Throne Of Grace Series

We read in Hebrews 4:14, “Let us, then, hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we have a great High Priest who has gone into the very presence of God…Jesus, the Son of God.” (GNB)

We live in a world where it is so easy for us to be ensnared and in bondage to various sinful habits. Outwardly we may appear to be living a carefree life, but the truth of the matter is that, deep down we know that we are in enslavement to the passions and desires of this world.

The Lord’s promise to us is that, irrespective of the kind of things that we are entangled with, He is able to deliver us out of them all, and set us free from every kind of bondage.

Knowingly or unknowingly we have become slaves to many things in this world. Bondage don’t happen in a day, it is a slow and deliberate process. Some people have relinquished their faith in God and backslid-den because of these enslavement.

In Hebrews 4:14 we are exhorted to “hold firmly to the faith we profess.” For instance if we are travelling on a bus with a bag of rice and the bus ticket in our hand, it is obvious that we will be more careful with the ticket than with the bag of rice. If we lose our bag of rice we can always buy it back for the same price, but if we lose the ticket we may have to pay a fine ten times more than the ticket itself. So also in life, we often find ourselves holding on tightly to worldly things and lose out on the more important spiritual things, not realizing that we disinherit a lot when we do so.

When we don’t focus on our relationship with God and on matters pertaining to Him, we will find that our prayer time, Bible reading, fellowship with other believer’s starts to dwindle and so does our faith in God. Since our faith is the fundamental element that overcomes the world, we are being admonished to ‘hold firmly to our faith.’

How do we hold on to our Faith?

The Great High Priest

In Hebrews 4:14 we read that,“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession....”(RSV)

In the Old Testament we read about the role and functions of a ‘High Priest’. The duty of the High Priest was to enter the ‘Most Holy Place’ once a year to offer sacrifices for the sins of the People. The presence of God is ‘Most Holy’ and so the High Priest who entered the ‘Holy of Holies’ did so with reverential fear and always with the offering of a lamb that was to be sacrificed and it’s blood shed for the sins of the people.

Jesus became the ‘Great High Priest’ who took on Himself the sins of the world by shedding His blood on the cross for each one of us. Since Jesus is the ‘Great High Priest’, He is now at the right hand of the Father in heaven, interceding on our behalf. We are the beneficiaries of Jesus’ constant intercession on our behalf. No other person can intercede to the Father on our behalf.

Jesus is the only one who can do that, because He alone has gone up to the Heavens and is beholding the face of the Father. All other High Priests who lived earlier died but Jesus was the only ‘Great High Priest’ who rose from the dead and lives on into eternity.

No matter how many times we sin and go back to God for forgiveness, it is the Lord who is constantly interceding for us to be set free from all our sins and bondage.

The only Mediator between God and Man

We read in 1 Timothy 2:5, “For there is one God, and there is one who brings God and human beings together, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself to redeem the whole human race.” (GNB)

There is only one God and the only person who is the intercessor between God and man is Jesus Christ.

At the beginning of creation we see the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit at work when God says ‘Let us make man in our own image’ Genesis 1:26. Jesus was there, before the creation of the world, but the only reason He came down to the earth was to take on a human form, live a sinless life and give His life as a ransom for the sins of the world. There was no one else who could live that sinless life.

When the Angel Gabriel brought the news of the birth of Jesus to Mary, we see how Mary magnifies the Lord. In Luke 1:46 we read, “And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,” (ESV) It was obvious then that Mary being a human being herself, also needed a Saviour as much as anyone else did.