Come and Go Sunday School with Dr. Frank Carver & Dr. Herb Prince from First Church of the Nazarene in San Diego, California, United States
GOD HAS SPOKEN
Without Holiness?
(Hebrews Thirty Four)[The following outline is that of Kevin L. Anderson, Hebrews: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition, New Beacon Bible Commentary (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2013), 5-6.
I. Hearing the Apostle and High Priest of Our Confession: Hebrews 1:1—4:13
II. Jesus’ Superior High Priesthood: Hebrews 4:14—10:18
III. Call to Persevering Faith and Acceptable Worship: Hebrews 10:19--13:25
- Exhortations to Persevere in Faith, 10:19—12:13
- Exhortations to Offer Acceptable Worship, 12:14—13:25.
- Receive the Unshakable Kingdom with Gratitude and Worship, 12:14-29
- Pursue Peace and Holiness, 12:14-17.
b. Mountain of Terror and Mountain of Celebration 12:18-24.
c. Listen to the Heavenly Voice 12:25-29.
2. Instructions for Worship as a Way of Life, 13:1-25]
Hebrews 12:17 For you know that afterwards, when he wanted to obtain his father’s blessing, he was rejected; indeed, even though he sought it with tears, his change of heart was to no avail.
Hebrews 12:14: “Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without
which no one will see the Lord.”
When the ways of people please the LORD, he causes
even their enemies to be at peace with them (Prov. 16:7).
Introduction
When I first came into the Church of the Nazarene between college and seminary (1950-1951) “holiness without which no one will see the Lord” was and had been a keynote in the preaching of many an evangelist and pastor. So far, so good.
For them it was a warning cry—so far so good! They were exhorting, not so much to a life it seemed to me, but to an experience. They were calling folk following their conversions to soon “get sanctified.” They had in mind a second crisis experience of God’s grace, usually ecstatic as I perceived their preaching, an experience which if they did not get, they would eventually be lost. Growth itself would not cut it (and this is not to say that the folk did not need it!). And we fully admit that most of us do need that moment in our Christian journey when we, in response to new light from God (or old light that we have disregarded!) make a decisive and deeper commitment to God—“Lord, I am all yours!” No matter what!
But the question we are faced with in our study is, “What did the writer to the Hebrews have in mind in his exhortation of 12:14?” Certainly he did not exclude such a moment or moments. Yet, what does he mean by “Without Holiness”? To find that out we look with him at
I.
The Pursuit
12:14
Chapter 12 began with the exhortation to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (vv. 1-2). We are to “consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sins, so that [we] do not grow weary or lose heart” (v. 3). To win the race would take endurance, and the ability to endure comes from adequate training, in their case from the discipline of their trials: “Endure trials for the sake of discipline” (v. 7, see 3-13). With verse 14 the preacher continues with the image of running a race, further explaining it now in terms of peace and holiness.
14Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
The writer’s explanation begins with the pursuit of “peace with everyone.” This to-be effort follows on his conclusion that discipline “yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those have been trained by it” (v. 11). To “pursue peace” comes Biblically as “the natural expression of righteousness.”[Johnson, Hebrews, 323.] The Psalmist speaks of a day when “righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (85:10). As Johnson comments,
there is no reason to think that this pursuit should include only members of the community. Indeed, pursuing peace “with all people” seems particularly important—and particularly difficult—in conditions of oppression. [Johnson, Hebrews, 323.]
The Apostle Paul’s admonition to the Romans was that “if it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (12:18) as well as
“let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (14:19).
The preacher’s explanation continues with the pursuit of “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” The NASB, with attention to the grammatical form reads, “the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.” “Sanctification” (hagiosmon) is an action noun in distinction from “holiness” (hagiotÄ“tos) back in verse 10 where the meaning is more “a state of being.” In our previous lesson, “that we may share his holiness,” was seen as the purpose and goal of discipline--that is, a quality of life resulting from that “sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.” As Anderson phrased it, it is a life of “participation in the holy life of God.”[Anderson, Hebrews, 322.]
