Manna Praxis

The Book of Hebrews: A Better Covenant

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

The first thing to notice about Hebrews is that it does not behave like a letter. Every other letter in the New Testament opens the way letters opened in the ancient world: here is my name, here is yours, grace and peace to you. Hebrews opens like a trumpet. “On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets.” No sender, no address, no greeting. Only at the very end, in the last dozen verses, does it fold itself into the shape of a letter with travel news and greetings and a benediction, and there the author tells us plainly what he thinks he has been doing. He asks them to bear with his “word of exhortation.” That was the ordinary name for the sermon preached in a synagogue after the Scriptures were read. What you hold, then, is a sermon that was put in the post. It was written to be read aloud to a gathered congregation, and it still reads best that way, out loud, at full pace, the way a preacher speaks when he loves the people in front of him and is genuinely afraid of what they are about to do. Because they were about to do something. These were Jewish believers who had come to Christ and had paid for it: publicly shamed, some imprisoned, their property seized, and they had taken it joyfully at the time. But that was years ago now, and the cost had not stopped, and the old ways they had come out of were still there, respectable, ancient, legal, safe. Some of them had stopped coming to the meeting. Some had grown listless and slow to hear. And so this preacher builds one long, patient, relentless argument, and every part of it says the same thing in a different key: what you are being drawn back toward was genuinely from God, and what you have in Christ is better.

As you read, hold this: To believers worn down and tempted to slip back to what was older and safer, an unnamed preacher makes one long, patient argument, that Jesus is better than everything they would return to, and therefore they must not drift, but draw near and hold fast.

The name and what it means

There is one word that runs like a seam of gold through this whole book, and if you learn it you will hear the sermon the way its first hearers did. In Greek it is κρείττων (kreittōn), pronounced KRICE-tone (Strong’s G2909), and it means better, superior, of higher rank and greater worth. The author uses it about thirteen times, more often than the rest of the New Testament put together, and he uses it as a hammer. A better name than the angels. A better hope. A better covenant, founded on better promises. A better sanctuary, better sacrifices, a better country, a better resurrection. Something better God had planned for us. He never argues that the old was false. He argues that it has been surpassed.

That distinction is the hinge of the entire book, and everything depends on your catching it. Better is a comparative word, and a comparative word only works if the thing being compared to is genuinely good. Nobody says a diamond is better than a lie. You say a diamond is better than glass, and you say it precisely because glass really does catch the light. The preacher of this sermon is not sneering at the prophets, the angels, Moses, Aaron, the tabernacle, the law, or the sacrifices. He treats every one of them as truly given by God, holy, and worth loving. He is himself so soaked in those Scriptures that he can hardly write a paragraph without quoting them. His argument is never good against bad. It is always shadow against substance, promise against fulfilment, the sketch against the finished portrait. A shadow is not a lie; a shadow is proof that something real is standing in the light. So when he says Christ is better, he is paying the old covenant the highest compliment there is: it was so good, and so truly from God, that only the Son of God Himself could surpass it. Hold that firmly, and you will read this book with reverence for what God gave Israel and with wonder at what He has now given in His Son. Let it slip, and you will read it as contempt, which it has too often been made to sound, and which its author never intended for a moment.

The world of the book

Begin with the honest thing: nobody knows who wrote Hebrews. That is not a modern doubt or a scholar’s fussiness. It was already an open question in the earliest centuries. Origen, writing in the third century, surveyed the guesses of his own day and concluded that who actually wrote it, God knows. The eastern churches tended to attach Paul’s name to it and the western churches for a long while did not, and the book itself says nothing. Names have been suggested ever since, all of them reasonable and none of them provable: Barnabas, who was a Levite and would have known the sanctuary from the inside; Apollos, the eloquent Alexandrian Jew mighty in the Scriptures; Luke; Silas; Priscilla. What the book does tell us is a little about the man or woman who preached it. The Greek is the most polished in the New Testament, the work of someone trained to write. The author knows Timothy well enough to mention his release. And, tellingly, he places himself in the second generation, saying that this salvation “was confirmed to us by those who heard Him.” He did not stand on the hillside himself. He learned it from those who did, as most of the church has ever since. Manna Praxis will not guess at the name, and you do not need it. The Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve the sermon and not the signature, and the sermon is what feeds you.

