RTS Papers / Hebrews to Revelation / Winter 2019
THE AUTHOR’S USE OF OLD TESTAMENT EXPOSITION
In this first element of a sermon, exposition, what we will mean is the author’s use of Old Testament doctrine. What are the main Old Testament texts used by the author and how does he use them in expositional terms? Seven foundational quotations are in the first chapter alone (Ps. 2:7; 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:27; 97:7; 104:4; 45:6; 102:25-27; Ps. 110:1-3). This begins a clear theme. The most basic contrast is made between the old and new covenants, yet the focus of that contrast shifts from angels and Christ, to Moses and Christ, to the priesthood and Christ. And the high Christology functions to anchor the people from drifting out into the sea of apostasy.
Now in speaking of “Old Testament exposition,” what one has to show is the author specifically exegeting an Old Testament text. The use of Jeremiah 31 in Hebrews 8 would be the most extended example. Since, however, our goal is to show how exhortation is anchored in early exposition, 3:7-11 provides a better case. This pericope cites Psalm 95:7-11, and the event itself is recorded in Numbers 14, though it seems to draw from several references. Brown comments that, “The Psalm was regularly used each Sabbath day in first-century synagogue worship … They must not disregard God’s ways as their ancestors did.” One implication is that the Psalm had already been orienting the people of God “back to the wilderness” for at least a thousand years to the Psalm’s composition. This was not a new doctrine.
If this was such a well-known motif among the Jews, why should it need further exposition? First, it may be that there are many Gentiles among even the first audience; second, it does not follow that God’s people see how such a “look back” fits with the “better promises” of the New. Those who do not accept Covenant Theology in our own day struggle with this same thing. If we are committed to the perseverance of the saints, we may naturally ask: How could a genuinely Christian audience be under such an extended warning of apostasy? Where is Christ in such a negative message? The call to “look to Jesus” in 12:2 is the hortatory punchline to: “Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises” (8:6). Because Christ is both the offeror and the offering, what was insufficient about the old priests and animals is no obstacle now.
THE AUTHOR’S USE OF OLD TESTAMENT ILLUSTRATION
The church in the New Covenant age is a mixed body, just as it was in the Old Covenant. Other New Testament passages like 1 Corinthians 10:1-11 make this abundantly clear. This will become relevant when we resolve difficulties from 6:4-6 and 10:26-31. The first thing to notice is how the author employs illustration to clarify the nature of the mixed body. The imagery includes a house (3:2-6), a field (6:7-8), and a city (11-13). There is more going on in these images that depicting the church as a mixed body; but there is not less than this.
The “two grounds” of Chapter 6 will await our later section on problem passages. However notice that just as God’s people are a “house” overseen by Moses in the Old, so the people of the New are God’s “house” overseen by Christ.
An advocate of New Covenant Theology may want to object that there is no word here of a mixed body. For him the application of Jeremiah 31 in Hebrews 8 is quite clear. This is the New Covenant in which all who are included will know the Lord: only the regenerate, and thus not at all any apostate. But the whole context has the same Spirit speaking into the current “house” for the same purpose: dividing between those who will believe and those who will fall away.
Remember that Christ came to divide between people in the same households (Mat. 10:30). That sword of division comes in the form of the Spirit’s words here. Later on there are two cities implied by faith of the pilgrims in Chapter 11 and by Christ himself in Chapter 13.
The more we take note of the “dividing” illustrations employed by the author, the more a traditional covenant theology (over against a New Covenant Theology) interpretation of the whole book is required. The exhortation (even if one does not take it as a sermon) makes no sense on the NCT reading. Other illustrations are built into the old system. The outer courts of the tabernacle are “symbolic for the present age” (9:9). Mount Zion is made the heavenly Jerusalem that even the present hearers of this letter “have come to” (12:22).
Is typology illustration? Usually we would say that an illustration moves from the clear to the obscure. A difficult concept is made simpler by a picture that is more familiar than the concept. “More than any other New Testament writer,” says Greidanus, “the author of Hebrews is known for his use of typology. Although he uses the word ‘typos’ only once, he indicates types with other words such as copy or sketch (hypodeigma, 8:5; 9:23; antitypos, 9:24), shadow (skia, 8:5; 10:1), and symbol (parabole, 9:9).”
The author of Hebrews sees Christ as the substance of the Old Testament. In drawing this forth, he works from a particular understanding of type and antetype, or shadow and substance. Vos sees 10:1 as a crucial passage: “the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities.” That expression, αὐτὴν τὴν εἰκόνα, may also rendered “the very image.” So if the Old was full of the copies, what can it mean that the New contains still images? Vos answers by considering how an artist first draws a sketch (skia) and then the final picture (eikoon). Note that “both the sketch and the real picture are only representations of some real thing which lies beyond both of them. This real thing would then be the heavenly reality.”
The upshot for Vos may strike some as Platonic, though by it he only means that the author differs from the other Apostles in how they have the Old “shadowing” the New. The author of Hebrews has the heavenly “shadowing down” all earthly exemplars (Old and New), while the Old still drives (left to right) toward the New.
Now all of this deeper typology might seem far removed from a practical sermon. However even the new believer draws comfort from the fact that when the veil of the earthly temple was torn in two (Mk. 15:38), this was really the “image” of Christ passing into the more real heavenly veil (Heb. 9:24, 10:20). The symbolism is not so impossible to understand after all.
One scholar is sure that the immediate audience is “facing persecution,” and that they are Christians “with whom the author was acquainted.” This would shed light on how discipline is used in Chapter 12. It would not be insensitive to relate fatherly discipline even to such an intensity of trial. But when he does so, he points to Proverbs 3:11-12; and naturally he calls this an “exhortation” (v. 5).
We can go even further and say that the lines between illustration and application are often very thin, so multifaceted is the author’s use of them. For example, the language of “entering the land,” corresponding with “entering his rest” (3:18; 4:1, 3, 10), is both illustration and application. The land of Canaan was indeed rest “from all [their] enemies” (Josh. 23:1), but it was also to be seized and maintained; and then of course there is a fulfillment of both dimensions: illustration and application.
This is often the nature of typology: that the type is both a symbol, and so an illustration; but it is also often a token, or kind of medium of exchange that is accepted in lieu of the real substance that backs the currency.
This is a little different than when God accepted the animal sacrifices as atonement for the people’s sins (Lev. 1:4), even though the author here makes plain that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb. 10:4). Here there is illustration, but the application is very different.
The people of the New are to “strive to enter that rest” (4:11). Our true Canaan and Sabbath is the new heavens and new earth, though arguably the Sabbath passage supports the ongoing nature of the fourth commandment. It may be supposed that this is far too complex to be edifying to simple Christians in a sermon. Several responses could be given, but limiting myself to two: (1) There is nothing to say that this final composition is not edited precisely from oratory simplicity to greater complexity, especially given the higher form of Greek; (2) If the final composition is destined for Alexandrian readers, for example, perhaps what was milk in the audible version was meat in the reader version. This may be speculative, but it is equally speculative to always assume that this or that first century audience was barely educated.
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