The author’s use of “sanctification” here as an action noun comprehends in summary fashion all that we have noted in its verbal forms throughout Hebrews. Comprehended is all that Jesus as a Son has done and is doing in his Incarnation, his Cross, his Resurrection, and as one who “has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (12:3; see 1:1-3). Here in 12:14 “the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord” includes all that God is doing and will do in the Christian’s inner and outer being—ethical and spiritual character. In view is the completion of the divine likeness (2 Cor. 31; 4:16; John 3:2).
This noun form, “sanctification,” functioning as a grand summary, occurs only here. We quote all the other occurrences of the root in their verbal forms:
For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father (2:11).
And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (10:10).
For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified [lit., “being sanctified”] (10:14).
Therefore Jesus suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood (13:12).
With the goal of the race now more clearly identified, the writer now turns to the
II.
Danger Ahead!
12:15-17
With verse 14 serving as a heading for the remainder of the paragraph (vv. 15-17), the preacher, continuing the themes of peace and sanctification, warns:
15See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled. 16See to it that no one becomes like Esau, an immoral and godless person, who sold his birthright for a single meal. 17You know that later, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, even though he sought the blessing with tears.
1.
First, the theme of “peace with everyone” is related directly to “the grace of God.”[“Grace” appears infrequently in Hebrews, but always significantly. See 2:9; 4:16; 10:29; 12:15, 28 (as “thanks”); 13:9, 25.] While the relation is not absolute or without exception, the lack of peace with others is due to the Christian’s failure to fully resource the “grace of God” in each situation--and that especially within the community of faith.
In view is not just the individual alone but also the members of the Christian community who are to come to the aid of one another in such matters: “Look out for each other”[The translation of Anderson, Hebrews, 332] so “that no one misses the grace of God” (NIV). There is no practical area of our lives in which the grace of God is needed more than in our relations with other folk, growing in proportion to their closeness to us. And how “graceful” do I react to those who uninvited confront me, say in a marketing or scam call?
Especially within the Christian community the author attributes such failure, such internal strife, to a “root of bitterness” that “springs up and causes trouble,” defiling the spirits of others. In the writer’s mind is Deuteronomy 29:18-20 where there may be those
whose heart is already turning away from the LORD our God, . . . among you a root sprouting poisonous and bitter growth, . . . thinking in their hearts, “We are safe even though we go our stubborn ways.” . . . The LORD’s anger and passion will smoke against them.
The “root of bitterness” thus describes a person or persons within the believing community. The spiritual danger is an “apostasy [that] threatens the safety and integrity of all”[Johnson, Hebrews, 324.]: “and through it many become defiled.”
2.
Therefore, second, the issue becomes that of the community’s “holiness” or the sanctification “without which no one will see the Lord.” One can define “without holiness” as “without their hearts open and their lives responding to the grace of God present and at work in their midst.” It appears that the preacher is concerned about a most serious threat to the spiritual health of the ecclesiastical enterprise, the holiness of the church—“the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.”[The Nicene Creed] To reinforce his point the author reminds his readers of the behavior and experience of Esau, the son of Isaac and Rebekah and the brother of Jacob in Genesis: “See to it that no one becomes like Esau.” Esau, as the firstborn of twins, “sold his birthright to Jacob” and thus “despised his birthright” (Gen. 25:33-34). The writer to the Hebrews, reflecting Jewish interpretive tradition as well as Genesis, describes Esau as “an immoral and godless person, who sold his birthright for a single meal.”
What kind of a person was Esau particularly in contrast to his younger brother Jacob? Genesis reports simply that Esau “was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents” (25:27). We can picture Esau as all boy, in love with the outdoors and the open sky, a wild, energetic and boisterous character—a man’s man! And Jacob—a sissy, a mamma’s boy with his tent pitched close to his mother’s! But the point is not “the field” in contrast to “tents.”
