest that offers himself.
00:31:48.980And then, right, he sits down and he's completed his high priestly service.
00:31:53.280You have a greater and better priest, right?
00:31:55.580Not in the order of Aaron, but in an order that precedes Aaron in Melchizedek, right?
00:35:39.060I try to get myself into the headspace of someone who thinks, yeah, there still is some remnant or aspect of the old covenant left, right, for this category of people over here, thousands of years later, right, holding that position and then reading this.
00:35:55.000That's really hard to read this and think, right, all he's doing, the entire book is trashing the old covenant and saying how this is so much better and saying it's going to go away soon.
00:36:09.660How would I come away after reading this thinking, oh, that's still a thing though?
00:36:16.140And even when you read, I mean, it gives you great confidence.
00:36:19.840And this view, I think, actually opens up the Bible, the entire Bible, way more for Christians.
00:36:27.320When you read Hebrews 11, and it goes to the history of the patriarchs and the men of the Old Covenant and says that we are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, of those Old Covenant saints.
00:36:41.820you go back and you read through that and you realize, wait, that's our history. That isn't a
00:36:49.500history of a particular special people, right? We are the special people. That's our history,
00:36:55.220right? I am spiritually descended from David and from Samson and from Abraham and from Jacob,
00:37:04.220right? Those are our fathers, right? We are grafted into this covenant. That's our history,
00:39:21.680We're the sons of Abraham that have been made out of stones into his son because, and it's entirely only via faith, that we have the faith of Abraham.