I haven’t died, although the few people who visit this Internet Outpost might have reason to think I had. Sorry about that. Most of my writing energy has been directed toward churchly duties. We are starting a sermon series on the book of Hebrews, and I have been banging out notes for that. Here are some now(!):
1. The book of Hebrews depends heavily on the Old Testament to make its argument. It is arguing from the Old Testament.
1a. We cannot assume that our audience is similarly familiar with the Old Testament.
1b. We must respect the authors movement in arguing. We cannot preach through Hebrews while ignoring the indebtedness on the Old Testament.
I think that because of this we need to “introduce” hebrews, to situate it.2. The author frequently offers “applications” in the midst of the argument: these “parenthetical” sections are often exhortative in nature, and seem ripe for the plucking for sermon material. We must be careful not to be focus on these sections (because they are easy to preach on, relatively) to the detriment of the main argument of the book, which by contrast is harder to preach on.
3. Hebrews describes, in a sense, the mechanics of Christ’s work as embedded in Israel’s story. In that sense we can use Hebrews to (re-) build theology for the church from the ground up, as it were.
4. Everything in Hebrews relates back to Jesus either as the high Priest who accomplished the task, or to His death on a cross. These two are close to being the same thing.
Main Idea: Jesus’ role as a Superior High Priest establishes a new covenant, a new law and a new people: all these are results of and shaped by Jesus’ superior sacrifice of himself.
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August 21st, 2007 at 10:41 am
I think the force of the exhortations is precisely due to their parenthetical character. I.e., now that you find yourself situated within the narrative of redemption, HERE is how you ought to change the way you’ve been living. It cannot come first, because these exhortations don’t make any sense within the old framework.