The contrast between the twins, both in the Genesis story and in Hebrews is in Jacob’s description as “a quiet man”--what Esau was not! In the Hebrew language Jacob was an ʼîš tam, “a man of tam,” that is, a tam man. How to translate the Hebrew adjective tam rendered “quiet” in this context is an interpretive puzzle; all the other biblical occurrences of tam refer to the moral quality of a person’s character.
Job, for example appears as a man “blameless (tam) and upright” (1:1; 1:8; 2:3). Somehow such an ethical characterization does not seem to suit the deceitful Jacob at this point in the Genesis account. The Hebrew adjective, however, can also carry the sense of “complete.” To start here fits the context.
In my judgement, the Jewish scholar J. P. Fokkelman takes this sense in the right direction. He suggests that the only possible interpretation here of tam is “bent on one purpose.”[J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2nd ed., 1991), 91. ] The word tam describes Jacob as a single-minded man who knew what was of value, sensitive to the worth of his familial traditions in the culture of the day. Esau, on the other hand is a creature of appetite, or as one put it, “all belly and no brains.”[Thomas W. Mann, The Book of the Torah: The Narrative Integrity of the Pentateuch (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 52.] Clever as he is, Jacob knows Esau’s weakness, where his brother is vulnerable, and exploits it
Our preacher takes this lack of integrity in Esau’s character, this serious flaw in his behavior at a more crucial moment in his life than he realizes, and drives it home to his readers with an extra flourish: “See to it that no one becomes like Esau, an immoral and godless person, who sold his birthright for a single meal.” The Hebrews writer’s description as “godless” we understand. But “immoral”?
Later Jewish tradition really messed up Esau’s character: “It regarded Esau as a sexual deviant, murderer, atheist, and all-around rascally fellow.”[Anderson, Hebrews, 333, in his “Esau the Immoral in Jewish Tradition” from which we quote] His marriage to the foreign Hittite women (Gen. 25:34-35) was viewed as an instance of sexual immorality. Anderson understands the use of “immoral” here in Hebrews as sexual immorality. He does admit with other interpreters, however, the possibility that the author has in mind “the common OT symbol of harlotry for covenant unfaithfulness or idolatry.”[Anderson, Hebrews, 333.]
Many years later, “when Isaac was old and his eyes were dim” (Gen.27:1), Jacob, encouraged and helped by his mother Rebekah, deceived his father with a ruse and stole the patriarchal blessing that was rightfully Esau’s. You know the story (Gen. 27:1-29). As a result the heart-broken and bitter Esau could only receive a secondary, a “second,” blessing (Gen 27:30-40). So the preacher writes of Esau: “You know that later, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, even though he sought the blessing with tears.
Since the patriarchal blessing rightfully due the firstborn was irrevocable by its very nature, there was no possible way for Esau “to inherit the blessing” of the firstborn. Isaac’s regret—he “trembled violently” (27:33), and Esau’s bitter tears could in no way pull off a redo. Esau “found no chance to repent,” no chance of “turning around,” as “repent” can mean in the light of its Hebrew background. But more than this, the writer to the Hebrews appears to have transformed Esau’s predicament into a picture of the apostasy he warns his readers against earlier (6:4-6). Thus Esau is depicted as “rejected.”
Conclusion
The accounts of Esau’s sale of the birthright and loss of the blessing have been fused in a picture of the behavior to be avoided at all costs lest we fail “to obtain the grace of God” in our pursuit of “peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” Although it is not a theme the author works with as such, the magnificent concept of “grace” underlies and permeates the whole of the preacher’s “word of exhortation” (13:22). Just listen:
We do see Jesus . . . now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. [The “grace” texts here are Hebrews 12:14; 2:9; 4:14, 16; 10:29; 13:9; 13:25. Bold type is mine.]
Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, . . . let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
How much worse punishment will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God . . . and outraged the Spirit of grace?
It is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace.
Grace be with all of you--the sanctification without which no one
will see the Lord!
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