“For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” NASB
“For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. 13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” NIV
These two verses of today’s text will be very familiar to anyone who has been a Bible-studying believer for any length of time. These verses, I would dare to assume, will be more familiar than the verses immediately preceding or succeeding them, because preachers and teachers love to talk about the Bible. We love to say that it is the sword of the Spirit and talk about the ability of God’s Word to cut to the quick – get right to the heart – expose all wrong and illuminate all right.
The temptation is very strong, therefore, to go to Hebrews, find these verses, start with an illustration that explains what a double-edged blade is and maybe tell an eye-popping story of some hero who has wielded a sword in ferocious battle and won the day, and then go on to cite all the statistics one can find about the Bible’s history and its endurance through all attempts to blot it from the earth, and proofs of its accuracy and infallibility and so forth and so on.
What we really need to be careful to do though, is to keep these verses in the context of what the writer has been saying in chapter 3 and 4, remembering that he is issuing a warning for the true believer in Christ, and he is not quite finished; hence, the word ‘for’ at the beginning of verse 12.
THE ESSENCE OF THE WARNING
In order to get the full impact of these two verses today we need to begin by backing up just one step and looking at verse 11.
“Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience.”
You may remember that last week I offered a recipe of sorts to help you remember what we are called to in this portion by the author.
Fear unbelief, - hear the good proclamation, - mix with faith, - add diligence and enter in.
Again, what verse 11 is concluding is that the true believer, once called and given life from above, must exercise a diligence to avoid falling back into a worldly, empty façade of religion.
There is a reason the word ‘rest’ is used so much in this portion of HEBREWS, Christians. Worldly religion is of necessity founded upon rules and traditions. It does not have the Spirit of Christ, so in order to keep its adherents in line there must be a rigorous routine of imposed behaviors to show the follower to be faithful to duty and doctrine.
If you want an example of what I am talking about, you only need to look at the people who go around, usually on Saturdays, in black suits and white shirts, going door to door wanting to talk to you about Jesus.
Now I have heard preachers on occasion use these people as examples of faithfulness and diligence, saying that we of the true church could take a lesson from them in their sincerity and their tenacity. But what I want you to understand today is they are a people in chains of legalism.
They do not have the Spirit of Christ, and they live in fear of disobeying, not God, but their church. They have not entered the rest that God provides and their diligence and faithfulness are born of enslaving fear.
But we needn’t look that far to find people in this sort of bondage. We don’t have to go to the cults and the false religions at all. These people are found even in every denomination of Christ’s true church.
Just the day before I came to my study to prepare this sermon I saw an article in the Baptist Press, citing results of survey’s printed in a book by Brad Waggoner, Vice President of B&H Publishing Group, titled “The Shape of Things to Come”.
The book reports that only 69 per cent of adults who attend a Southern Baptist Church at least once a month strongly agree that ‘the Bible is the written Word of God and is totally accurate in all that it teaches’.
Only 76 percent of that same group indicated that they believe the Bible is significant and applicable for daily living.
Now folks, these are people who, when they go to church, go to a church in a denomination that believes and teaches the inerrancy, infallibility and immutability of the Scriptures, and that the Bible is the authoritative source of truth and wisdom for daily living.
So they are attending a church but not believing what the church teaches. They don’t know their Bibles, therefore they are not studying their Bibles, therefore they are not believing the Word of God, therefore they have not entered His rest. They are in disobedience and the writer to the Hebrews warns us to be diligent to avoid following their example.
Now before I move on, let me just draw your attention to the fact that entire denominations from their headquarters on down, have rejected the Bible as the inerrant, infallible, unchanging Word of God. Some do not employ it in their worship, and some do use it as a history book, a poetry book, a book of general rules for living, but reject it as God-breathed and powerful for daily living. So in that case the percentage of people who have failed to enter God’s rest climbs significantly, and without having the actual survey numbers I’d venture a guess that it would reach 100 percent. Because anyone in those groups whose faith is according to God’s Word is going to leave and go someplace where the Bible is believed and taught.
At least, I hope so.
I’ve chosen this particular issue to focus on because this is where the rubber meets the road, friends. If you don’t believe…
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” 2 Tim 3:16-17
…then you are living in disobedience to God and have not entered His rest.
