Hebrews 13: 9- 14

Leviticus 4: 11-12

Romans 8:3

As Randolph stated in the comments yesterday, some of the ‘isms’ that have been associated with Christianity are Gnosticism, (they have special knowledge), Marcionism, (OT God is Different from NT Jesus), Montonism, (Holy Spirit reveals all), Adoptionism, (Jesus is not true son of God), Docetism, (Jesus was spirit, His flesh was an illusion).

These are surely some of the ‘strange teachings’ that would arise in the realm of Christianity and we are to be warned against them. But the primary issue facing these Hebrew believers in the first decades after their introduction to faith in Jesus as the Messiah, was the lure to fall back into the rituals of Judaism. The peer pressure from their past to engage once again in offering, “gifts and sacrifices offered which cannot make the worshipper perfect in conscience, since they relate only to food, and drink, and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until a time of reformation, when Christ appeared…” Hebrews 9: 9-10

Hebrews 13: 12, “Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate.” One of the layers of doctrine introduced in this 13th chapter, is that the bodies of the sacrifices for ‘sin offerings’, Leviticus 4: 11-12 are burned outside the camp. Jesus accomplished this also, at Golgotha, outside the gate of Jerusalem, on the cross as our sin-offering. Romans 8:3, “For what the Law could not do…God did; sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin…”

Hebrews 13: 13 “So let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach.” A forceful call to illustrate the complete break with Judaism outside the gate, for believers in Christ. Jesus was completely ostracized by the Judaic religious hierarchy, and in a trumped up, fake trial, was rejected as their Messiah. Therefore comes the same necessity to turn from Judaism, to embrace Christianity, to turn from the ritual, and ceremony of the ‘letter of the Law’, to the ‘Spirit of the New Covenant’, outside of their city walls, their domain, which action will cause them to reject you also.

Hebrews 13: 14. “For here, (outside the gate of Jerusalem), we do not have a ‘lasting city’, but we are seeking the city which is to come.” A ‘lasting’ city, is the Greek word ‘meno’, -‘ a requirement to stay in a given place, state, relation or expectancy ‘. The city of Jerusalem, the representative pinnacle of Judaism, is no longer a required place of worship for these Hebrew Christian believers. But like Abraham, Hebrews 11:10, “we are looking for that city which has foundations whose architect and builder is God.”

Blessings

Karl