Now picture the congregation. They were Jewish believers, almost certainly, and they lived in a world where the age of a religion was its credential. Rome tolerated ancient faiths and distrusted new ones, and Judaism was ancient, legally protected, and respected. Christianity, in their neighbors’ eyes, was a splinter group only a few decades old, gathered around an executed Galilean. To leave the synagogue for that was to trade a recognized place in the world for a suspect one, and the price came in ordinary forms: a family that stopped speaking to you, a trade that dried up, a landlord who put you out, and for some of them a prison cell and confiscated goods. They had borne it. But the book keeps returning to the language of tiredness rather than the language of rebellion. Drooping hands. Weak knees. Growing weary and losing heart. Becoming dull of hearing. Some of them staying away from the assembly. This is not a congregation planning apostasy. It is a congregation running out of steam, and quietly drifting back toward the older forms of worship, which were beautiful, which God Himself had given, and which no longer cost them anything.

That is why the author fights the way he does. He does not lecture them about willpower. He lifts up Christ, chapter after chapter, until the pull of what they are drifting toward simply loses its force. And he does it in the language of the sanctuary, because that is the language they knew in their bones: priests and blood and altars and veils and the Day of Atonement, when one man went in behind the curtain once a year with blood that could never finally take sin away. Whether the temple in Jerusalem was still standing as he wrote, we cannot be sure; he argues from the tabernacle of the Scriptures rather than from the building of his own day. But the world of his sermon is that world. To hear him rightly you must smell the smoke, see the curtain, and feel what it meant to be a worshiper who could come near the house of God and never actually go in. And then hear him say that the curtain is open, and the invitation is to draw near.

The shape of the book

The one thread to carry

If you carry one thing through these thirteen chapters, carry this: Jesus is better, therefore do not drift. Everything in the sermon hangs on those two clauses, and they are not two subjects but one. The whole doctrinal weight of the book exists for the sake of the practical commands, and the practical commands are impossible without the doctrine. You cannot hold on to something you have not seen the worth of. So the preacher shows you the worth, and shows it, and shows it again, until holding on is the only reasonable thing left to do. Hear how he begins, and notice that he begins with God speaking.

"On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets. But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature, upholding all things by His powerful word. After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high." Hebrews 1:1–3 (BSB)

There is the whole book in three verses. God has not stopped speaking; He has finished speaking, in a Son who is the very shining-out of His glory. That Son upholds everything that exists. He dealt with sin. And then He sat down, which is a word no priest of Israel ever got to do, because the work was never finished and there were no chairs in the tabernacle. Now see what the preacher does with it. He does not leave you admiring a doctrine from a distance. He turns it into an open door.

"Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Hebrews 4:14–16 (BSB)

Read that slowly, because it is the pastoral heart of Hebrews. The One seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high is not remote. He has been down here. He knows what it is to be tired, hunted, misunderstood, and pressed hard, and He came through it without sin, which means He knows temptation more thoroughly than any of us who give in early. So the throne we approach is a throne of grace, and we are told to come to it with confidence, and to come at the exact moment we least feel entitled to, our time of need. And then, having filled twelve chapters with the greatness of Christ, the preacher points you at Him and tells you to run.

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with endurance the race set out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." Hebrews 12:1–2 (BSB)

There He is again, seated. The book keeps coming back to that chair, because a finished work is the only ground a weary believer can stand on. And notice what fixes a runner’s endurance: not gritting the teeth, but the direction of the eyes. Look at Him. That is the whole counsel of this sermon to people who are tired, and it is a wonderfully merciful thing that God gave His church a book written specifically for those who are running out of strength rather than for those who have plenty. So read Hebrews slowly, and let its warnings land with their full weight, and let its comforts land with theirs. Praise God that He has spoken to us by a Son. Learn the Word, fix your eyes on Jesus, and give thanks.