No matter what the lesser issues are, they all come back to this. If you have failed to understand that the true believer is eternally secure in Christ then there is something about God’s Word you have either not learned or refused to believe.
If you impose upon yourself and others some restrictions that the Bible does not, or some traditions and regulations that supercede the Scriptures, then you have not believed the promises of God concerning grace nor have you believed the teaching of the Apostles concerning true religion.
It all eventually comes back to this; you believe God’s Word and enter His rest, or you disbelieve and are therefore disobedient to God’s Word, and that is true no matter how devoted your religious piety.
I repeat here, if God held those accountable who only had the Ten Commandments and the witness of His works among them, how much more we, who have the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ”? (2 Cor 4:4)
Believe God’s Word and be diligent to enter His rest.
THE SEARCHING WORD
David asks a very interesting and very revealing question in Psalm 19 verse 12.
“Who can discern his errors?” Then he makes a plea, “Acquit me of hidden faults”
David was confessing a weakness that is true of all mankind. We don’t really know ourselves. We very easily and frequently deceive ourselves about ourselves.
Most of us have heard Jeremiah 17:9 more than once…
“The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?”
In a taped sermon I heard a preacher refer to a sermon he had heard at a conference, titled, “The Pastor’s Heart: Desperately Wicked”
I wish I could have heard that sermon; I’m certain it would have been to me like the knife of a skilled surgeon, both cutting and helpful.
Because, beloved, no one of us is excluded from this fact of the human race. We are deceived and deceiving. We do not know our own heart of hearts, nor can we know another’s.
When we see in the Gospels that Jesus responded to men according to the knowledge He had of their hearts we should be astounded once more and reminded that this was surely God with us.
“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” Jn 1:14
The terminology employed in our text by the author is very specific, very precise; in fact, the wording itself is like the Sword that he is describing. With precision he defines it so that we cannot miss the message.
I am told that the Greek designation for sword refers to a short-bladed, sharp dagger. That’s as far as we need to go in comparing the living and active Word of God to a cutting sword. We all get the picture and need make no more of it.
But look at these phrases. “…penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit”
“…joints and marrow…” “…judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart…”
These are things the human mind cannot do.
The living and active Word of God is able to divide soul and spirit. The soul is the animal, the material, the psyche of the man. The spirit is that which is immaterial and eternal. In death the spirit leaves the animal behind and the physical life is extinguished.
That is what is taking place when the perfect Law of God does its work in the inner man. It is what Paul describes in Romans 7:9 when he declares,
“And I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died…”
That is the power of the Word to destroy the false and worldly hope of the sinner; his self-assurance and self-dependence, cutting him down in conviction bringing him prostrate as though a sword had pierced his heart.
The deepest innermost part of the human frame is the marrow of the bones. The truth of God’s Word is able to pierce down to the very center, making distinction even between bone and marrow; and we can get a picture of a body dissected and even the bones split and laid open to view – nothing hidden – nothing covered up – nothing unaffected by the surgeon’s blade.
Hence the next phrase, ‘…able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart’
God’s Word is Truth. His truth penetrates to the very core of men’s most secret thoughts and intentions often even hidden from the man; his sins, his guilt over past sins that he has suppressed within himself.
This why the Gospel is the power of God for salvation, believer. This is the truth of God’s Word that goes to the center of the heart, exposes to the man or woman the vileness of what has been their previous existence; the bile harbored there even in secret for so long, exposes sin as utterly sinful and deals its death blow so that life can be brought forth by the resurrection power of that same Gospel.
“For in it the righteousness of God is revealed…” Rom 1:17
The New Testament talks of the sheep and the goats; those who are true believers and those who are not. Jesus spoke of those who, at the judgment, would claim a right to Heaven based upon their works and their goodness.
Paul warned young pastors not to be deceived by the wolves that would come into the assembly with their divisive spirit and their false teaching.
The living and active Sword which is the Word of God will sort them out and none can escape its discerning thrust.
THE UNCOVERING WORD
Whereas verse 12 gives us a picture of a sword that reveals the innermost thoughts and intentions, verse 13 shows us a God whose all-seeing eye cannot be avoided; whose scrutiny cannot be evaded.
Francis Thompson, born in 1859, grew up close to the church in several ways. His family was close friends with the local Catholic priests and Francis himself was expected to study for the priesthood. Being lazy and selfish he soon dropped out of that. Wanting still to please his father he entered medical school, but soon became addicted to opium.
The drug was slowly destroying his body and his mind, and he eventually moved away from his family to London, where for several years he lived the life of a homeless man, ragged, hungry, dependant on laudanum, befriended for a short time by a prostitute who let him take refuge in her flat.
The story is much longer than I can go into here, but the short of it is that while God was out of Thompson’s thoughts He was never entirely out of his life. In a work that has become a classic, Thompson near the end of his life wrote “The Hound of Heaven”.
In 1997 author Gordon MacDonald translated this work into modern English, which reads in part:
“All my life – every day, every hour, throughout all the years – I have been on the run. My flight has been from One who has penetrated every dimension of my reality, even the nooks and crannies of my mind where I once assumed that all things could be logically figured out and brought under control. Not only have I run, I have hidden from Him behind clouds of tears (in those moments when my heart was broken) and beneath the disguise of sustained hilarity (in other, rarer moments when it seemed as if life could not be better).
I have raced away from Him in moments of naïve optimism, and, just as quickly, have dived for cover when life’s circumstances unraveled and I was numb with fear. But, no matter my direction or my frantic pace, there has always been this relentless sense of pursuit, an awareness that there was One close behind who was not in a hurry, not upset, not panicked, and never undignified. Add to this pressure a Voice that is more present to me than even the footfalls of the One who chases, a Voice that says, ‘All of life will continually be unfaithful to you if you persist in being faithless to Me’.”
That nothing and no one escapes the absolute and perfect examination of the eyes and knowledge of God is both a fearsome truth and a comforting truth.
There is no creature hidden from His sight, means that in the end all wrong will be exposed and all victims vindicated. It means that all who are evil will be brought to justice; those who have loved the darkness will be brought to light.
It also means that all His chosen ones will be brought safely into the fold, no matter how hard they try to run from Him at first. None will be left behind.
It means that all true, born again followers of Jesus Christ will stand before Him and their works will be judged accurately and rewards will be meted perfectly.
“So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. 10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. 2 Cor 5:9-10
Believer, if you were to be honest with yourself; if you were to ask God to illuminate to you even that which you have hidden from your own thoughts in some dark corner of your heart, how would your present relationship to Him be described?
Is there some part of you that has continued to run from Him – that even as one of His children you have tried to hide?
I would also ask anyone who is in the church, who has perhaps been involved actively in the church for a very long time, do you really know that you are His? Have you truly believed His Word? Is His Word presently searching your innermost thoughts and intentions and finding faith? Or are you just going through the motions but refusing to enter His rest through unbelief?
I will guarantee you that all of your diligence, all of your work, all of what you have perceived and presented as ministry is useless if God’s good news has not been mixed with faith in you as you heard it.
Paul made this clear in His first letter to the Corinthian church.
“For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. 14 If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15 If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.” 1 Cor 3:11-15
We will give an account, fellow Christ-follower, and our accounting will be for how we received every Word that proceeds to us out of the mouth of God.
What matters will not be what we have done in ministry; what matters ultimately will not be whether what we have done is good or bad, useful or useless. Yes, the Bible tells us those things will be judged.
But they in their goodness or badness, usefulness or uselessness, will grow out of whether we have trusted and obeyed the Word of God.
Back when we talked about the many-faceted confirmations of the Gospel that God has given to us, we agreed that He only needs to say anything once for it to be true.
That is because He is God who cannot change and cannot lie and perpetually, through history, through His Word, through His Son, through His Spirit, avows and confirms His love and care for us.
So when we disbelieve what He says to us we cast aspersion on His character, on His purpose, on His motives, on His grace.
We will give an account. Therefore let us renew our determination right now, not as the body of believers but as individuals who will stand before Him on that fixed day – let us renew our determination to hear the Word, learn the Word, believe the Word of God, and with diligence enter in and take hold of the rest He brings us to.
Lay down your arms, lay down your self-trust and self-sufficiency, step out of the world’s wilderness of striving and enter His promised land of rest.
For He has brought you to it, you do not have an enemy that He cannot overcome, and the abundant fruit of His rest is love, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
